Chloé Zhao’s Long Road to Hollywood
With her lyrical film ‘Nomadland’ and Marvel’s upcoming ‘The Eternals,’ the director has arrived
Growing up in Beijing, Chloé Zhao was, in her own words, “a troublemaker.” In school, she would rip the covers off her textbooks and place them over her manga. At home, she gorged on Western culture — movies like Terminator and Sister Act, and hours upon hours of MTV. She fantasized endlessly about other worlds and faraway places.
“I wanted to leave home and go explore,” Zhao says. And, at the ripe old age of 14, she got her wish. Indulging her restlessness, her parents sent her to boarding school in London. Three years later, just shy of graduating, she pushed for one more move: “I want to go where the Hollywood sign is,” she told them.
She transferred to L.A. High.
Today — after college in Massachusetts, a stint bartending in Manhattan, film school at NYU, and a few years making movies in the Badlands of South Dakota — Zhao, 38, is back in Hollywood, on very different terms than when she first arrived. This year will see her join the ranks of a very short list of A-list directors, thanks to the release of her third independent feature, Nomadland (due out February 19th), and, in the fall, Marvel’s The Eternals. Nomadland channels Zhao’s humanistic eye and ear to tell the story of an American underclass of older, itinerant workers who live out of vans and chase seasonal jobs to survive. With its breathtaking views of the American West and nuanced depictions of men and women left behind by the global economy — all played by real-life nomads, except for Frances McDormand and David Strathairn — the film is a major Oscar contender. And if that intimate style of storytelling doesn’t seem like a fit for the superheroes of the MCU, well, think again.
“Not only does Chloé make remarkable, small, personal movies in a remarkable, small, personal way, but she thinks in grand, cosmic, gigantic terms, which fit perfectly with what we wanted to do,” says Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige.
Just as Zhao was hired for The Eternals in the fall of 2018, she went into secret, guerrilla-style production on Nomadland. Over the four-month shoot, she and McDormand traveled in their own vans through five states, including South Dakota, Arizona, and Nevada. Zhao cast and scripted on the fly, pulling in details from the lives of the people they met. McDormand worked alongside her nomadic counterparts, packing boxes for Amazon, harvesting beets, cleaning toilets at a campground. There is no pity or manipulation in their portrayal. As McDormand puts it, Zhao “draws a razor-sharp line between sentiment and sentimentality.”
“We all go through our own personal apocalypse at some point,” Zhao says of the film’s subjects. “We’re forced to fight and to redefine ourselves, because everything that defined who we are is gone. . . . The ability for perseverance, to find a new life and sense of self — that, to me, is the human spirit.”
Living in cars and campgrounds was not new for Zhao, nor was using nonprofessional actors. She made her first two films in much the same way, out of financial necessity. After film school, she packed up and headed to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where she embedded herself in the community. She would chat up locals at bars or even the gas station, looking for stories she could shape into a movie — and for people willing to play a version of themselves onscreen. Her debut, 2015’s Songs My Brothers Taught Me, is a tender snapshot of teenage siblings facing the hardships of life on the reservation.
Her follow-up, The Rider, centers on a rising rodeo champ, Brady Jandreau — in the film, Brady Blackburn — who suffers a catastrophic fall. The story traces his adjustment to a new reality where his injuries prevent him from ever working with horses again. That film’s rapturous reception brought Zhao full circle, putting her at the helm of the kind of blockbusters that awed her as a girl.
Zhao claims she’s ready to slow down after The Eternals is completed. But don’t be so sure. “Now, I just want to stay still for a long time,” she says with a rueful chuckle. “But the idea of constantly moving, finding out what’s beyond the horizon . . . it’s ancestral. It’s in our blood to want to explore.”