Jiro Ono, a Sushi Legend, Is Captured in a New Documentary Magnolia Pictures Two stars of "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," Jiro Ono and his sushi. RIVETING high-wire action sequences are not something you tend to find in documentaries about food. Especially documentaries in which the main character is well into his 80s. But when David Gelb, a 28-year-old director, was shooting a crucial passage in "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," a cinematic portrait of Jiro Ono, a legendary and exacting Japanese chef who works near a Tokyo subway station, he had to deal with a race against the clock as tense as a flee-from-the-fireball scene in a Ridley Scott movie. "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" is probably too modest to qualify as future Oscar bait, but one scene is like chum in the water for gourmands: Toward the end of the documentary, which comes out in New York on March 9, there is a spellbinding "concerto of sushi" in which nearly every item on the omakase menu at Sukiyabashi Jiro, Mr. Ono's sliver of a restaurant, is captured in a loving close-up while Mozart soars on the soundtrack. It looks simple enough - point a camera at the fish and start rolling - but it wasn't. Mr. Ono's standards are so obsessively high that he wanted to shoot each handmade masterwork at "the supreme moment of deliciousness," Mr. Gelb said, which happened to be the precise instant of its creation. "It was important to Jiro that the sushi looked the way it was supposed to," Mr. Gelb said. This went beyond the fresh glistening hue of the fish. In the chef's eyes, the scene had to incorporate even the gentle settling and merging of the fish and rice and sauce as each piece was placed onto a plate. Take too long, Mr. Gelb said, and "we would've lost the soft landing, because it had already landed." So the sushi concerto may look serene, but it really involved Mr. Gelb racing around with a camera, trying to maximize a few scant seconds before a customer gobbled up the movie's beautiful scenery. Which even the director was tempted to do, at times. "If you were to drop a grain of rice from the table, you would immediately go after it, the rice is that delicious," Mr. Gelb said. I mean, you would chase that grain of rice.