Interview with Richard C. Morais, Author of 'The Hundred-Foot Journey'

 Goodreads synopsis of 'The Hundred Foot Journey' by Richard Morais:

"That skinny Indian teenager has that mysterious something that comes along once a generation. He is one of those rare chefs who is simply born. He is an artist."

And so begins the rise of Hassan Haji, the unlikely gourmand who recounts his life’s journey in Richard Morais’s charming novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey . Lively and brimming with the colors, flavors, and scents of the kitchen, The Hundred-Foot Journey is a succulent treat about family, nationality, and the mysteries of good taste.

Born above his grandfather’s modest restaurant in Mumbai, Hassan first experienced life through intoxicating whiffs of spicy fish curry, trips to the local markets, and gourmet outings with his mother. But when tragedy pushes the family out of India, they console themselves by eating their way around the world, eventually settling in Lumière, a small village in the French Alps.

The boisterous Haji family takes Lumière by storm. They open an inexpensive Indian restaurant opposite an esteemed French relais —that of the famous chef Madame Mallory—and infuse the sleepy town with the spices of India, transforming the lives of its eccentric villagers and infuriating their celebrated neighbor. Only after Madame Mallory wages culinary war with the immigrant family, does she finally agree to mentor young Hassan, leading him to Paris, the launch of his own restaurant, and a slew of new adventures.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is about how the hundred-foot distance between a new Indian kitchen and a traditional French one can represent the gulf between different cultures and desires. A testament to the inevitability of destiny, this is a fable for the ages—charming, endearing, and compulsively readable.

Richard C. Morais is the award-winning author of The Hundred-Foot Journey. The film adaptation stars Helen Mirren and Om Puri, directed by Lasse Hallstrom, and produced by Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Juliet Blake, DreamWorks Studios, and Participant Media.
Morais is a former Forbes foreign correspondent and founding editor of Barron’s Penta, he’s also written Buddhaland Brooklyn, The Man with No Borders, and a biography of fashion legend Pierre Cardin. His works have been published worldwide and developed for film, earning recognition for promoting cross-cultural understanding.

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So, here is the Novelpro Junkie interview with Mr. Richard C. Morais:

1. 2024 marked the 10th-Year Anniversary of the “The Hundred-Foot Journey” film adaptation, could you talk about how you found out that your book will be adapted into a film?

The story, for those who don't know, is about a Muslim Indian family who suffers racism in India because they're not Hindu. They get chased out of India. First, they go to England before settling in France. They were restaurateurs in Mumbai in India. Their car breaks down in the mountains of the Jura, which are these mountain ranges in between Switzerland and France. They open a sort of loud, boisterous, cheap Indian restaurant opposite a two-star French restaurant that's run by Madame Mallory. Madame Mallory is a French haute cuisine snob. She has reached her 65th birthday and she's like a culinary nun. She's devoted to getting her three stars, which is the top Michelin rating. It's her 65th birthday and she suddenly realizes that she's never going to get her third star when this Indian family moves into the restaurant and sets up a cheap Indian restaurant opposite hers. She's everything about French good taste and here's this loud, noisy Indian restaurant across the street. Her first instinct is to crush them. But she goes and tastes the food and she realizes the 16-year-old boy in the kitchen, the son of the owner, has one of those great chefs that is simply born. So, she first tries to annihilate the family, break them and chase them out of the village.
But something happens—I won't go into it—she has a change of heart. She brings the young man into her two-star French restaurant and teaches him French cuisine.

It’s [the book] is called the 100-foot Journey, because it's the hundred feet between the Indian restaurant and her restaurant. When he crosses the road, even though it's only a hundred feet, he's actually leaving one world—it's really in psychically and in his soul—he's really going from one world to an entirely new world. So, even though it's a hundred feet, it's a thousand miles from going from an Indian Muslim Indian restaurant with his family to a very intense two-star French restaurant. So, that's the story of the book.

I could not get the book published for 16 years and then overnight, the first place that bought the book was in India.  I could not get published in Britain or America. HarperCollins India took the risk. When I got back, word had spread that this book did really well in India.  I immediately sold the US rights. That same week, someone banged on my door and it was a producer. Her name was Julia Blake, and she was the co-head of National Geographic TV. She was unhappy and she was looking for a project to sink her teeth into and to leave National Geographic. She was in D.C. I was at that time living in Philadelphia. She got on the train, came to Philadelphia and literally banged on my door and said, “you've got to let me have this book”.  I had been writing in the dark for 17 years or 16 years and no one had given me the time of day. So, I said “Sure, I'll give you the rights”.

So, I gave her the right and they optioned it (they pay you a small amount of money for the rights to develop, exclusively to develop your book as a film). So, I sold her the rights for a few years. My book went on to become an international bestseller around the world before the film. Commonwealth countries really loved the book because it tells the story of the snobbish Europeans and finding your own voice in Europe and immigration, which is a very important subject. As the book was going around the world and starting to become an international bestseller, Julia was doing these amazing deals. First, she got Oprah's film company, Harpo, and then joined forces, and got Spielberg's film. He was going to direct it. In the end, it was Lasse Hallstrom.
 
2. What was your writing habit when you wrote The Hundred-Foot Journey”?

So, I was a pretty well-known business journalist. Writing is my day job and my hobby. I always actually had two jobs. My heart and soul wanted to write fiction, but I have a family. I had to feed myself and my family. So, I became a journalist to pay my bills. I was, at that time, Forbes Magazine's European bureau chief in London.
People always think about writing, “oh, if I could only get a cabin for three or six months, I would bang out my book.” That's not really how to write. If you want to climb Mount Everest, the only way to climb Mount Everest is to put one step in front of the other, look down at your feet and take one step at a time. Don't look at the mountain peak or else you get overwhelmed. So, that’s how I wrote my book.

I had a demanding day job as a business journalist. So, what I did is I eliminated all commuting. I told my magazine; I refused to go to the office. I don't mind traveling around the world as a foreign correspondent, but when I'm home, I want to be home with my family. The real reason is that I didn't want to commute. I made a promise to myself, the time I would normally commune, most people commune, I will write fiction. So, I had about an hour and a half every day where I would write fiction. I would write it page by page until the book was done.
The other thing is that journalism is good because it taught me not to have writer's block. A lot of young writers who try to start writing, often get what they call writer's block. The advantage of my training as a journalist was that you can't afford writer's block. You have a deadline; you have to write no matter what you're feeling. That discipline taught me, no matter what I'm feeling, I will always write my fiction.
 
 
3. Did you have other titles in mind beside The Hundred-Foot Journey? What were they? 

No, I always knew it was always going to be The Hundred-Foot Journey because as I said, it's a hundred feet, but it's psychically, he's really going from one corner of the world to another corner of the world. And so that hundred feet, as I said, there are times in life when we are making a distance in physical space, but psychically, it's a huge leap. That's why I always knew that The Hundred-Foot Journey was the right title.
 
4. What was the hardest thing about writing the book?

One of the hardest things was, so the way I write is I always wanted to be an actor. So, my route into fiction writing was through acting, like a character actor. So, what I do is I do a little bit of research just to get the voice right.
My life is very boring: I get up, I brush my teeth, I go to work, I have dinner and then I go to bed and in between I walk my dog. So, my life is quite boring, but most people's lives are quite boring. The joy of writing fiction is you get to travel. I literally leave my body. I had a writer when I was a teacher in college, her name was Grace Paley. At the time She was a very famous American writer, but she only wrote short stories, but technically she was considered top. She was from the Bronx in New York, and she always wrote about the Jewish Bronx. I remember I was a 17-year-old walking into her classroom. She said, “The reason we write is to show why we're different from other people”.

My background is that I was born in Portugal and raised in Switzerland. When I was 10 months old, my family moved to Switzerland. I lived in Switzerland until I was 16 years old. Then I went to university in America and I was very confused. I had just arrived in America and I thought I was American because my mother was American, but I had lived my entire life in Europe and never lived in America and had only visited it like two or three times before I moved here as a 16-year-old by myself. When you're 16, 17, or 18, anywhere in the world, it's a very scary time because you don't just try to figure out who you are, but when you don't even know which country you belong to, it's very disorienting. Like I said, I was an actor. So, I could go into Switzerland and speak fluent Swiss German and they would think I was Swiss. And then I'd come to America and everyone thought I was American, but I didn't belong to either place. So, I was in America, I was 17-year-old. I was almost going crazy because I was just so confused about who I am and all of that.

And she [Grace Paley] said, “the reason we write is to show how we're different from other people”.
I put up my hand and I just in a trembling voice, I said, “Grace, that is the most irresponsible remark I have ever heard a teacher say. I know why I'm different from other people. I feel that every moment of the day. The reason I write is to find out what I have in common with other people”.

So, all of my novels are in the voice of someone who's very different from me. The joy of it is I get to be, a little while, not Richard Morais, but to be a young, Muslim Indian chef, or to be a Japanese Buddhist priest, or to be a Spanish banker. That's the great joy of it. I do enough research to get the voice right. Then I write through the book and I love to cook, I cook for my family. But, running a professional kitchen is very different. It's a different skill set than what I do in my home. I didn't know the technical thing. So, one of the hardest things was to do enough research and that's where the journalist training came to my advantage, because I'm used to doing research as a journalist and to learn. I have this inquisitive mind to learn things that I don't know about. I'm paid to do that as a journalist. So, I applied for it. So, there is a lot of detail in the book that came from this research. So that was the hardest part.  I'll give you one example:

In the 1880s in France, there was what was called the Franco-Prussian War. The Germans attacked France and they actually had encircled Paris. Paris was under siege. For two years, no one could get in or out of Paris and there was no food. Le Petit Larousse Gastronomique, which is the great, classic French cooking book, during the siege of Paris, they actually had recipes for rats, cats, and dogs because that was the only thing they could eat. In typical French, they would say, “if you want to eat a rat, you must get one from a wine cellar because it's so much tastier than one from eating corn and you want to serve it with a Bernays sauce, but Kornowski's recipe, of course”. So, I mean, you can't make this stuff up. But that was actually in this recipe. That was actually what my research led me to. So, the book is filled with these crazy little fun facts and details that are true, that flow from the research. So, I would say that was the hardest thing.

Bonus information on how the story was written:

I had never been to India when I started writing the book. But there is actually a movie angle for the reason for that.
 I was in London as Forbes' European Bureau Chief. I wrote an article about Merchant Ivory Productions. That was a small independent film group that made beautiful films in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. They used to take classic literature like Ian Forster's Howards end and they would make these beautiful films of them. The producer was Ismail Merchant. He was a Muslim Indian and a great chef. He loved to cook too. When he came to London, after I wrote the article, we became friends. He came to London, and he'd call me up and say, “Richard, I'm in town, let's cook”.
So we'd go to the markets, we'd buy all the stuff in the markets, go back to his apartment and cook up a storm. He'd have all his famous theatrical film and acting friends over. So, we had a great time. Towards the end of his life, he started directing. He directed a beautiful film called Anita Desai's In Custody. It's an Indian writer, it's a beautiful book, and he did a really lovely job. It's in Urdu, which is the Muslim Indian language. Om Puri, who plays Papa in The Hundred-Foot Journey, has a cameo in that film.  Ismail showed me, gave me a private screening of the film before it was released, and then we had dinner at the Bombay Brasserie in London.

During that dinner, I said, “Ismael, you need to find a literary property that marries your love of food with your love of filmmaking.  I'll help you find something”. I was thinking of Balzac or Zola, some of the great French writers who had written about food. Then, I was walking with my wife and daughter on the beach and this idea popped into my head to do The Hundred-Foot Journey. And I thought, you know what, Ismail, he was always, he was the most charming scoundrel you've ever met. He was always, every time you shook his hand, you'd have to count your fingers, you still had five fingers. Because he was always hustling you, but he was so charming—and you knew you were being hustled—but you just couldn't help. He was just so much fun. So, I said, “Fuck you, Ismail, you've been hustling me for 25 years. I'm now gonna hustle your back. I'm gonna write a book that you're gonna have to turn into a film”. That's what I was thinking in my head. So that's why I started writing The Hundred-Foot Journey. I was trying to trick Ismael into making a film that I had written. He sadly died.

That's another thing for young writers; I always write thinking how it will look on the screen. That’s very important. So, when you write fiction, always imagine what it would look like on the screen. Imagine what actor would play that role. It's like if you visualize something, it happens. If you can see it, it will happen. If you can see your future, it will happen. But you first have to have the imagination to see it. You can't move and you can't move into the future until you can imagine the future. I hope that helps.
 
 
5. What is your biggest reward for writing and being involved with “The Hundred-Foot Journey” film adaptation after all these years? 

Basically, Hollywood pays the writer to go away. They don't want to know anything about the writer. You have zero control, particularly when you're dealing with the A-Team, Spielberg and Helen Mirren and Lasse Hallström. I had the A-Team making my film. So, they write you for a writer, a big check and they say, “Now go away, we never want to hear from you”. But Julia Blake, who was one of the three, the original producer who I told you about. So, she was English. She would periodically call me up and ask for my advice. She was exceptional. And so, every now and then, there were two things where she asked for my advice. First, she said, "'Who should play Papa?' And I said, "'It has to be Om Puri.'" And she said, "'What? That ugly?' And I said, "'No, who go see East Meets West”, which is, he plays a Pakistani father in Manchester, married to an Irish woman, it's a fantastic film. I said, “he is papa, you have to get him papa”. They eventually did get Om Puri to play papa.

Then she asked me the same question about the director. I said, “Lasse Hallström”, and that's who they got. That's very unusual, particularly with the first film. I did learn from that. So, they paid me to go away. My other novels, which are also in development, i took less money, but I demanded to be an executive producer. So, I had more influence and frankly, I wanted to learn more about the filmmaking business. That's how I got a seat at the table.
 
6. In one word, how would you sum up your experience with the film premiere of “The Hundred-Foot Journey” and your journey writing the novel? 

Awesome.

 I wrote for 17 years and no one would give me the time of day. They always say that overnight successes are years in the making and that's exactly true. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time, the A-Team came on board. It was like a fairy tale. But what you don't see is that for 17 years, I was crying in the corner, because I had such an ache. I had a voice. I believed I had an important voice to go out into the world, and I couldn't get it out.
 
7. Were you ever involved with screenwriter Steven Knight with the film adaptation?

Steven Knight, he was a major script writer. He was considered one of the tops. So, DreamWorks, which was Spielberg's company, wanted him to do a turnaround—which means a project that had hit a brick wall. They were gonna buy it from another studio and turn it around and get it made. That was “Rebecca”, which is a great 1950s film noir film and book written by Daphne de Muriel. They were trying to lure him. They said to Steven Knight—who also likes to cook—If you do this, you can also have the pick of any other project we have in our portfolio.

They'll do a deal for two scripts for you:
One will be the big one where you get the big fee and the other one will be a passion project that you really want to do. The studios like that, because what they do is they have to pay top dollar for the big project, but then for the passion project, he gets a fraction of his usual fee. They amortize it, they average it for the two films. It brings the cost of the big project down, because if you get two scripts for the price of one and a half, you're actually getting the big script at a discount.
 So, he picked The Hundred-Foot Journey—I was blessed that he picked The Hundred-Foot Journey. When he started writing, he said, “I will not speak to Richard”. He did not want to speak to me. One day I got a call from the producer and she said, “So, we've got the first script, the first draft of the script from Steven Knight, but I'm not going to show it to you”.
Now, nothing will freak out a writer more than the producer saying, “we got the script, but we're not going to show it to you”. In other words, it's not very good, otherwise they would show it to me. So, I heard that and I freaked out. Remember, I'm a reporter. So, the second thought in my head was, “Since when is that going to stop you from getting your hands on the script?” So, I made a few calls and I got the script and I read it. She was totally right. I totally freaked out. If I said black in the book, he had written white. It was just like all over the place. To be fair to Steven Knight, if you read the first draft of what I have done, it's not very good. He did write a great script in the end. Anyway, I was freaking out. Here I had my book and there was this crazy, draft script. So, one of my friends is Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote “Remains of the Day”. He won the Nobel Prize. I called Ish [Kazuo Ishiguro] and he said, “Time out”. He said, “take a look at the names working on your film. Spielberg, Oprah, Lasse Hallstrom, Helen Mirren”. And we go down the list and he said, “you've got the A-Team”. And I said, “yeah, that's true”.

He said, “So, you don't want a bad film to come out of your book, but these people of this quality are not going to let a bad film out about your book”. I said, “well, okay, I get that”. He then said, “if the film comes out and the book is better than the film. Every review is going to say, go read the book, it's so much better than the film. And if the film's a great film…” basically he was saying I’m in a win-win situation. As soon as he said that, I relaxed and let the Hollywood system do its thing. And sure enough, they did a beautiful job.

 Stephen Knight wrote a beautiful script. It's different. I wrote Lasse Hallström, and I said, “Lasse, this is the way it should be. Your plot is a little more Hollywood, like a little more violin strings than mine is. My book is a little darker”. For example, in my book, I didn't want the cliche of the love affair. So, it was a love affair between a family and food, it was a love affair between an older chef and a younger chef. The romantic part was minor. The big love affairs were between this older chef teaching a younger chef and the younger chef outgrowing the older chef. They, of course, turned it into a Hollywood romance, which is fine. The plot is different and the ending is different. But I wrote Lassa to say, “Lassa, this is the way it should be, your film speaks for itself as a piece of art. My book speaks for itself as a piece of art. But if you saw the film and read the book, you would know they had the same DNA. That's exactly the way it should be”. Things do have to change for the film. It's a different medium and it can't rigidly follow the book. It has to take its own liberties to come to life. But the spirit and the characters were truly true to the book for which I'm very grateful.
 
8. What was your favorite scene when you wrote the book? And what was your favorite part from the film adaptation? 

My favorite scene from the book I wrote, I think, is when he crosses the street… It's like you're asking me what's my favorite child, I love them all. They're just different. There are also some cooking scenes. I love writing the first part in India with his grandmother cooking fish stew in India. In terms of the movie, Manish Dayal, who played the lead character, was renamed in the film. Racism plays an important part in my book and it chases them from India to France. But Hollywood being Hollywood, they
never want to offend anybody. They made it very ambiguous what the race is, so as not to offend anybody.
 
 I thought that Manish Dayal, who plays the chef, that scene in Paris where he's homesick and he starts crying, he tastes—actually chokes me up—when he tastes, there's a scene in the end of my book, which I also love writing, was the night he won his three stars—he walks through Paris and he smells some Indian food, and he goes and he sees a poor Indian at the end of the day, at two in the morning, eating a bowl of Indian food and he puts his hand on the glass and he aches to return there, but he can't. So, my book was, he had a calling in life to become a great three-star chef, but he lost something in the journey, which is connection to his culture and heritage. He had to fulfill that destiny to become a great French chef, but you pay a price for everything. I thought that Manish did a wonderful job in the fancy Paris restaurant where he tastes the food and gets so emotional because he misses his heritage.
 
9. Last question, what has cooking taught you about life? 

Cooking is, for me, really is a metaphor of life because, or at least the quality and enjoyment of life. My father was a really good cook and he wasn't very good at telling his children that he loved them, but he would show it and he would show it through cooking. He used to tell us—I have three older brothers—that he would cook us whatever we wanted on our birthday. He was a businessman but his hobby was cooking and he loved to cook and his grandfather had a restaurant, so cooking was in the family. I always associated food and cooking with family love.
 I am a bit of an idiot savant because I can remember what we had to eat at a certain meal 25 years ago. The reason I can, it's emotional intelligence. It's not just the food; it's the people around the table and that I can remember what each person ate at that meal from 25 years ago because of the love I have for all the people around the table. It's like somehow my emotional intelligence and food and cooking is very, it's like. it's a different part of me, it's a very deep part of my brain.
 
So, the great thing about cooking is right now [after this very interview], I'm actually on my way to cook two ducks for friends who are here. I got some fresh rosemary and sage from the garden last of the winter. I'm on the East coast, and I'm mincing to put a dry rub on the duck. It's going to take five hours to cook. It is about the care you have in life, whether you're writing or you're making a movie. I try to mimic the care I take into my cooking to all of those professional pursuits as well. It's got to be love, discipline and hard work. And then technique too, which comes with time. It's like making a stew. You take a little bit from here, a little bit from there, and throw it into the pot and then you make something unique with your voice. That's what good cooking is and that's what good writing is.