Sitting down to speak for this story, a T-shirted José Andrés is in Miami, flanked by swaying palm trees — a Beach Boys song incarnate. Two days later, he would be on the Ukraine-Poland border, feeding a steady stream of refugees fleeing the Russian onslaught.
Through his work with his nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, the Michelin-starred chef has dedicated himself to providing free meals to people affected by natural and man-made disasters, from hurricanes to armed conflict. The organization was founded in the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Andrés’ efforts are the subject of We Feed People, a documentary directed by Ron Howard, set to premiere March 19 at SXSW before heading to Disney+ on May 27 via National Geographic Documentary Films.
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“How do people achieve these things that are outwardly very, very complicated or even impossible?” says Howard of what drew him to the story. “[Andrés] would go to a bar and just hang out for about an hour and find the person or two who actually knew what was going on.”
By the time Howard made his approach about a documentary, Andrés already had turned down other offers from entertainment outfits. “They wanted more a reality show about disasters,” says Andrés, who with CEO Nate Mook decided that if anyone was going to tell the story of WCK, it might as well be an Oscar winner whose films the chef describes as “beautiful kisses to the wind.” Plus, he didn’t want to find himself in this imagined scenario: “I’m 90 years old and I say, ‘Shit, and I told Ron Howard no.'” So he said yes.
From the outset of WCK, Andrés, who gained fame as the chef at the Washington, D.C., tapas restaurant Jaleo, understood the power of real-time documentation. “You’re bringing light to people going hungry,” says Andrés, who often posts iPhone videos from disaster zones on social media, while the rest of the WCK team has long filmed its efforts. This left Howard with hundreds of hours of footage from the organization’s decade of work. Howard’s crew supplemented this trove with footage taken during WCK’s COVID-19 relief efforts and talking-head interviews with Mook, Andrés and the chef’s wife and daughters. Howard is quick to point out that while Andrés was feeding others in the pandemic, he had to shutter several of his restaurants permanently.
Work with WCK can see Andrés hopscotching from one disaster zone to another. This was the case in 2021, when he flew from Haiti, where WCK was assisting with relief after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake, to Louisiana, where Hurricane Ida was due to make landfall. By the time Andrés arrived at the airport near New Orleans, it had been closed in preparation for Ida. Left with no way out of the airport, Andrés hopped the security fence. “Before I know it, I have a light in my face, my pants are caught in the wire, and a sheriff says, ‘What are you doing?'” recalls Andrés. “We didn’t know if we were going to be taken to jail. [We said] ‘We’re coming to feed people.'”
“Where was the camera?” asks Howard, hearing this story for the first time. “That could have been in the movie!”
This story first appeared in the March 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
