NOMADLAND
CHLOÉ ZHAO’S ONLY ON HER THIRD FEATURE, YET TIPPED FOR OSCAR GLORY AFTER ELICITING WHAT’S BEING CALLED THE FINEST PERFORMANCE OF NOMADLAND FRANCES M DORMAND’S CAREER IN
Before she makes her MCU debut with Eternals, director Chloé Zhao’s new movie starring Frances Mcdormand may just be next year’s Oscars frontrunner.
WWe meet on Zoom, inevitably, but even in the little box, Chloé Zhao thinks big picture. In conversation, she paints her scenes in desert reds and ochres, in natural earth tones and sweltering heat. For instance, when Zhao describes the September California premiere of her latest indie film, Nomadland, a road movie of unusual wanderlust that just won Venice’s top prize, she can’t help but mention the chaos that was happening off screen.
“When we did our premiere at the Rose Bowl, the car headlights were flashing and
I could see the smoke from the wildfires,” Zhao says, recalling the millions of US acres already scorched. “And living through the pandemic, I thought: ‘This feels post-apocalyptic.’”
The thought comes out with a disbelieving laugh. Maybe it’s the noise you’d make if you wandered into a Mad Max movie. America is burning, and it’s a very Chloé Zhao thing to fixate on that, even at her own screening.
The three features she’s already made — Nomadland and two warm-ups, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and the critically cherished The Rider (2017) — display a pronounced interest in life outside the frame. All of them take their settings, their plots, even their actors (mostly non-professionals) from the gorgeous and otherworldly environs of South Dakota’s badlands, rugged and alien, as well as from other states often dismissed as “flyover country”.
Up to now, that’s where Zhao has needed to go to find the stories she’s wanted to tell. A shift is coming, though: when she finishes her upcoming project, Marvel’s gargantuan Eternals, the kick-off for a new franchise of superheroes, her fanbase will explode in size. But it’s likely that even then, Zhao will continue to pay attention to the windswept towns and intimate anxieties that most movies ignore, further developing her modern-day spin on the classic Western, peopled by today’s cowboys and loners.
“There’s a personal apocalypse in losing everything in your own life,” she continues, speaking to Nomadland’s guarded central character, Fern (Frances Mcdormand), a van-dwelling widow who sets off on an expedition into her own solitude. Zhao brings the character to South Dakota for one of her film’s many moments of dusky grace. “That walk that she does at sunset on the badlands, seeing how nature has remained unchanged throughout her own crisis — that’s a very healing process.”
The scene feels like a touchstone to Zhao’s career to date — marked by compassion, attuned to the marginalised, comfortable in the company of outsiders. If she’s arrived here, to a terrain unlike that of most of her peers, it took some doing. It also took recognition to see that she was an outsider too.
Sincerity comes easily to
Zhao, as does a streak of playfulness. “Why don’t you take a guess?” she says coyly, when asked about her Beijing-born upbringing with wealthy parents (her father was a steel magnate) who encouraged her whims. “I was a bit of a wild child. I had a good relationship with my family, but I was very rebellious. I wanted to do things differently. Not all the decisions were right, you know? Like all kids.”
MTV, Hollywood movies and dreaming of life in the West took hold at a young age. After a stretch in England at a Brighton boarding school (an experience she succinctly describes as “Hogwarts”), Zhao ended up in Los Angeles, where she finished high school. A degree in political science led to graduate film studies at NYU, where suddenly, the wild child found herself stymied.
“You try to make a film in New York with a low budget,” Zhao dares. “Just try to go shoot in a bar—find a bar to shoot in. My God, it’s so hard. I remember feeling: ‘How am I going to have any production value that isn’t like every student film to come out of New York?’”
As Zhao puts it, she wasn’t able to shine. Aware of NYU’S reputation for launching authentic local voices (such as Spike Lee, a former professor of hers), she found herself reaching out for something she could call her own. Part of that meant reconnecting with an adolescent fascination with China’s rural Mongolia; she would make a short film there. It also meant opening herself up to the work of photojournalist Aaron Huey, a chronicler of living conditions on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Zhao describes the discovery as transformative.
“I remember one image that really got to me,” she says. “It’s a kid — a teenage boy — sitting on a horse, bareback, and he’s wearing a Tupac T-shirt. And he’s at a gas station getting gas. Behind the gas station are these beautiful badlands. There’s a juxtaposition of things that shouldn’t be combining. It’s old and new, very American.”
Zhao simply had to go. “It was very much about just getting in the car,” she remembers, an impulsive decision that led to her artistic maturation. At Pine Ridge, she found compelling
stories about poverty and resilience, goldenhued magic hours, stunning locations and game amateur performers whose trust she came to earn. She developed a 360-degree shooting style to capture the improvisations of her alwaysunpredictable cast, essentially turning her entire set into a live zone. She became comfortable around horses. She and her crew started dressing the part in case they drifted into frame. They rented a vehicle that would blend in.
Lensing her debut film, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, in this guerrilla-like documentary manner and then shaping the original script in tandem would become Zhao’s signature. Modestly, she’s quick to acknowledge the influence of a trio of masters: the urbane intimacy of Wong Kar-wai, the naturalistic camera dancing of Terrence Malick, and the ever-curious cultural humility of Werner Herzog (“Any time we get into trouble, my joke is: ‘What would Werner do?’”).
But blending the three of them together is Zhao’s own invention, making her a distinctly 21st-century artist, both a witness and something of an activist. Reviewers swooned over her follow-up film, The Rider, a downbeat, Pine Ridge-set drama about a broken former rodeo star (a close version of its real-life performer, Brady Jandreau) contemplating his own purpose in a life without thrills. Hollywood took notice.
“I got an email
and there’s her name on it, and then the name of a book,” Zhao says with a tiny smile, still tamping down her excitement about the moment when
Mcdormand reached out about a passion project she was developing. (The actor, campaigning at the time for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, was knocked out by The Rider,
reportedly exclaiming at a festival screening, “Who the fuck is Chloé Zhao?”) The book was Jessica Bruder’s non-fictional Nomadland: Surviving America In The Twenty-first Century,
a 2017 account of itinerant workers who live and travel in campers to seasonal gigs — a phenomenon that feels both timely in a recessionary economy and as old as the westward founding of the nation itself.
It speaks to the integrity of Zhao’s process, rooted in realism, that her first conversations with Mcdormand were distinctly ego-free. “Initially, we talked about: should she even be part of the film?” the director remembers of her meetings with the two-time Oscar winner. (Already some are predicting that Nomadland
will change that number.) Ultimately, the decision went Mcdormand’s way, but the idea of inserting a recognisable star into a universe studded with real-life wanderers would be a challenge — and a first for Zhao.
“So from very early on, we agreed that Fran had to be part of Fern,” says Zhao. The name and the character emerged out of a long process of collaboration, as did a set of standoffish mannerisms, chain-smoking habits and a tragic marital backstory. Additionally, they situated Fern as an exile from Nevada’s real-life Empire, once a thriving company town but ghosted after its sheet-rock plant closed in 2011, leaving behind only ruin.
Over the course of Nomadland’s fourmonth-long shooting schedule in locations across the American Southwest, Mcdormand would anonymously pack shipping cartons at an Amazon plant, scour bathrooms at tourist stops
and come to know the interiors of a van she actually lived in, as did Zhao’s small crew in theirs. This wouldn’t be a matter of stealth slumming for a stunt-prone actor or hiding under elaborate prosthetics, but stripping away to an unflinching honesty. Zhao remains floored by the actor’s commitment.
“That kind of presence, her ability to be completely connected in these moments, is not easy,” the director says. Zhao mentions some of the film’s real-life nomads by name: gloriously tough road warriors who steal their scenes, shining in Mcdormand’s unpretentious gaze. “Bob, Swankie — they’ve seen it all,” she says. “They’re going to catch you if you’re insincere. So when Fran is sitting in the van with Swankie, when she’s looking into her eyes, Swankie’s going to have to feel it, that she’s telling someone a story and they’re truly listening. And I think Fran did that.”
On top of achieving that bone-deep believability, Mcdormand would also be playing someone wounded and private: a solo traveller whom Zhao felt no need to “correct” or solve. Nomadland is exceptional in that sense, marked by quiet stretches, not gab, imbued by a spirit of semi-contented isolation. Hitting the road doesn’t necessarily fix Fern, and that’s perfectly fine. Zhao thinks it’s an idea that might resonate widely.
“It’s the hardest thing, to keep living and accept the loss of dreams,” she offers. “That effort, to me, is what’s to be celebrated, even though our culture prefers to say, ‘Get success or die trying.’ It’s one or the other. But it’s really the daily grind of: ‘I’m lonely. I’ve lost everything. But I’m going to go for a walk today.’ And that is a big step.”
Fern’s interior journey is echoed by Nomadland’s exquisite sense of natural light and weather, a second narrative in itself. The movie shifts from bluish factory fluorescents and wintry emptiness to a hint of sunshine on the horizon. The cinematography is by fellow NYU grad Joshua James Richards, Zhao’s right hand on several features (and her boyfriend). “We allowed the temperature and the reality of those locations to guide us,” she says. “You know how landscape painters back in the day always had a little person standing on the cliff because they wanted you to feel humanity’s tininess? Josh has that in mind all the time.”
Making Nomadland has, by Zhao’s own admission, steered her closer to her own restless instincts, the same ones that sent her west in the first place, first as a teenager, then as a storyteller. Sometimes, she says, she still needs to hit the road.
“It brings me back to the basics, to a life of sanity,” Zhao explains. “It gives you a lot of perspective to go out there and see how other people live.”
More often than not,
though, Zhao prefers being a homebody. She calls herself a cavewoman and isn’t on social media (“I don’t want to be beholden to what’s popular in the moment,” she says). By her own reckoning, the pandemic hasn’t been so bad for her, living with Richards in the hilly community of Ojai, a “healthy distance” from Hollywood, sharing two dogs and some emergency chickens
(“I ordered pizza yesterday,” she admits) and editing one of the buzziest titles of 2021.
Eternals isn’t an obvious choice for Zhao — nor is she for Marvel — but it may turn out to be an inspired one. Her early, formative love of manga comics serves her well. More valuable will be her proven sense of empathy. First appearing in July 1976 as the saga of a (fairly whitebread) race of immortal aliens coexisting with the human race over millennia, the source material has been given a significant brush-up, accommodating what will be Marvel’s first gay superhero. It needs a director sensitive to the cosmic pull of the heart.
“We’ve gotten to a point where we want our films to reflect the world we live in,” Zhao says. “It’s not that controversial at all, just upgrading it to make it a bit more of our time.”
Though muzzled by Marvel’s contractual secrecy, Zhao lets on that her strategy is to go deeper where Avengers: Endgame went big (“You can’t go bigger, right?”). Will she be shooting in her celebrated 360-degree style, disguising her crew and going for the first Malickian superhero movie?
“You can expect a couple more magic hours, yes,” she tips. “At least that. But you’ll have to wait and see.”
It’s killing Zhao to be unable to talk about
Eternals, to have to speak in the curtailed vagaries of a studio mega-release. But in her editing room, she’s reminded of a hopeful post-pandemic future, one in which crowds can enjoy what was once taken for granted.
Nomadland is also a beacon of sorts, of the kind of communion that’s been gone for too long.
“We need to come together and experience a story that connects us,” Zhao says. “We’ve been sitting around the fire telling stories for a long time. Cinema just happens to be the modern version of that. And it’s not going to go away forever. It might go away for now, but it’s going to come back in a different form. And the more we can see ourselves in those stories, the more they’re going to sustain us.”
An irony isn’t lost on her: in Nomadland, Zhao has told a tale about a wanderer, yet the film has already travelled the world and won acclaim while she, herself, has had to stay put. “I always wanted to go to Italy,” she says, dejectedly. Her Golden Lion, Venice’s top honour, was shipped to her. Zhao is struck by that festival’s startling rebound, staging its 77th edition in person with safety precautions in place. “Being the oldest festival in the world and also being the first one to come back to us — how iconic is that?” Zhao enthuses. Hopefully, she’ll get a red-carpet do-over.
Thinking of festivals, the director flashes back to the world premiere of The Rider and another unlikely juxtaposition, just like that photograph at the Pine Ridge gas station, the one that changed her life. “One of the most moving moments I’ve felt in my career was seeing Brady at Cannes,” she says, “and seeing people who think they have nothing in common with him feel connected to him.”
Zhao brought her cowboy along with her. You sense the larger purpose of her films is to make room for these lone wolves in our minds, no matter how widely they — or she — may roam. The world is enormous, filled with undiscovered country and hearts in resonance with those they haven’t yet met. Zhao likes it that way.