IndependentMedia's David Gelb Chases Passion, Not Perfection

Mr. Gelb, many of your documentaries have featured chefs on a quest to perfect their craft. Are you a perfectionist in the same way as your subjects?

The term I’m using these days is passion, not perfection. It’s moved over to passion! My first documentary feature was Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and when I met Jiro, I was taken by the fact that he’s spending his life doing the same thing, and each day he's working to improve it by just a little bit. The humility of that… It’s really amazing, because he seeks perfection, but he knows that he'll never achieve it. But with my series Chef’s Table, some of them are real perfectionists, but some of them are just like doing what they feel, they don’t even think about the idea of being perfect. So as the show as gone on, the real unifying factor is passion. Passion is part of perfection of course, you know, if your goal is to make the one perfect thing, that's one kind of passion. But there are other ways too!

Okay, let me rephrase. Are you passionate in the same way as your subjects?

(Laughs) I'm definitely passionate! I want everything that I do to mean something, it has to have intention, it has to have purpose. When I was working on Jiro, I was trying to do what he's doing! I worked on every part of my craft, the cinematography, the music, the editing, everything. I shot it myself. I did the sound. And I was very obsessive about all of it. I wanted to raise the bar of what I was doing to match what he was doing as best as I could. And that’s still true today, I want to be there to make it. I want to spend the time doing it, I want to be working with a great team, helping them to make something.

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