Production Secrets: Food on Screen

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Alex Paganelli grew up with a multicultural background in the French Alps - his father’s family is Italian and his mother’s side is English, from London. Seemingly opposite parts of Europe collided in the French mountains to deliver to Alex a very colourful European upbringing, especially through the prism of food. “Growing up in the Alps, we were away from everything,” he reflects back on his childhood as he tries to remember where his fascination for food is rooted. “I grew up in a tiny village - there were probably about 700 people there and I was there until I was about ten. That was my first experience of food and the culture around it. It’s so extremely different from how people eat in the city.”

Later in life, Alex moved to London where he is now based, so the pace of the big smoke has undoubtedly had an impact on his taste buds and how he regards food. But we can never run too far from home, so he knows that the tiny Alpine village is still to be seen in the way he cooks, eats and ultimately shoots food. “The setup was very interesting. We would kind of gather things from neighbours around us because we would all grow things. You could swap a lot - somebody’s got a walnut tree, so when they harvest it they swap a bunch of walnuts for a rabbit from somebody next door. It almost sounds strange when I talk about it now, because I sometimes forget about that part of my life. But that’s how I got acquainted with food.”

Alex’s Italian side of the family he calls ‘traditionally Italian’, and although they had moved to France with his father back in his 20s, they still lived life in a very Southern Italian way. “That was in the worst part of Grenoble in the Alps. But my grandmother still cooked Sunday lunch as if she was in Italy. The doors were always swung wide open and there were a million people in the house.” So, Alex took the best of all worlds - the heavy Italian food upbringing, mixed in with French cuisine, the comfort food of England and whatever he had picked up later on his travels. All to make up what he is and eats today. One thing is sure - by the time he was studying in London, he knew food was his line of work. “I hated working at restaurants, but I was so passionate about food. I knew it would be something I will be doing in one way or another.”

After deciding he wanted to pursue food as a career, Alex began documenting virtually everything he was cooking, never thinking about becoming a photographer and even less a hybrid chef-photographer as he is today. “Mostly, the purpose behind taking those photographs and videos was to push for a career as a chef. There was something that I loved in the idea of documenting things I made instead of having long, wordy recipe books. I am a much more visual person, so that’s what I respond to. It was a way to immortalise what I was doing in my own way - what I was cooking. And to grow my career as a chef as well.”

His career indeed grew, to the point where documenting became just as important as cooking. While now we speak about the production side of things, Alex still sees himself as a chef and still hosts events. “In my previous flat, I used to host dinners and events, but everything got a little chaotic so I moved out - now I still do commissions for events but that is more on occasion. But I still cook, publish recipes, work on recipes, prepare intimate dinners. That’s what I love.” As photography and filmmaking started taking over, Alex’s main goal was to keep the balance between them and cooking, even if both sides of him diverged from tradition somehow. “Even if I don’t have a restaurant, just knowing I can still do events, dinners and I still cook gives me so much happiness. Keeping a good balance is something I love in my work.”

Now, Alex has entered the world of commercial direction and photography under the name Deadhungry, disrupting the space by helping brands use food without actually… being food brands. Perfection is thrown out of the window and replaced with edge, style and unapologetic passion for what food really means, while working with fashion, lifestyle and food brands across the globe. When he looks at how he carries his skills as a chef into how he treats food on set, Alex sees the two very much blending together. “Nothing has to become a production for me to be able to produce something,” he says. “A lot of it is me playing around in the kitchen and taking a photo or filming it when I think it looks amazing. Even when I am on a big production now and we do have a stylist, I always think back to how I would have done things on my own in the kitchen, by myself - that’s how my mind works. And even when you have a huge production team behind something, you have to make it your own.” Alex says he doesn’t find himself planning on the aesthetics he adopts today - they are a product of those intimate processes in his own kitchen, that led him to see how he prefers to shoot and style food.

This isn’t the first or last time food in production will be discussed - through the years, cinematic masterpieces have dipped their toes into utilising food in a metaphorical sense. ‘The Godfather’s tomato soup recipe, Anton Ego tasting his childhood in one bite of Ratatouille, or the incredibly intricate and detailed portrayal of food in the Spanish masterpiece ‘The Platform’. Styling and placing food in front of the camera is always a deliberate process, the results of which are always carefully calculated. Regardless of if it is a pristine food campaign for a proper food brand, or something totally twisted in every way, venturing in the culinary world never leaves anybody indifferent - because we all have a connection with food. Alex Paganelli also knows that, and he uses that knowledge to his best advantage.

“The way I shoot food is very visceral. Even a little bit uncomfortable,” he admits. “It can be a bit gross. But I try to find beauty in grossness all the time - so I would say, I try to achieve what feels beautiful to me, even if that’s not perfect.” Sometimes, that could mean shooting food moulding - but in a beautiful way. “There’s also the element of camp in my style. I love the surprising and unexpected, because it fucks a bit with people’s perceptions of what food is supposed to look like.”

He continues, “Food is something everyone relates to - you can’t help it. I have been doing this for about nine years now and I have realised though, everybody’s perception of food is linked to a very secret part of them. Something that has to do with their upbringing, with a remembered tradition, with a piece of a wider culture. This is usually embedded very deep inside people. And you see that so clearly when you touch that nerve - you disrupt how they see food. It makes people always feel uncomfortable because it’s something that they’ve been so used to - seeing or eating or tasting in a specific way since a very young age.” 

Unexpected is one way to put it - having food crushed, smashed, leaking, dropping and dripping is how Deadhungry makes his mark on a campaign. Of course, he can make it look perfect too - just look at his Selfridges Christmas campaign, which proved that it’s not that he can’t go mainstream. It’s just not him. Even when he places food perfectly, it still has that edge to it. That’s probably why so many non-food brands go to him, with the ask of disrupting more spaces through food. Dazed Beauty saw that, so they knew that their end of year spread needed a kick to it. So it came to Alex to dunk a bunch of beauty products in a ‘70s inspired feast and turn them into a visual showpiece. Similarly, Skims knew that the brand needed something different than just good old bikini photos. But we can talk about that later.

“I think non-food brands are attracted to this because food has become a part of lifestyle. Food photography is now a sub-category of lifestyle photography, because it’s such a huge element of our lives beyond just eating,” he explains. And it’s true - one scroll through your feed on Instagram or TikTok will provide you with a whole bunch of different food shots that people have taken not just to show you what they will use to satiate their animalistic need, but to show a piece of themselves. To place themselves, as a brand, through a photo of what they eat. So why isn’t it totally normal that actual brands would want to do that too? Not to mention that with the rise of the short-form video format a lot of people have been indulging in ASMR mukbang videos for a few years now - a form of expression that initially disrupted the way we view food and the act of eating and was met with a lot of criticism, but has now been almost totally normalised. ‘What I eat in a day’ videos are just the tip of the iceberg, and that’s not a bad thing for creativity at large.

“As much as I love to do full food brands as well, I love the freedom when I do food as lifestyle - as part of fashion, beauty, or whatever else,” says Alex. He admits a lot of his inspirations come from the fashion world, where we also saw a massive overhaul of what was considered ‘aesthetically pleasing’ over the past few years. On a few levels, perfection has been ditched for something more raw, visceral and actually creative. 

But how can one look at a fashion brand like Burberry and know instantly what food to connect it with? For Alex, a lot of the time it comes down to research and finding out more about the product he will be shooting - everything has a story. Considering what’s in season during the time of the shoot, what is readily available, as well as what kind of food relates to the culture and pillars of the brand. It only makes sense that his campaign for Burberry included some tea and biscuits. And because many of these brands have never before ventured out into food, Alex has the opportunity to create that new aesthetic - one that relates to them, but that feels like him too. He explains that sometimes decisions are made on the moment when inspiration strikes: “For Skims, everything started from one word - Waffle.” One of the fabrics used was called the waffle fabric, which kickstarted the entire waffle-inspired campaign.

Looking back at a turning point in his career, he points to his work with Bottega Veneta, for which he did a huge campaign consisting of a recipe, an editorial and the full campaign. “These were three very different lines of work, but it was super interesting because they let me do what I wanted to.” From goo-emerging jewellery to dramatic music as the backdrop of somebody destroying a cake, the campaign was just in line with what Deadhungry stands for and what Bottega wanted to showcase. 

“I think Selfridges was also super fun because it was my first ever really big food campaign. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, because all I had been doing until then was lifestyle. So I wanted to prove to myself that I could be given something so simple as a concept and still nail it. And it was still nice to see I can make it look cool and like myself.” Indeed, Selfridges looked brilliantly elegant, but still had an air to it that told you this isn’t just  another old food campaign. I mean, diamond rings inside the panettone instead of raisins… Come on.

To contrast the simplicity of the Selfridges recipe, Alex reflects back to an editorial he did for Chaos69 magazine, particularly the Chanel-sponsored issue. Alex’s mission for the special edition was to celebrate the most sought out perfume in the world - the Chanel No.5. So, to match the editorial to the exceptional subject, he had to go huge. “You can’t tell from the photo, but the perfume bottle they gave us was enormous,” he points out. “I had this idea of comparing it to ‘human nectar’ and exploring what that would look like.” After digging a bit around the idea of human nectar, the team decided to relate the campaign to honey - or human honey. “We found this beehive - some guy had it in East Dulwich in London on some hill. So we took that massive bottle up there, we brushed it with honey and waited for all the bees to come do their thing. It was a totally natural occurrence - the bees are all in camera.”

"I also loved shooting Byredo last year," he reflects. The campaign for the luxury 'Divorce' lipstick that went completely viral was paired with a divorce cake in a matching red colour - another example of colour, texture and shape transcending simple subcategories to create something unique. "When I saw the mood board come in, I thought it was fun so I immediately wanted to do it. I never thought it would become such a thing - two or three months later I was still getting tagged and getting emails about it."

Jiggling jelly, spilt tea, bees stuck on honey, and a host of other destruction and recreation goes on behind the scenes for Deadhungry. This is certainly not the full extent to which we might see food on screen, but it’s one memorable example. Alex explains that he usually doesn’t work with food stylists or ‘small brushes’ - on occasion, he does, but it’s not his go-to. He would much rather study the product, shoot it as it is, and then slowly start ruining it, until the point at which he thinks it would strike a nerve. The process is not concentrated on selling what a product or brand looks like, but making customers see and relate to it for another reason - a deeply psychological process that leaves a serious impression. Provoking a visceral reaction with one of the most visceral things in life. You can call it chaos, or you can admit it’s creativity.