René Redzepi is a juggernaut in the modern culinary world. His three-Michelin star restaurant Noma has changed the way the industry and consumers view natural, foraged ingredients. Now, Redzepi is bringing this fascination with natural food sources and how our environments affect us to a major streaming service. Teaming up with seasoned culinary TV producer Matt Goulding, Redzepi has co-created Omnivore, a new seven-episode docuseries exploring the product life cycles of seven incredibly popular ingredients. The series takes audiences around the world of food with beautiful cinematography as Redzepi narrates the stories of the people who grow, transport, sell, cook, and bond over the seven key ingredients.

We were lucky enough to sit down with René Redzepi and Matt Goulding ahead of the show’s release on July 19 to talk about Omnivore. During the conversation, we discussed Redzepi’s nerves about moving from the kitchen to the producer’s chair, why they selected those seven ingredients, and the documentary’s surprising and stunning cinematography. Casual ‘foodies’ may know Redzepi from his recent appearance in The Bear’s third season, a show which the chef praises. Meanwhile, Matt Goulding discusses his former creative partner, the late great Anthony Bourdain, and the pair touch on Bourdain’s cultural legacy.

On Omnivore’s Gorgeous Cinematography & Style
Omnivore (2024) In this unparalleled documentary event, Apple TV+ takes viewers into the culinary world of renowned chef Reneě Redzepi, the founder of Noma – the world’s best restaurant – on a journey around the world that gives a glimpse into the beauty and complexity of the interconnected food chain of food that links us all. “Omnivore” celebrates how we grow, transform, share, and consume the ingredients that build our societies, shape our beliefs, and forever alter our human story.Release Date July 19, 2024 Cast René Redzepi Seasons 1 Production Company Fifth Season, Film 45, Apple TV+ Streaming Service(s) Apple TV+ Showrunner René Redzepi Expand

MovieWeb: The first thing I want to touch on is that it’s a beautifully shot documentary. A lot of past food shows and food travel shows rely on a grounded, neutral color palette to showcase the food. What inspired the creative decision to hyper-stylize a lot of these moments?

Matt Goulding: You know, I think from the beginning, one of the big pieces of inspiration for us was Planet Earth, and some of the great, ambitious, big-scoped nature documentaries that had the ability to capture the wonder of the world through animals — in the case of nature documentaries. In our case, it’s through ingredients. But we felt like it’s two sides of the same coin. And so that was at least one of our big sources of inspiration.

Matt Goulding: But I think, with the individual episodes, we worked with our directors to really give each episode its own identity. So rather than having a formula, and having just a classic kind of style that we’re gonna carry formulaically across the breadth of the season, we said, ‘Look. We want the individual ingredients and the storytelling to kinda match the form, right?

Matt Goulding: So let’s make “Chili” a fast-paced, sweaty, swashbuckling episode. Let’s, with “Pigs,” slow it down, and let’s live in a single village in Spain so we can have this intimate relationship with this animal that’s at the center of our existence.’ At least our goal was to have each of those episodes have its own style, its own cadence, its own rhythm. But all speaking to the larger point, which is, food is everything. It’s at the very center of everything that we do and everything that we are.

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Food of the World

MovieWeb: Each episode focuses on a different ingredient. This season, you’re looking at salt, rice, bananas, pigs, chili, coffee, tuna, and corn. Why these specific ingredients? And during the creative process, were there any others that you were focusing on that had to be cut?

Matt Goulding: Hundreds. Hundreds were cut out, for sure. I mean, I think René and I went back and forth for many months, along with a lot of the collaborators on this project, and there’s a lot of them. I think it’s really fun to be able to imagine the stories of each one of these ingredients. But, of course, what we wanted was some kind of balance, where we have a couple of these society-shaping staples. In this case, rice and corn.

Matt Goulding: But then, if you start adding wheat and potatoes, it can be a little one note in terms of the style [and] in terms of the themes. And so you mix in something surprising like chili or coffee, two ingredients that aren’t essential to our survival, but are certainly essential to our pleasure as a species and the things that make life worth living. And then also thinking about the geographic diversity. We wanted this to really be a wide story where we can visit, in this case, 16 countries, five continents, get as many different perspectives as possible to communicate this idea that food tethers us in all kinds of surprising ways across great distances of this Earth.

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René Redzepi on Going From Chef to TV Producer
Pierre Deschamps

MovieWeb: René, you’re obviously no stranger to stress, having worked in a kitchen for several decades. But did it feel nerve-wracking at all to transition from being the subject of food documentaries and shows to the co-creator of one?

René Redzepi: Oh, yes. Actually, the most nerve-wracking moment I think we’re living in right now. Because we’ve spent the better part of four years thinking about this, working on it, late night texts, late night calls, early morning calls, traveling, distilling, distilling, distilling, researching, figuring out, making mistakes, Visas canceled, COVID. I mean, you name it. It’s so different to running a kitchen, actually. And then now it’s coming out there into the world.

René Redzepi: And usually when I’m at Noma, and we’re working on a new menu, I kinda know by now, ‘Okay. This one we nailed, guys. When the menu’s done, our guests are gonna love this.’ And now we just don’t know. It’s really, really, really different. But I have loved the process of taking an idea that’s almost 10 years old and now becoming a finished product… Nothing is linear. There’s been so many curveballs along the way, big and small. And now we’re just waiting for people out there to actually watch it and let us know if they like it. That’s the most nerve-wracking part. I have no clue whether people are gonna like it.

Apple TV+

MovieWeb: You’ve also said that when you started developing the show, being a newcomer to the world of TV production, you thought that this would be in the hands of audiences within about a four-month time-span. Over the last few years of development, what’s changed the most about the docuseries since its initial conception?

René Redzepi: I think more confidence in us. We actually are more confident. At first, I was, and I don’t know if [Matt] were to say, I was very worried about stepping in and helping make decisions, or saying ‘I don’t agree with this’ sometimes if something was happening. I felt like such a novice that I almost disregarded my own knowledge that I have for food. And, sometimes, when you have people that are actually shooting a food show, they don’t necessarily know food the way we know food. And that level of confidence, and knowing how things work, and how a crew is, and what does post-production even mean, and how to talk to a director. I mean, I didn’t do that as much as Matt, but I did do it. And the confidence grew.

René Redzepi: And I think at the end of this period, where we went into editing, that really helped us, that we stepped in and just wrapped it. We changed things to the very last minute. We’re changing words, changing the slight tone, the feel of things. We planned this two years ago, and now, it’s the need for me to change it. ‘Can you please go back into the editing room and, like, switch this around?’ It was fantastic when that confidence came.

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Matt Goulding: I think, the big question in my mind was the storytelling mechanics. Like, we had this vision in our heads, and, of course, making television or making film, you’re always trying to get some percentage close to the vision you have in your head. It’s never gonna be 100%. Right? Is it gonna be 80? Is it gonna be 60? Is it gonna be 72? But in our case, we didn’t have a host, and we didn’t have talking heads. And so we were already kinda trying to tell a story in a nontraditional way, especially within the food space.

Matt Goulding: And so how is this gonna work? Are the mechanics gonna really allow us to tell the best version of the story, and pull you in, and make it cinematic, and immersive, and, above all, entertaining? We want people to take away meaning in this, but we also want them to be entertained, to have a good time when they sit down and watch this. And so, I think by the time we got to the end, and we started seeing how these episodes were coming together, then you really get the confidence. You say, ‘you know what? We feel like the pieces are fitting together.’

Related The Best Food Documentaries of All Time A good food documentary is able to weave together incredible stories about food, the way it’s produced, and the people that produce it.

On Anthony Bourdain’s Cultural Legacy

MovieWeb: Matt, you’re obviously no stranger to working on culinary shows. You worked with the great Anthony Bourdain. And, René, you were the reason for his journey to Denmark several years ago. Could you both talk a little bit about his influence and legacy on the modern culinary world?

René Redzepi: Oh, yeah. Most definitely. You can feel that in Omnivore.

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Matt Goulding: I mean, we couldn’t make Omnivore if there wasn’t an Anthony Bourdain before us. There’s just zero doubt about that. You know, he represented this idea that food is never just food. Which is one of the things that we say both internally and on the series. He took food into the political world, and into the cultural world, and into social and class issues in ways that really crystallize its importance.

Matt Goulding: And so when René called me up to make television together, the question we both had was: ‘What’s the next step in this journey? Where else can we go to kinda push the boundaries of storytelling? What would Uncle Tony think about Omnivore?’ Honestly, I think about that a lot. Because he never sat around and asked, ‘What does the audience want?’ He always said, ‘If you ask, what does the audience want, you’re already kind of losing.’ You have to say to yourself, ‘What is it that you wanna say? Like, what is the story that needs to be told?’ And so I think trying to remember as much of that along the way, because, ultimately, this is a space that I feel he mastered in ways that few people ever have.

On the Most Painful Experience of Shooting Omnivore

MovieWeb: Finally, I want to ask about the Bhut Orange Copenhagen, from the chili episode. René, could you briefly describe that sensation of trying it? And Matt, did you try one?

Matt Goulding: [No]. He led the charge.

René Redzepi: Have you ever turned momentarily insane?… You only have if you’ve eaten a super hot pepper, because it’s kinda what happens. You lose complete control of yourself because it’s so hot, and you think it’s never gonna go away. You panic, and then you tell yourself it’s gonna be fine. But it’s so hot and just builds and keeps burning, burning, burning. And when you have a whole crew doing it together, it was something else. And then watching the guests do it afterward, it’s a high. I’ll say that much.

So is
Omnivore
, which is now streaming on Apple TV+ here.