Recipe for a Dinner Table Scene

Balancing conviviality vs. discord in 'Fried Shrimp.'

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Hello, and merry Christmas!

If you’re like me, you’re feeling like you might burst at the seams this morning. Christmas is well and good, but in my family the real holiday is Christmas Eve. That’s when we do a version of the Feast of the Seven Fishes. If you’re not Italian (and haven’t watched season 2 of The Bear), the Feast of the Seven Fishes is exactly what it sounds like: On Christmas Eve, you make an extravagant dinner featuring seven types of fish. Apparently, the reason for all the seafood is that you’re not supposed to eat any meat until Christmas Day (God forbid you go vegetarian for a day), and the number seven comes from the seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church or the seven hills of Rome… or something. No one ever actually explained the origins of the ritual to me. (And really, who needs a reason to gorge on loads of carbs and shellfish?)

I say we’d do a “version” of the Feast of the Seven Fishes because my family’s never been all that strict about the number of fishes. Growing up, there would be stuffed calamari, baked clams, linguine with clam sauce, a red sauce with a medley of shellfish, and then shrimp. Lots of shrimp. Like all the varieties Bubba lists off in Forrest Gump.

Really, though, there was only one shrimp that mattered, and that was the fried shrimp. 

The writer as a young boy with his uncle and a big mound-o-fried shrimp.

Hence, the title for my latest short film. 

The short—which was released on NoBudge this past week—follows Elise (Emily Wilson), who is Jewish, as she spends a first Christmas with her boyfriend Bobby’s (John Connor Hammond) overbearing Italian family. It was inspired by a few Cea family stories. I won’t spoil what those stories are, in case you haven’t watched the film yet. But let’s just say the climax was the starting point. Setting the film at Christmas came later—as a way to up the stakes for Elise, create a culture clash, and add a colorful backdrop. My family’s Christmas, with all its rituals and excess, always felt cinematic to me. And I was excited to show the nitty gritty of how the sausage shrimp gets made.

To make fried shrimp, we’d create an assembly line. One person on flower, one on eggs, and one on a breadcrumb mixture.

In pre-production, though, the scene I spent the most time thinking about was the one at the dinner table. Today I’m going to write about what I learned making it.

What makes for a good dinner table scene?

Elissa Suh, who helms the brilliant food-movies crossover newsletter, Movie Pudding, told me she thinks a good dinner table scene comes down to the following:

Dinner table scenes are an opportunity to develop tensions between characters, and like all other scenes something must happen. In my opinion, the best ones capture that intersection/juxtaposition of conviviality that comes with eating food with others and whatever discord lies beneath the surface of the characters. Barring that, it needs to serve as the most beautiful set dressing ever, of course.

In our scene, the biggest challenge was balancing the conviviality and discord. For Elise, Bobby’s boisterous family and the lack of kosher foods had to feel overwhelming and anxiety-inducing. The family, meanwhile, had to be oblivious to Elise’s discomfort and the ways their own mythology and traditions might not be embraced by everyone. For them, the feast is self-evidently fantastic; for Elise, it’s a nightmare. As the scene progresses, it’s meant to act as a dance of assimilation—with Elise feeling pressure to laugh at the family’s stories and eat the family’s foods. What of herself will she give up to be accepted by her partner’s family? 

Dinner scenes seem like they should be simple to shoot—at their core, they’re just people talking at a table—but there’s a lot to consider. Who’s sitting where? Who’s wearing what? How do you maintain continuity while still giving a sense that the characters are actually eating and passing dishes? If it’s a big group, how do you get everyone involved in the action? Do you shoot over the shoulder or clean? With a lens that exaggerates distance or shrinks it?

As I was preparing, I tried to watch as many dinner table scenes as I could, so I surveyed Twitter: “What are some great dinner table scenes in movies?” This being before Elon lit the platform on fire, I got a lot of replies. Over 1,000.

The responses ran the gamut, from horror movies (people loooovvve Hereditary!) to comedies (ditto Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie); classics (Hello, Dolly!, The Heartbreak Kid)  to contemporaries (Phantom Thread, Django Unchained). And of course, the most iconic food movies (Big Night, Eat Drink Man Woman) got lots of mentions, too. 

There was a lot to learn—and steal—from many of these movies, even the ones that were nothing like the film I wanted to make. Once you go down the dinner scene rabbit hole you can drive yourself crazy thinking about amplifying each shift in dynamics through camera moves, character groupings, lenses, and blocking. (This video will give you a lot to chew on.)

Ultimately, the scenes that I gravitated most towards, though, were from films I’d seen many times before. Particularly the classic mob movies. Which might be embarrassingly obvious, but made sense on a couple of levels: This family, while not involved in actual organized crime, was supposed to harbor a similar suspicion towards outsiders, adherence to tradition, and insistence on loyalty. They’re also New York Italians who would’ve grown up with some cultural similarities to the types portrayed so famously by Scorsese. (My own grandparents grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and my nonna always reminded me of Scorsese’s mom, Catherine.)

And lastly, a lot of the scenes I was looking at were shot quite simply, which was a practical necessity on our small budget and tight schedule. Take for instance the following scene from the end of The Godfather Part II, which served as a key aesthetic reference.

The Godfather Part II scene—which also takes place at Christmas—acts as a memory, and I wanted our scene to function similarly.

I also wanted to emulate that scene’s intimate, golden-hued lighting and festive air, to make conforming seductive for Elise, even as her alarm bells are ringing.

A craft breakdown

Finding a good location went a long way. The house we shot at happened to be owned by a Christmas fanatic, who lent some additional decorations. The red wallpaper in a living room we converted to a dining room added some nice texture. And our production designer Riley Andreu did a great job coordinating the food on the table (kept fresh with a steamer), as well as the background ornamentation (did you catch the struffoli on the side table?).

As for lighting, our wizard of a DP, Todd Rawiszer, achieved the aesthetic I was after by using a menace arm to boom out two 2x1’ lite mats, which were skirted. And he matched all the practical bulbs in the scene with low watt incandescent bulbs.

This setup also let us move around the table fairly quickly. Our approach was to get two-shots of strategic pairings (Bobby’s dad and uncle; Elise and Nana; Bobby and his mom) and close-ups of the scene’s most important characters (Uncle Jimmy, Nana, and Elise). We started with our master, then picked up Bobby’s dad and Uncle Jimmy, then Nana and Elise, then Bobby and his mom, and then all of the action that ends the scene. This all went about as smoothly as it could have, thanks to the dynamite cast and crew. By the time we were done with the master, all the actors were really humming.

When editor Alex Thiel and I got to the edit, we had more than enough material to work with. The trick became finessing the scene so that you could both feel the friction between Elise and Nana and follow the story Bobby’s uncle is telling. We wound up stripping the story to its essentials and relying on a lot of small gestures to communicate Elise’s discomfort.

Elise says she likes the shrimp, but makes a sour face as she chews.

Did it work? Were you able to follow the story and the emotional beats of the scene?

Let me know what some of your favorite dinner scenes are and what makes them great in this chat thread.

Also: In 2024, I’d like to feature a lot of these sorts of scene/craft breakdowns. If you’ve had an experience that might be instructive to the community and you’d like to write about it, pitch me at nothingbogus1@gmail.com.

Listings

• From Kabir Chibber: I'm a filmmaker working on my feature debut. I'm looking for collaborators in NYC—ideally other indie writers, directors and producers who exist outside the industry. To get a sense of my sensibility, you can see my shorts here and something I wrote about Demolition Man in the New York Times Magazine last month. Pls email me at kabir.chibber@gmail.com if you're interested. 

• From Anna Torzullo: Does anyone have the following to borrow/use:

  drop cloth or large plastic sheets for painting or a cube table that is either white or stone/cement (photos below for reference). To get in touch: Email annatorzullo@gmail.com. We would need it for a shoot that will take place from 1/7-1/11, and could pick up anytime before then. We have a vehicle so within a ~20 mile radius of nyc is ok for pickups!

  

• If you want to promote a screening of your film, I created a chat thread here.

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