NOMADLAND
An Oscar frontrunner after dominating festivals with its tale of itinerant van dwellers, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is a film for our recession-struck times. Total Film speaks to the team behind this year’s most soulful movie.
Frances McDormand and director Chloé Zhao on the road movie that’s on course for a van-load of awards.
What year is it? 2020!” exclaims Chloé Zhao, trying to trace back the genesis of her new movie Nomadland. A production that got bifurcated by her time shooting Marvel’s forthcoming Eternals, it’s left her a little confused about the order of events. As she chats with Total Film over Zoom, her dog barking in the background, Zhao’s brain fog finally clears. “We shot in September 2018. I started shooting Eternals in September 2019. So we all met at the end of 2017.”
The confusion is more than forgivable, especially in a year as bizarre as 2020. Even the way Nomadland arrived in the world this past autumn was offbeat. A Venice Film Festival premiere without the cast and crew. A virtual bow at Toronto. And a drive-in Telluride debut – all socially distanced – that took place in Los Angeles, not Colorado, as the wildfires were burning in the background. Three simultaneous screenings, in an all-too-rare moment of cross-festival harmony in the era of Covid-19.
Inspired by the real-life nomad community in America – “van dwellers” who have left behind suburban living – Nomadland may have landed in one of the most difficult years in living memory. But a story about finding freedom on the open road when we’re all confined to our homes feels both hugely timely – and oddly soothing – right now. “We always obviously hoped it would have a resonance,” says producer Peter Spears, “but things conspired in a way that we hadn’t anticipated.”
It was Spears who kick-started the film after his agent-husband Brian Swardstrom sent him an early copy of Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America In The Twenty-First Century, a non-fiction account of the nomad community that has increased exponentially since the financial crash of 2008; as the recession bit, thousands lost their jobs and found their houses repossessed, leaving them without a traditional roof over their heads.
Spears’ husband is also the agent for actress Frances McDormand and sent her Bruder’s book, with a view to her and Spears teaming up. “He said, ‘Should we option it?’ and I said, ‘Why not?’” remembers McDormand, who was then about to embark on the festival/awards circuit for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the film that won her a second Oscar in 2018. Likewise, Spears was doing the rounds with Call Me By Your Name, another eventual Oscar winner.
As luck would have it, the Chineseborn Zhao was also pitching up then with her second film, The Rider, which McDormand saw at Toronto. “Loved it. Wanted to meet Chloé Zhao. Wanted to find out more about her films and we did,” she says, brisk and business-like. Certainly, Zhao was perfectly suited to adapting Bruder’s book; both The Rider, with its story of rodeo cowboys, and her 2015 debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me similarly show a fascination with the Great American Landscape.
On her earlier films, Zhao found her stories after spending time with the Lakota Sioux tribe in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. For Nomadland, the research was already embedded. “That part of the American West is an area that I’ve travelled so much that I have crossed roads with a lot of the people in the book but never really stopped long enough to get to know them.” Among the key personalities in Bruder’s book: Bob Wells, a guru amongst the van dwelling community, and regulars on the trail, Linda May and Charlene Swankie.
To Zhao, their itinerant lifestyle is nothing new. “I think people hitting the road has always been part of the DNA of the American psyche. It’s very much in the pioneer culture, since from the beginning. It’s always there. Even on the reservation, the kids I got to know, they might be stuck in one place but they almost never stay in one place. They’re always moving. I think that it is such a young country. What’s beyond the horizon, it’s very much glorified in popular culture.”
Originally, the idea was for McDormand to play a version of Linda May, a former cocktail waitress now in her late sixties, but over time, Zhao brought a fictional character to life: Fern. After losing everything – home, job, husband – Fern takes to the road. Working in jobs ranging from an Amazon “fulfilment centre” bod to caretaking an RV park, she lives out of her van – named ‘Vanguard’ – as she travels the Midwest, across South Dakota, Nebraska and Arizona.
Gradually immersed into the nomad community’s way of life, McDormand says they played a game of ‘What if?’ “What if I was really one of them?” she says, rhetorically. “In one town we were in in Nebraska, I went to the local Target to buy a couple things and I was offered employment! I was offered a form to fill out if I wanted to get some permanent or temporary employment at a Target. So I went back to Chloé and said, ‘It’s working!’”
As Spears notes of his star, “She’s so stripped down to just the bare essence of Frances in a way that we’ve never seen before.” There was no ego or entourage
here. “I mean, she was living in that van for a lot of this movie.” McDormand’s growing attachment to her vehicle – entirely kitted out with a bed and other basic facilities – was essential for her to fit right in, adds Zhao. “It’s like the cowboys with their horses. You got to know your van to have the street cred.”
Overall, they spent five months on the road across seven states, with Zhao refining her script as the shoot unfolded. “Really the last day of shooting is when I lock my script,” she explains. With Fern’s journey woven around encounters with Bob Wells, Linda May and Swankie, Zhao adapted her story along the way to incorporate random encounters, including with Derek Endres, a young man who crosses paths with Fern more than once. “He was just literally someone we met on the road,” says Spears.
At one point, Fern arrives at the RTR (Rubber Tramp Rendezvous) in Arizona, the largest gathering of RV-dwellers in the world, organised by Wells, who has gathered a huge online following espousing about escaping the rat race. While the film talks about alternative living, Zhao is “not trying to make a political statement”, adds McDormand. “We’re leading you to a community that has made some decisions – very difficult decisions – for themselves.”
Ironically, for a film that appears so free-wheeling, it took tremendous organisation. The production couldn’t simply trail the nomads around the country. “In order to be spontaneous, we have to plan really carefully,” says Zhao. “The weather is usually very extreme and unpredictable in a lot of these very rugged places. So we had to plan very carefully when we’re getting to where and exactly when we can shoot.” With a skeletal crew, many of whom were performing multiple jobs, “We came like an organism,” grins McDormand.
While the near-mythic American landscape is mesmerisingly shot by Zhao’s regular DoP (and real-life partner), Joshua James Richards, there is more to Nomadland than simply gorgeous photography. Much like Zhao’s earlier work, it captures the soul and spirit of real people; Fern may have a tentative flirtation with fellow traveller Dave (David Strathairn, one of the only other ‘name’ actors in the cast), but it’d be wrong to expect Hollywood hearts and flowers here.
“Both Chloe and I were really interested in it not being a conventional, traditional, romantic story between Fern and Dave, and we liked the idea of walking the sentiment right up to the edge of sentimentality,” says McDormand. “And then not satisfying the audience with it. I’m in my sixties and David is in his seventies. It’s really exciting to see a romantic relationship between two mature adults that doesn’t go the way of sappy sentimentality.”
When Zhao wrapped Nomadland, the film had to go on ice, with postproduction interrupted by her recruitment to Eternals, with the British-based shoot for Marvel’s superhero ensemble stretching from July 2019 to February 2020. “Once she got back to the States, she was going to edit both films together in the same editing facility,” relays Spears, but then the first Covid-19 lockdown struck – and Eternals shut down, its released moved by a year to November 2021.
It did mean that Zhao could finish cutting Nomadland’s four months’ worth of footage on her laptop at home. By late spring it was picture-locked but getting it ready for the autumn festival circuit meant pushing it through all the usual finishing stages of a movie – sound mix, colour grading, etc. – under Covidenforced restrictions. “We were kind of the first project through the system in the post [Covid] world,” says Spears, who had the job of “trying to figure out this new normal… with all these new protocols in place”.
Nomadland’s more-than-bumpy arrival certainly didn’t affect the film’s reception. After collecting Venice’s Golden Lion – making Zhao just the fifth woman in history to walk away with the festival’s top prize – it went on to claim the Audience Award at Toronto. Two firm indicators that Nomadland will be heading to the (delayed) Oscars this coming April as one of the favourites, with McDormand particularly making “a strong case for Oscar #3”, as The Hollywood Reporter termed it.
Whether or not that happens, Nomadland is destined to become recognised as a film for our times, particularly for the near-retirement Baby Boomer generation now suffering post-recession. “The choice of the van dwellers to live [remotely] has a lot to do with the economic disparities in our country,” says McDormand. But Nomadland is about more than financial woes; in the end, it’s a love letter to the human spirit and kindness. “I think,” smiles Spears, “that feels like such a perfect tonic right now for the time we’re living in.”
NOMADLAND OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 19 FEBRUARY 2021.
‘I THINK PEOPLE HITTING THE ROAD HAS ALWAYS BEEN PART OF THE DNA OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHE. IT’S ALWAYS THERE’ CHLOÉ ZHAO