Hollywood to make a movie about Ferran Adrià’s restaurant El Bulli

Barcelona (ACN).- A movie will portray Ferran Adrià’s genius in the kitchen. The film will be based on Lisa Abend’s new book ‘The Sorcerers Apprentices, a season in the kitchen at Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli’. Abend is the ‘Time’ magazine correspondent in Spain. The movie will mix fiction and non-fiction, describing the experience of young cooks at El Bulli, Ferran Adrià’s Restaurant located in Roses, in Catalonia’s Costa Brava. The restaurant has some 30 intern cooks each season, who work very long hours (almost 14 hours per day) and put a lot of passion in their work, according to Abend. In total, some 1,000 interns have gone through El Bulli’s kitchen, “they are the cuisine’s future”, stated Abend. The restaurant has three Michelin stars and has been voted the best restaurant in the world by ‘Restaurant’ magazine on five occasions (the world’s record). In fact, Ferran Adrià himself has been voted the best chef of the decade for having revolutionised cuisine, developing a new language, pushing technical and conceptual innovation, inventing the so-called “molecular cuisine” and the culinary foam. Adrià’s cuisine is characterised by contrasts of flavours, temperatures and textures. In 2014, this passion and creativity will be seen on movie screens, although the public figure of Ferran Adrià is already very present in the world’s media, as the anecdotic fact of having his own character in ‘The Simpsons’ series proves.

During the presentation of the Spanish version of Abend’s book in Barcelona, ‘Los aprendices de brujo’, Catalan Ferran Adrià and American Lisa Abend explained the movie project picturing El Bulli’s kitchen. The movie will be based on ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentices’, which compiles the stories Abend observed after spending some months in Ferran Adrià’s kitchen. The main condition Ferran Adrià put to authorise the film is that it should be based on the stories Lisa Abend discovered in El Bulli. Adrià wants the movie to describe his philosophy and his way of understanding life, away from the supposed glamour and constraint of the world’s top restaurants. A movie about Adrià’s own life would not make sense “as it is a normal life”, but a movie about the consequences of his cuisine and experimentation would work. Nevertheless, Adrià explained it will be a fiction film, “similar to the Social Network”. It will tell the story of young cooks spending some months in El Bulli’s kitchen.

The movie will be made for sure, assured Adrià, as they already have part of the funding. Only the contract signature is pending to start the production. Neither the director nor the main actors are decided. Nevertheless, Lisa Abend joked about the possibility of Johnny Depp being Ferran Adrià in the movie. The film has no shooting dates yet, although its producer, Jeff Kleeman, told CNA that they will profit from the period El Bulli will be closed, between 2012 and 2013. In fact, the restaurant El Bulli will close next July 30^th for good and it will go through an ambitious transformation process in order to reopen again in 2014 and turned into elBulli Foundation. elBulli Foundation will be a centre to experiment and will link cuisine to visual arts. Quite likely, the movie will be premiered in 2014, coinciding with elBulli Foundation’s opening.