Since 2015, Netflix’s Chef’s Table has become the go-to destination for food-lovers to get a personal, intimate look at some of the most acclaimed chefs around the world. The series has returned with a new spin-off, Chef’s Table: Legends. This new season brings audiences into the world of four chefs who have played an integral role in the world of modern cooking as we know it. The release of Chef’s Table: Legends coincides with the 10th anniversary of the original series and sees the return of several behind-the-scenes crew members like composer Duncan Thum who received two Emmy nominations for his work on prior episodes of the show.

After the release of Chef’s Table: Legends, Duncan Thum sat down with Beyond the Cinerama Dome to discuss returning to Chef’s Table, the research that goes into each episode, and his personal connection with one of the chefs. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Beyond the Cinerama Dome: I saw that you went to USC specifically for film scoring, but you didn't have a necessarily straightforward path to get there. Can you talk a little about what led you to that really prestigious program?

Duncan Thum: It's a great question. It's funny how creative life, I guess you might say, is never a linear one. I've done a number of things, from teaching music, playing in bands, producing records for myself that were just weird and experimental, and doing all kinds of strange things that gave me pleasure in those moments. I followed that voice.

Courtesy of Julie Patterson

I like to describe my early years as failing as a jazz guitarist (laughs). I tried to learn how to do that well in college and I did learn a lot. I learned how to be free and think about music in a way that I think has informed my creative life ever since. Improvising is a really cool introduction to music because it puts a lot of focus on your ear. It forces you to listen and follow that vocabulary of thinking as you go, which is really fun.

Eventually, I got into doing film because my partner at that time was an animator. She had made a stop-motion animation and asked me to make the music for it. I was blown away by how fun it was because that process is so collaborative. Suddenly, I wasn't just making music in the dark for myself, so to speak, I was working on a team trying to serve the story of the animation. I have been gung ho to do film ever since.

Do you feel like animation is distinctly different in terms of what the purpose of the score is?

Yeah, definitely. The through line of all of it is you're making music to serve a story. To support a story and illuminate the emotional peaks and valleys and to lend space when it's necessary. I think the score’s job is to put a lot of heart into the arc of these characters.

That part is the same with documentaries, but the angle of approach is different. For animation, I feel like there are often a lot of fast-paced cuts or actions or just quick turns where you have to go from one emotion to a completely different one in a short period of time. That's always kind of fun because it requires you to draw in a lot of different genres or have a large vocabulary of classical music to have that referential aspect that I think you hear a lot in animated movies. It's a really cool challenge as a detective, if you will, to sort of figure out what those needs are.

Would you say it's at all similar to Chef's Table? You've done quite a few episodes at this point and are now coming back for Chef's Table: Legends, but each episode has to be its own thing. The changes aren't as quick as what you were saying with animation, but you are still creating a cohesive TV show with each episode as its own standalone thing.

Yeah, that's very well said. I think the particular challenge of Chef's Table is not necessarily the fast-paced element of it, but the need to localize your music in the world of each chef. That takes you from Peru to Turkey to France to South Korea. All these places kind of have a very distinctive character, just as the food does.

Having the music mirror that journey is the challenge of each episode, and building that as an element into a score that tracks the bigger narrative journey is the fun of it. You get to research all these cool places. I love to spend a good bit of time going on YouTube and deep diving on all of these things.

We did an episode for the pasta season on Chef’s Table with chef Nite Yun. She's based in San Francisco, but she has a Cambodian background. Just learning about Cambodian music, even if I wasn't going to use it, I think it was so helpful for me to get into this headspace of what is this place and how does that relate to the food. In many ways, music and food are open doors to a culture, maybe more than anything else?

You can just go eat that food and get a sense of like, wow, this is an amazing place with all this history and all that has amounted to this beautiful dish or this beautiful piece of music. As much as I can, I just try to immerse myself in these places and then in these chefs' lives. They have a version of this in their own stories too, which is fun to explore.

I'm glad you pointed out that you feel music and food are very similar, because I feel the same way. Both food and music are about nourishment, and I think it's really interesting that the two play off each other in such an unexpected way, because it's two very different senses, you know?

Right, right, right. Yeah, I've thought about this sometimes. I think there's a nostalgic aspect to it as well. When we hear something that we loved from some part of our life, maybe we were going through this really painful breakup or it was an incredible, exciting time of learning, growth, change, and expansion. We were listening to something in that time that just captures the feeling of being human to us. That we can call back when we hear that same music many years later.

I think food, very much, if not even more so, does that. Just thinking about the food your parents might have made you when you were a kid or something you did when you first learned to cook a little bit yourself. If you had success with a recipe or a meal that was shared in a pivotal time with friends or something like that, these things can really be connected to our memories of these places. Both good and bad.

I think because we can't eat the food that we watch on Chef's Table or any kind of cooking show, music is a nice replacement for that same experience.

When you talk about the different locations throughout the show, when do you find that you've hit a research limit? I imagine that as someone who loves music, it would be so easy to just keep going down that rabbit hole.

I have to say that the deadlines are friends. The deadlines will always tell us, okay, it's time to just start writing and see what comes out. Which is always the fun part because I kind of think of it as like you've accumulated all these things over your life, and they're like voices in a chorus. You can kind of just pull them out as you need to. Hopefully that little research phase is just adding another voice to that chorus that you could then draw upon.

But when the rubber meets the road, we don't actually have a lot of time, so we have to write and trust in that intuitive process.

One of the episodes I want to ask about is the one about Jose Andres. He does incredible things with his own cooking, but then also World Central Kitchen. You had an experience with World Central Kitchen, and I was curious at what point in time in the scoring process did that experience happen?

It's an interesting one because it ended up being an immersive experience for me. I would have had no idea when I was writing that music that it would be the last music I would write in my studio.

If it's not clear, I lost my home in Altadena. I lost my studio during the Los Angeles fires. It still is a journey of recovery, and it's been a tremendous emotional and sort of traumatic experience. When I was writing the music for Jose's episode, I had no idea what would come.

Jose Andres is an amazing character, and he is so inspiring. His broad, expansive approach, not only to reinventing food and Spanish cooking, fusing it with Americana classics, but also as a humanitarian. There's so much energy and so much passion. He puts so much of himself into helping people, and that was a tremendous inspiration for me.

The music was being written and we had kind of finished the process. I was literally doing the last song when the fire started. Several days later, that song was completed, and in the throes of all this upset and getting our family to safety, I had a recording session with my partner on the score, David Bertok, and we recorded the music with an orchestra in Macedonia. I think I had learned within 24 hours that we’d just lost everything in our lives.

I sunk myself into the music, and between takes I was crying. I was in shock and going through this incredible emotional experience, hearing that music, and I don't know…it’s something I'll never forget. It was a very intense and three-dimensional experience, you know?

There's an irony there that we were doing this abstract thing, and then it would sweep into my very neighborhood. I never could have anticipated that, but it's so beautiful at the same time. If I can take a step back and abstract myself from my emotions a little bit, it's an amazing thing that Jose was suddenly there. He was doing his thing for my community.

It had benefited so many of us, and I was able to thank him personally recently for it. It's been a tremendous connection to me personally now for that reason.

I'm so sorry for your loss. I know someone in Altadena who also lost everything, and it's just awful.

I'm sorry for your friend too. We're going to make it through this. We just have to take things day by day and the amazing thing about all of it is that the community has been incredible. I think people are so caring and loving. I've met so many more of my neighbors now than I'd ever known before the fire, which is a testament to how committed everybody is to Altadena and to each other. I think it's a great shining light in the face of everything else that's happening in our country right now, which seems like a nightmarish apocalypse. It's the antidote to all of that, and I'm so grateful for it.

I'll end with a fun question. Do you ever find yourself, as you're scoring, thinking, I think I could go make this?

I am a great food lover. I love food, I love eating, and I have some experience cooking. I always enjoy it. My better half, my wife Ashley, is a tremendous chef. She has the intuitive quality that I think you need to be able to see a bunch of ingredients and go, oh, what if I do this? I see her transform things that I would never know could even go together. I think that's really fun.

I’d also like to add that cookbooks can kind of demystify some of that if you don't have the intuitive thing. It's really fun to just cook recipes. The director of the Jose Andres and Thomas Keller episodes, my dear friend Clay Jeter, we started this Chef's Table journey together on an episode about an Argentinian chef named Francis Mallmann ten years ago.

He had a reunion party in his backyard the other month and we cooked out of Francis' cookbook. Empanadas and some other dishes that were achievable with our skills. None of the lambs, open fires, and burying vegetables in the earth, you know? It was fantastic. I mean, it was such a fun way to gather, celebrate this journey together, and eat some of the food that we had made.

Support Your Local Film Critic!

~

Support Your Local Film Critic! ~

Beyond the Cinerama Dome is run by one perpetually tired film critic
and her anxious emotional support chihuahua named Frankie.
Your kind donation means Frankie doesn’t need to get a job…yet.

$5.00

$10.00

$25.00

$50.00

Custom Amount

Support us by covering the fees we have to pay

3% Cover the Fee

Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, & YouTube. Check out Movies with My Dad, a new podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies.

Composer Duncan Thum Talks Return to “Chef’s Table: Legends”

Sam Hayes Goes into the Deep End of “Pools”

Composer Mark Orton Talks Sweeping, Dangerous Romance of “On Swift Horses”