Director Peter Miller talks with Geneva Anderson

(March 20, 2025- foods mentioned with an * behind them open to recipes)

Marcella Hazan is the secret ingredient that made Italian cuisine irresistible to Americans. Through her cookbooks and teaching, she taught home cooks to focus on fresh ingredients and master simple techniques to unlock flavor, which is what truly matters in food.  Emmy and Peabody Award winning director Peter Miller’s thoroughly engaging new documentary, “Marcella,” which just won a Taste award for best feature, masterfully pieces together Hazan’s life (1924-2013) and legacy.

The occasion of our interview is the 28^th Sonoma International Film Festival (SIFF), where “Marcella” screens twice (Thursday, March 20, 1 p.m., Sebastiani and Friday, March 21, 1:30 p.m., Sonoma Valley Women’s Club) with Miller and Marcello’s son, Giuliano Hazan, the award-winning Italian cookbook author and cooking instructor in conversation, and “Marcella’s Italian Dinner,” SIFF’s four-course tribute dinner celebrating Hazan (Thursday, March 20, 1 p.m.).

When I first caught up with Peter Miller, he was making Marcella’s famous Bolognaise sauce; our next conversation occurred as he was proofing sourdough, which he makes regularly, and he spoke enthusiastically about Marcella’s lemon chicken.  It was no surprise that the initial idea to do a Hazan doc came to Miller six years ago while he was preparing ravioli from a Hazan recipe with Valerie, his wife.  Cooking together is their thing—they strive to cook dinner together every night. They wondered if anyone had made a documentary about Hazan. After contacting her husband Victor and son Guiliano the next morning, who were elated with the idea, the project was a go.

Geneva Anderson: The arc of Victor and Marcella’s relationship is so central to your film: it begins as a love story set in a very traditional era but their roles were later inverted.  She started her journey cooking meals for him and we see that, gradually, she moved to the forefront while he was in the background doing what he did best, marketing her work, managing every detail.

Peter Miller:  Part of what makes this story so fascinating and magical for me is this relationship between these two brilliant creative people that does invert the traditional creator and muse relationship. The husband is behind the scenes quietly enabling the brilliant artist to get her work done.  Victor starts out as this traditional 1950’s guy who wanted his wife to put a meal on the table for him every day.  Never mind that she had two degrees, was a brilliant scientist, and had never cooked.  He expected to have a great Italian meal every day. That Marcella learned to cook with the same drive and determination that enabled her to become a brilliant scientist and to overcome a disability that made her right arm virtually unusable was all part of shaping this formidable determined woman, who ended up changing our foodways. Victor came around fairly quickly, offering tremendous support.  It’s a well-known secret that her six bestselling books were written with Victor, one of the most eloquent writers I’ve ever encountered. She didn’t have the mastery of English to pull this off on her own. He was entirely behind the scenes, never taking credit.  It was such a pleasure to spend time with him.  I interviewed him three times, once while he cooked for us.  He is in his 90’s now and has remained very articulate, insightful and the touching stories he told me about Marcella formed the basis of the film.

Did you ever meet Marcella?

Peter Miller:  My wife, Valerie, and I wanted to take her class in Venice but it was always beyond our means.  During the 1990’s, we lived in New York (and still do) and we learned that she was giving a class in Connecticut, an evening of cooking, so we got babysitting and took an hour long class with her and Victor.  She was every bit as feisty as advertised.  Somehow, we managed to sneak up to her and ask her about a recipe we were having some trouble with. Valerie said, “A lot of time when we are making this recipe the sauce breaks at the last minute; what’s happening?” She looked at us with her cigarette and Jack Daniels in hand and said “The sauce doesn’t break.”  Her message was, “the problem is not with my recipe; it’s with you. You’re not doing it right.”

This is such a rich portrait of Marcella—her strong exacting personality, numerous accomplishments, the cooking scenes, the interviews, those plush vintage clips, the music, that voice.  Who did the editing?

Peter Miller:  I’ve been making docs since forever and everything I’ve ever done has been in collaboration with my film editor, Amy Linton.  She takes this material that I gather—stories, images, music—and weaves them together with emotion, poetry and rich storytelling.  The collaboration between us is one of the great joys of my life. Maybe it’s like Victor whose great prose put a voice to Marcella’s ideas; his writing is so central to how we receive her ideas.

Music is used so wonderfully in the film, both very subtly and in that moving choral scene at the dinner.

Peter Miller:  Italian music is central to telling a story like this. When we first started editing the film, we asked Victor what music was meaningful to Marcella because we wanted to build the film around music that would have been in her world and in her mind.  He said start with Verdi and his opera “Nabucco.” The story follows the plight of the Jews as they are exiled from their homeland by the Babylonian king Nabucco.  The chorus from this opera, “Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate,” is one of Verdi’s most famous and widely recognized musical works and it is often performed as a standalone piece. I knew I wanted that.

When we were in Marcella’s home town, Cesenatico in Emilia-Romagna, to film, we went up the road from Cesenatico to a nearby town where the Canterini Romagnoli, a traditional chorus, performs in a beautiful old monastery. They were kind enough to sing “Va, pensiero,” along with several other pieces of Italian classical and folkloric music and let us film them. This very music was part of the story of the wonderful meals Marcella would serve. She would have this chorus start singing toward the end of the meal and it was a magical moment for her students.

Later, we worked with Fred Story, a fantastic film score composer who my film editor Amy Linton and I worked with before on a film about the classical conductor Robert Shaw. We knew Fred was the person to create an original score that was interwoven with Italian classical music.  We have many performances of Verdi, Vivaldi, the Italian folk guitar player John La Barbera, and a jazz pianist, my hugely talented nephew Ben Miller.  Fred brought this all together in an original score that blended all these elements.  The music in the film reflects the spirit of Marcella’s aesthetics, the Italianness of it, the simplicity of it and the emotion of it. Amy elegantly wove this together with the drama of the film to create a musical story that underscored Marcella’s life story.I found the historical clips, the visual blending of how Italy was, the people, the scenery so moving. Peter Miller:  Because this is a film about cooking in Italy and at home, the imagery had to evoke the way the food and culture intersect so richly in Italy.  I found an archive in Bologna, the National Family Film Archive, where these amazing Italian archivists have been gathering 8 and 16 mm Italian home movie footage for decades.  This is a treasure of genuine footage that includes Italian families enjoying meals together or places in Italy captured in an organic and authentic way.  They were kind enough to let me use several minutes of this footage to bring Marcella’s story to life as well as the story of how Italians engage with their food culture.

Having gathered all this material, the decision of what to keep in and what to cut must have been excruciating. Peter Miller:  This could have easily been a multi-part series but you need to think about the journey you’re taking people on.  Marcella wrote thousands of recipes but this is the story of her life as a person and not a Wikipedia entry where we strive to include everything.  We chose to tell the story keeping the narrative, the character, and her journey at the center. This is my first culinary doc.  One of the things about it that differs from any film I’ve made before is that I realized early on was that we needed to go into the kitchens of the people who are talking about Marcella and have them prepare her iconic dishes—Chef Shola Olunloyo, Chef April Bloomfield, Giuliano Hazan, and Steve Sando. The recipe for the film called for blending these scenes with interviews, footage from Marcella’s tv appearances, and the amazing mass of archival materials we gathered.

How did you select chef Shola Olunloyo?  

Peter Miller: Shola Olunloyo never met Marcella but his life was shaped by her.  He’s a brilliant, fancy Philadelphia chef who makes her Bolognese ragù every weekend. He actually refused to be filmed in his high end restaurant and asked to be filmed in his home. So we went to his home, into his kitchen, which from a filming point of view is not a demonstration kitchen, just a home kitchen. But Marcella was all about cooking at home, so the scenes we have of great chefs preparing her dishes is really about how to make her wonderful food in a home kitchen environment.

Marcella’s lemon chicken* is basically three ingredients, depending on if you count the salt— a chicken, 2 lemons, salt and pepper, period.  Shola describes it as a piece of poetry and it is, but it’s all about how you prepare it. Following her precise instructions you can have a wonderful meal.  My wife and I have made that dish so many times and it’s a miraculous simplicity that leads to something delicious.

This plays into the famous Marcella quote in the film: “Italian cooking is very simple but it’s not easy” which seems to summarize Marcella herself.

Peter Miller:  Exactly, the essence of what she’s about. The true simplicity in Italian cooking isn’t about making things effortlessly, but about focusing on essential ingredients and techniques to achieve the very best flavor.  The three ingredient tomato sauce* that April Bloomfield prepares on film is a great example. April’s an accomplished restaurant chef who can cook anything. When I asked her what she wanted to do for the film, she said, the tomato sauce. I said are you sure?  It’s just three ingredients.  She said “Trust me; this is what I want to make.”  What April says about the onion is so, well, deep.  It’s such a simple recipe and yet it’s so perfect.  You melt 5T of butter, put in a can of very good tomatoes and you add an onion and cook it for 45 min. It’s such a simple recipe and yet it’s so perfect.  In the end, you’re supposed to remove the onion and discard it. For a lot of people that seems really profligate but Marcella knows what she knows and she knows you should take that onion out. When April is reflecting back on what Marcella taught her, it’s much bigger than food.  It’s that sometimes we need to choose to do the right thing and this is a metaphor for the way we should live.  Steve Sando says he wishes he could apply the Italian way of cooking that Marcella taught him to everything in life.

The footage of Sando in his home with his well-splattered cookbook making that sumptuous Marcella bean lardo sandwich is precious as is his comment “What better thing do you have to do than spend the day cooking?”

Peter Miller:  Can you argue with that?  The lesson here is to be conscious and be engaged and dive into the things that matter and do them well.  Marcella is a great guide for that kind of living.

If you could somehow speak with Marcella today and ask her a question what would you ask?

Peter Miller: I regret that I didn’t get to ask Marcella the story of her life on camera.  I gathered every piece of film that had been shot of her that I could find.  In very few of these did anyone ever ask her about her life.  There’s one wonderful interview that is in the film in several places that was done when she’d released her autobiography, “Amarcord,” in 2008.  Thank goodness this exists because in it she describes what it was like to grow up in Italy and meet and marry Victor and to start to make food and to create these cookbooks and tell her life story.  This is one short interview.  Every other time someone had a camera on her, she was showing how to make a recipe. To me, her recipes are wonderful and necessary but her life story is fascinating and I’m glad we could piece it together from what was available. But I would just love to sit her down and find out where she came from and what makes her tick and what the world looked like to her and where she went and what it was like.

Did Marcella have any other hidden talents or was cooking her main creative outlet?

Peter Miller:  She was deeply inspired by Japanese culture and aesthetics and studied Ikebana to the point of becoming quite accomplished. I don’t think there’s anything Marcella couldn’t do if she set her formidable mind to it.

Do you have a favorite Marcella dish?

Peter Miller: It’s like asking me to pick my favorite child. Valerie and I cook dinner together every night and have done so for years.  We often cook Marcella recipes and are still finding new ones that we love.  We make her Tomato Sauce with three ingredients the most, followed by her wonderful Penne with Spinach and Ricotta*.  One of the things I especially enjoy about Marcella’s recipes is what the cookbook people call the headnotes, the little explanations at the top before you get to the actual recipe. The headnote for the Penne with Spinach and Ricotta recipe describes how when Marcella discovered this sauce in Sicily, it reminded her of the tortelloni she remembered from her home up north in Emilia Romagna, but “turned inside out.” This recipe creates one of the simplest, most satisfying comfort foods I know (and one that our vegetarian daughter especially appreciates), and every time I serve it, I laugh a bit thinking about inside-out stuffed pasta.

“Marcella will be released in theaters, video-on-demand, and DVD on May 9, 2025.

Visit the “Marcella” film website.

Books by Marcella Hazan

Guiliano Hazan website– explore the world of food with Marcella’s son.

PETER MILLER is an Emmy and Peabody-award winning filmmaker whose documentaries have screened in cinemas and on television throughout the world. He directed and produced A.K.A. DOC POMUS, JEWS AND BASEBALL: AN AMERICAN LOVE STORY, and SACCO AND VANZETTI. With Carlos Sandoval, he made A CLASS APART for PBS’s American Experience, now being adapted as a feature film executive produced by Eva Longoria. His musical film THE INTERNATIONALE was short-listed for an Academy Award nomination. His documentary PROJECTIONS OF AMERICA, about a WWII propaganda film unit, was shown nationally on PBS stations, and he co-directed ROBERT SHAW: MAN OF MANY VOICES, about the celebrated conductor, winner of three Emmy Awards, for PBS American Masters. Peter co-wrote and produced Ken Rosenberg’s BEDLAM, about the crisis in care for people with serious mental illness, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and aired on PBS Independent Lens. He is currently directing and producing MARCELLA, the story of the beloved food writer Marcella Hazan. He has been a producer on numerous films for Florentine Films, including JAZZ, THE WAR, and FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT.