On the road to success
March 6-7, 2021
How did an indie darling become Marvel’s promising new director? Nicholas Adams-Dzierzba meets Chloe Zhao
“My mum says you’re homeless. Is that true?” asks a teenage girl of Frances McDormand at the beginning of No- madland. “No, I’m not homeless,” Fern, her character, responds. “I’m just ... houseless. Not the same thing, right?”
This down-not-out attitude carries Nomadland — winner of the Golden Globe this week for best film in the drama category and for best director in Chloe Zhao — across the US on a pilgrim- age to the heart of America in the 21st century.
And while the film, is told from within the confines of a motor- home, this is not the story of grey nomads, those romantically ti- tled retirees seeing the countryside from a luxury RV. This is a story of fringe dwellers, the marginalised who subsist in their vehi- cles. It is a side of America Zhao wants the world to see.
“Well, I am an outsider,” says the 38-year-old Zhao over Zoom from Burbank, California, when asked if her films are for and about people on society’s periphery.
Zhao says she’s always been just a little bit outside what’s con- sidered the “right way of life” — the mainstream.
Nomadland is the director’s third film. It stars McDormand and David Strathairn opposite a cast of non-actors and already it has cinephiles excited.
Zhao and McDormand are both sure to be Oscar con- tenders, the film also won the Gold Lion, the top gong at the Venice Film Festival in September 2020, and then came home with the People’s Choice prize at the Toronto Film Festival.
What makes Zhao’s work unique is her hybrid filmmaking style, combining documentary with feature, using non-actors to play fictional ver- sions of themselves. Linda May, Swankie and
Bob Wells, who play Fern’s friends and men- tors, are real people, and the subjects of Jess- ica Bruder’s nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Cen- tury, on which the film is based. They teach Fern the way of the nomad: from the pragmatic to the philosophical.
“I think I’m naturally attracted to the no- mads and their philosophy of life. I guess it’s this desire to constantly want to reinvent yourself and to shed all the things that make you comfortable so you can keep growing and never lose a sense of who you are. Be- cause there are all these things that are piling up on top of us.”
It’s enough to make a person want to run away. And that in a sense is what Fern does when her husband dies and her home locale of Empire, Nevada, becomes a ghost town after the shutdown of the local gypsum industry (used to make chalk and plaster wall). She becomes an itinerant worker.
“You should consider early retirement,” an unemployment benefits worker tells her. Fern retorts: “I need work, I like work.”
Fern lives out of a motorhome, migrating from Amazon “fulfil- ment centres” to national park campsites in a world stripped down to the essentials. “You are one of those lucky people who can travel anywhere, and they sometimes call you nomads,” Fern is optimis- tically told as she crosses a United States rarely seen on the big screen.
Zhao may have made her name with small release films such as Songs My Brothers Taught Me, and The Rider, but Zhao has al- ways been destined for big things. Her next major project is Eter- nals, the latest in the Marvel franchise, starring Angelina Jolie and an all-star cast as “a race of immortal beings who lived on Earth and shaped its history and civilisations”. Filming began in London last year and the movie is slated for release on October 28.
Born in Beijing, Zhao moved to the US in her late teens to finish high school and study political science. Now she’s made history as the first female director of Asian heritage to be awarded best director at the Golden Globes, and only the second female winner. Zhao’s directorial style developed as a happy accident. She only had $100,000 to make her first feature Songs My Brothers Taught Me, and couldn’t afford actors. “For me there’s something we have that other people with films 10 or 100 times our budget don’t have. We have these folks and they are all of that place. There’s a connection between them and their surroundings,” Zhao says.
While shooting that film on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, Zhao met and befriended Brady Jandreau, a cowboy of native American heritage. When he suffered a near fatal head in- jury that meant he could no longer compete in bucking bronco rodeos, Zhao had the subject of her next feature, The Rider. Again, the lines between documentary and feature film blur. In the film, Brady, a cowboy who suffers a significant brain injury and can no longer ride rodeo, continues to train horses despite the risk of worsening his condition.
Jandreau, a first time actor, plays Brady Blackburn; his family are played by Jandreau’s real family. His best friend who experi- enced an even more severe accident, and who in poignant scenes Brady visits in hospital, is played by Lane Scott, another former bull and bronco rider.
Zhao drew out of Jandreau a devastatingly beautiful perform- ance of the story of his life as if it were fiction, shot in the style of Terrence Malick, on location in the South Dakota badlands. The scene that stays with the viewer is seeing Brady the horse whisperer. She attributes the capture of these organic moments to a combination of luck and preparation. “Someone said to Brady, ‘Hey, you want to just take a look at this horse,’ while we were packing up the car. There was no conver- sation. Everyone just started to take the camera out, and get in the right position. I didn’t want Brady to do anything performative because there’s a camera there. He looked at me and said, ‘I’m a horse trainer Chloe, I don’t care if a camera is there, I know what I’m doing’.” Meanwhile, McDormand had taken notice of Zhao’s directorial style. “Fran came to me with the (Nomad- land) project. I think she had seen The Rider, and thought, ‘There’s another way to make this film’. She is so versatile, in terms of her skills.”
McDormand is that rare Hollywood creature, one who shuns the limelight. She resists press interviews. Her husband Joel Coen (with his brother Ethan) directed her in the celebrated film Fargo for which she won an Oscar for best actress in 1997; the Coen Brothers won best original screenplay. (The husband-and- wife team are now working on a new feature together of MacBeth, with Denzel Washington playing the Scottish usurper king and McDormand in the role of Lady MacBeth.)
“One thing that I find with Fran is that I don‘t al- ways see in every actor is that she is really not afraid to make a fool of herself in front of the camera; to be as vulnerable as the non professional actors and be present and connect,” Zhao says.
The strongest points in Nomadland are like that horse whispering scene: non-performative and responsive. McDormand’s interactions with non-actors are most affecting when she’s not acting, but reacting.
“All the scenes in the film are scripted in the sense that I talk to them (the non-actors) a month before or a day before,” Zhao says. “And then based on what they said, I pick and choose the parts of their story that [will] work for the film. I put it into a script and give it back to them and they will practice. And on the day they can de- liver sometimes exactly as it is; sometimes it will go off (on a tangent). And sometimes it gives me things I didn’t expect.” Asked about whether the Oscars diversity standards needed to be put in place considering recent winners: Moonlight in 2017 and Parasite in 2020 both for best picture, Zhao is circumspect about
representation and inclusion. “I think that the two movies that you just mentioned are incredible movies on their own. Regardless of their subject matter, or who made them, they stand on their own as movies. I think that’s a very important thing to remember. The quality of the work.”
But for now Zhao is concentrating on telling stories about worlds in which she does not live; she wants to explore places and people who are trying to figure out where they belong. “We share a lot of things in common, their sense of anxiety about who they are about where they belong. How to move on from tragedies, ways to deal. And I see a lot of that kind of human resilience out there.”
Nomadland is in cinemas nationally. Oscar nominees are announced March 15.