“The oddest couple in Telluride,” the director joked. Matt Tyrnaueras he drives from his Beverly Hills home to the film festival in Colorado, it will be Tyrnauer and the colorful characters at the center of the two truth documentaries he will premiere in the Rockies this Labor Day weekend: the legendary Democratic political strategist James Carvilleobject of Carville: Winning is everything, stupid!Sushi chef and restaurateur extraordinaire Nobu Matsuhisaobject of Nobu.
Tyrnauer, 56, a veteran Vanity Fair editor-in-chief and special correspondent turned prolific director of numerous critically and commercially successful nonfiction works, including the 2009 Oscar-nominated film Valentino: The Last Emperorof 2017 Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywoodof 2018 Studio 54 and 2019 Where's my Roy Cohn? — previously had a film at the festival in 2022, his documentary Benington College The end of the worldBut dealing with two documentaries, both still seeking U.S. distribution deals, and their famous characters, neither of whom will have seen the film about them until their premiere, makes for a very different experience, he acknowledged.
Tyrnauer is one of the few filmmakers who have had more than one film invited to Telluride in a single year, a festival with a small, carefully curated lineup. (This year, the documentary team at Bonnie Cohen AND Jon Shenk they also come with two works, In the waves and in the war AND The White House Effect.) This is largely because few people can make two truly quality documentaries in such a short space of time. But it’s also, Tyrnauer says, a result of “the magical rhythms and cadences of filmmaking.” The two projects began around the same time and were shot in overlap. “Nobu is never home, he travels to 55 restaurants and hotels in remote places, and we were on the private jet with him to do it. And Carville is on and off Delta flights every week, and we’d meet with him, too. So it was a couple of years of a lot of grueling travel.”
Carville and Matsuhisa will meet for the first time on Saturday, when Matsuhisa arrives in town from Japan, joining Carville, who, along with his wife, a respected Republican political strategist, Mary Matalinawill already be on the ground; Carville and Matalin, the epitome of a DC power couple weirdo, plan to attend the festival's patrons brunch on Friday morning, and then the first screening of Carville Friday evening. Nobu will be screened for the first time on Saturday. And then Carville will air again Sunday, at the same time as the LSU Tigers football game, much to Carville's dismay. “I couldn't tell a football game, or when it's happening, to save myself,” Tyrnauer chuckles. “But he's been told he can't get a pass for that game.”
In some ways, Tyrnauer’s documentary subjects couldn’t be more different: Carville, nicknamed “The Ragin’ Cajun,” was born, raised, and continues to live in Louisiana, while Matsuhisa is originally from Japan. Carville speaks loudly and at breakneck speed, while Matsuhisa is generally soft-spoken. And Carville knows little about sushi, while Matsuhisa doesn’t follow American politics particularly closely. But in other ways, they’re remarkably similar. Both are septuagenarians (Carville is 79, Matsuhisa is 75) who first achieved real success and fame, after many failures, in their forties. Both have become regarded as the top professionals in their respective professions. And now, in their third acts, both maintain grueling schedules that reflect their desire to stay active and relevant.
Unlike his subjects, Tyrnauer, whose father was a television writer/producer, found his calling, and a positive response to his work, early in life. “I was kind of like Woodward and Bernstein with a reporter’s notebook around when I was in grade school,” he laughed. “I had a newspaper in the third grade. I was a film student. I knew what I wanted to do.” During and after attending Wesleyan University in Connecticut, his many and varied interests, which included art, culture and American politics, led him to several subjects from past profiles that he composed in print and on film. And they eventually led him to Carville and Matsuhisa.
Carville, as film buffs will recall, was the star of another documentary 31 years ago, Chris Hegedus AND FROM Pennebaker'S The war roomwhich chronicled the 1992 presidential campaign Bill Clinton that Carville oversaw. (Remember “It's the Economy, Stupid”?) The long shadow of that classic may have scared other filmmakers away from documenting Carville further, but not Tyrnauer. “James was the subject of a great documentary that people remember decades later, which is very rare for any film,” Tyrnauer acknowledges. “But now it's more than 30 years later and James Carville is a household name, not a rising star in the political universe. He's had a gigantic, ascendant career in the public eye and a marriage that's almost unique in its public-political nature. And he's been unchecked for quite a few decades, actually. So I thought there was a lot of material in there for this. And then came the 2024 election.”
Tyrnauer never imagined that his documentary on Carville would focus so much on its subject, leading the charge to convince him Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential election, which began more than a year before a disastrous debate led many other Democrats to adopt the same position. But that's how it went. “I was filming with him at his house in New Orleans,” the director said. “It was May 2023 when an ABC News-Washington Post the poll said Biden was losing to Trump. James read the numbers to the camera, and then we went to film him making his morning rounds of phone calls, which he does every day, to the same group of people who are his comrades in the trenches of the '92 Clinton campaign. In that moment, something clicked in James, who realized, with all his expertise, that Biden was in serious danger of losing; that this is a “change election”; and that nothing says that more than Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. So he started pushing, and that became a major storyline that I started following in this film.”
At the same time, Tyrnauer was traveling the world with Matsuhisa, whose evolution “from a family-run restaurant [owner and chef] to the spectacular overnight success to the slow climb to one of the greatest restaurant empires ever known” fascinated the director, as did the fact that Matsuhisa’s signature restaurants opened in the director’s Los Angeles community in the 1980s. “It’s where I’m from, and I love that era,” he explained. “The punk food revolution era in Los Angeles is really fascinating, and I was a little bit informed about it.”
What was it? Not familiar with before embarking on a film that explores “what it is about the man's character that allows him to be so successful” were many of the specific details of Matsuhisa's life, least of all the fact that “he was a spectacular failure for the first half of his life.” But, Tyrnauer continued, “When I started questioning Nobu about the particulars of his life, I found a really soulful and thoughtful person who was able to access his emotions and was very generous with her honesty as an interviewee.”
But that's not all Matsuhisa has been generous with, Tyrnauer pointed out: “One of my problems with Nobu is that he's AS generous that I had to stop going to Nobu [restaurants] because I couldn't sneak in there without getting a free, elaborate meal, and after a while I felt ashamed.” (Tyrnauer's favorite dish on the chef's menu: tuna tartare with caviar.)
Tyrnauer decided, he said, that “in order to understand what it means to be Nobu, to watch Nobu and connect with Nobu as a sushi chef, I would have to somehow sit across from him at the sushi counter, and that would somehow be in the film. I wouldn't be in the shot, but I would be the customer, and he would be doing his thing, and I would be interviewing him while he was doing it. So we did a shot in the omakase bar in [the restaurant] Matsuhisa. We had cameras hanging from the ceiling that were floating around and over my shoulder, and we were shooting it from all sorts of angles.” He added, “I sat there for hours and hours. The crew was incredibly happy, too, because I couldn't possibly eat everything that was passed across the counter, I mean, there was caviar flying everywhere!”
Spending time with Matsuhisa brought back memories for Tyrnauer of his first documentary, also recounted in truth style and its subject: “I think there are very clear parallels between Valentino [Garavani, the famed designer] and Nobu, the movies and the people. I think they're both great creative artists in their fields, at the top of their fields, in a very rarefied part of culture, both high-priced and perfectionists.”
Now, as Tyrnauer prepares to reconnect with his subjects in the highlands of Telluride, he’s not sure what to expect, other than a good time. “They’re both really good guys and really wonderful to be around,” he says. “I haven’t talked about each other much yet. I think we’ll all be happy to be thrown together into this surreal fishbowl of this perfect little mountain town, in the middle of the best film festival imaginable.”