Chloé Zhao Is About to Be Huge
March 2, 2021 5:59 PM   Subscribe

With the intimate, Oscar-tipped Nomadland streaming and the Marvel epic Eternals set for the fall, this might be the filmmaker’s big year. "So then I end up with a hundred grand, making my first film. The question is, what do you have that people with $10 million don’t have? Then make that as big onscreen as possible. Because that’s your only chance to stand out. I’m very grateful for those years."
posted by folklore724 (25 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
I find it pretty amazing that a director can go from making two really small-budget films to being able to pitch a Marvel movie and actually get it. Good on Zhao for going for it and good on Marvel for being willing to take risks.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 6:12 PM on March 2, 2021 [4 favorites]


This was a really good and inspiring read. I've not seen her films -- definitely going to check them out. I love films that blur the line between fiction and documentary in part by using non-professional actors to play themselves (or people very much like them).
posted by treepour at 6:37 PM on March 2, 2021


I loved Sandi Tan’s profile of Zhao from Vanity Fair.
posted by pxe2000 at 6:41 PM on March 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


Per that profile: 'Growing up in Beijing, Zhao dreamed of England. When she enrolled at boarding school in England, she yearned for New York.'.

And to complicate that narrative a little bit, per @tingguowrites:
#ChloeZhao winning the #GoldenGlobes has inevitably led to nationalistic pride for being “the first Chinese national” to win the best director. While in the US she’s an Asian woman to be recognised independent of these identities, but b/c of how she mastered a western.

More complicated is her background, her father headed a state-owned steel company and she went to boarding school in London. The irony lies in her family name Zhao, “Zhao family” is originated from a #LuXun novel & now internet slang for powerful families of communist officials.


So good for her, from my thirdworlder perch, i guess.
posted by cendawanita at 6:53 PM on March 2, 2021 [9 favorites]


The movie really did a good job capturing not only the day-to-day semi-isolation of this kind of lifestyle, but also the Sisyphusian task of maintaining a mid-2000s Ford Econoline van. There are fleeting shots Fern digging into the door assembly, which contains cables which dry rot after exactly 11 years, and inspecting the tail light assembly which becomes a fishbowl when it rains. I felt the need to clutch my Allen wrench set close when watching it.

That said, the film totally punted on the book's criticisms of Amazon and the perils of working the seasonal labor circuit. But there aren't many jobs at Disney for those who negatively depict capitalism.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:39 PM on March 2, 2021 [22 favorites]


It feels like an “elevated genre” movie really just means a good horror movie
This whole interview, and the 'small budget to huge budget' arc really makes you think of Peter Jackson's career trajectory, which was an tiny-budget lurid splatter movie about aliens invading New Zealand, a drug-addled puppet musical, one moderate-budget psychological drama, then a decade later—Lord of the Rings...
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:08 PM on March 2, 2021 [3 favorites]


> I find it pretty amazing that a director can go from making two really small-budget films to being able to pitch a Marvel movie and actually get it. Good on Zhao for going for it and good on Marvel for being willing to take risks.

The reality is, Marvel WANTS to hear takes from directors who haven't made big movies (Russo Brothers, Jon Watts, Fleck & Boden, Destin Cretton, etc. etc.). Their directing fees are much smaller, and Marvel action scenes are pre-vized so much that those scenes aren't really directed by the directors.

Marvel's PR pitch on these hires is that their finding interesting indie filmmakers with unique perspectives who bring creative freshness and a unique stamp to their version of a Marvel film. It's certainly possible Zhao will do this (based on this interview, for example, she seems very self-assured and determined in the absolute best way), but it's not like there's much extra-Marvel originality and uniqueness to Captain Marvel or Spider Man Homecoming.
posted by lewedswiver at 10:06 PM on March 2, 2021 [4 favorites]


What a fantastic interview. I love that she answers half the questions by talking about her dogs, and I get what she means about doing a film like The Rider to be able to get on the same page for subsequent projects.
posted by migurski at 11:13 PM on March 2, 2021


it's not like there's much extra-Marvel originality and uniqueness to Captain Marvel or Spider Man Homecoming.

That's mostly true, but at best there is some variance, Thor: Ragnarok, for example, did have a generous enough helping of Waititi's stamp on it to be recognizable as part of his body of work, but so far that's generally been more true of the "funny" ones than it has the more serious movies Marvel's made, save for maybe Black Panther, which did seem to have some Coogler stamp to how it told its story, from what I can tell from Creed anyway. (Well, maybe Branagh's Thor did too, but not so much to its credit.)

Zhao's got an interesting challenge with Eternals for those characters being the least known and thus needing the stronger introduction and for Zhao's interests so far being a bit less fit to broad genre action/comedy, as her strength is in the focus on the interactions between people and the land. One of the most notable things about Zhao, that is really one of the hallmarks of a great director, is how she manages to give a sense of the lived experience of all her characters, not just the leads with everyone else being fit to their stories. She also really captures the sense of place her characters inhabit and how that informs their actions and feelings.

These are things I'll be really interested in seeing for these Kirby created Eternals since it could both provide a different kind of take on the comic stuff, with Kirby having a strong style of his own that is bizarrely serious bordering on something like campy at times, but retaining such a deep authorial imprint that it doesn't really fully cross over into ridiculousness alone for the personal vision involved.

If Zhao invests in trying to bring her usual intensity of focus to these characters it could be really interesting, but also might not be seen as having the same kind of mass audience appeal as Guardians of the Galaxy's more broad humor and pop reference. The Eternals are already one of Marvel's relatively more risky ventures for having such limited pop cultural resonance, so adding a potentially more "understated" element to it could lead to disappointing returns and leave Zhao to take the blame. But of course Zhao could have something else in mind entirely that will be exciting for a mass audience. It's just hard not to note how producers screwed with Jenkins on Wonder Woman and hung Boden out to dry on Captain Marvel after setting that character up to underperform.

Anyway, I haven't seen Nomadland, but would encourage people to see Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider, both of which are well worth the time.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:24 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Nomadland is excellent, bleak but good, many of the characters are essentially playing versions of themselves. A movie that's not a documentary, but not entirely made up.

It also begins and ends in Empire, somewhere you'll likely recognise if you've been to TTITD.
posted by mbo at 12:36 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


Seriously, no photo of Taco and Rooster?
posted by HotToddy at 6:23 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


HotToddy: I, too, am disappointed at the lack of dog pictures. Clearly, they're an important part of her Process and so should totally be included in a profile.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:42 AM on March 3, 2021


I do find it interesting that she makes these movies about economic precarity when her father, Zhao Yuji, is apparently worth "tens of billions" of dollars.
posted by hepta at 7:08 AM on March 3, 2021 [3 favorites]


it's not like there's much extra-Marvel originality and uniqueness to Captain Marvel or Spider Man Homecoming.

YMMV. Both of those films are less interesting for the pro forma big action set pieces (although those are competently executed) as they are for the quieter and funnier moments; the former movie completely flipped my expectations of how the Skrulls would be treated (and had some amazing work by Ben Mendelsohn through full-face prosthetics), and the latter had just all kinds of great moments, my favorite being when Michael Keaton is looking at Tom Holland in the rear-view mirror and just figuring it all out. I don't think that that's a matter of Kevin Feige or whomever handing the director a set of storyboards and going, "OK, do this." Even in situations where there's an obvious conflict between the writer/director and producers, e.g. Edgar Wright leaving Ant-Man, the end product is still pretty good (and, for that matter, was still pretty Edgar Wright-ish, IMO).

Zhao's got an interesting challenge with Eternals for those characters being the least known and thus needing the stronger introduction and for Zhao's interests so far being a bit less fit to broad genre action/comedy, as her strength is in the focus on the interactions between people and the land. One of the most notable things about Zhao, that is really one of the hallmarks of a great director, is how she manages to give a sense of the lived experience of all her characters, not just the leads with everyone else being fit to their stories. She also really captures the sense of place her characters inhabit and how that informs their actions and feelings.

These are things I'll be really interested in seeing for these Kirby created Eternals since it could both provide a different kind of take on the comic stuff, with Kirby having a strong style of his own that is bizarrely serious bordering on something like campy at times, but retaining such a deep authorial imprint that it doesn't really fully cross over into ridiculousness alone for the personal vision involved.


The thing with the Eternals is that they already have a lot of backstory built in, in that they're supposed to be the actual mythological/fictional people whose names they bear: they actually are, or were, Icarus, Athena, Mercury, Circe, and so on. They're more established in the culture than merely mortal people are capable of being, and so I'd imagine the through-point of the story being how these sort of ultimate celebrities actually are as people.

As far as how Kirbyesque it will be, that's tough to gauge from what little we've seen, which is mostly just the actors in costume. Taika Waititi did some very literal versions of Kirby costumes for the background characters on Sakaar, and they were just as bizarre as you'd expect live-action Kirby designs to be.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:19 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


I do find it interesting that she makes these movies about economic precarity

I mean, maybe that's the only kind of people that are insulated enough to make that kind of work. Mind you, that they're stories of American distress also plays very well in that calculation. To relate to another mainland talent, thanks to Rogue One, I really got into the directorial works of Jiang Wen, who's done pretty daring movies that's recognized internationally, but his defence has always been they're about pre-CCP China and not meant to serve as analogies to the party bureaucracy. This was helped a lot by his family ties to that bureaucracy. But they're not bulletproof - he'd been denied entry to leave the country before and also is uh, currently laying low (this is post-R1) since his last movie set in colonial Shanghai raised some uncomfortable questions about how much was it NOT an analogy (and i can't remember if it's got a limited release or a ban in the end).

Not even a rich cadre kid like Zhao deserves to be memory holed but I don't know to what extent our complicity in not talking about her family wealth actually looks worse on balance, and considering this is less Bezos (nouveau ultra-riche) and more Musk (active descendant of a wealth legacy thanks to systemic oppression).

With regards to her MCU performance, I'm more with Halloween Jack - Marvel these days don't hire for blockbuster acumen rather than human colour. When they're lucky they get someone like Coogler and Waititi - but you know, they're exceptional compared to those who did the spidey and even the ant-man movies not just because it turns out they have some action direction chops that were only waiting for legit serious cash, but because they had really rather important things to say and were invested in interrogating the text (the implications of an African superpower; the story of the Aesir as wandering peoples and what is indigeneity then?). That's what made their movies prime cultural commentary fodder.

Can Zhao do the same? Who knows, the best mainland filmmaker i find have a subtlety in their critique but I'm thinking of those who continued in the struggle of staying behind and being seen as subversive. She's upper class through and through, so maybe i should just expect the same level of insight as kathryn bigelow and patti jenkins....
posted by cendawanita at 7:38 AM on March 3, 2021 [4 favorites]


As far as how Kirbyesque it will be, that's tough to gauge from what little we've seen

The mix of Zhao and Kirby is what I'm really interested to see since Zhao's work so far has been more understated, allowing the character's choices to more or less stand on their own without much attempt to tell the audience how to react to their decisions other than through their relationships and actions, while understated is about the last thing anyone would be able to say about Kirby's work. The meeting place between Kirby and Zhao, from the couple films I've seen, is a sense of earnestness about their worlds, but earnestness hasn't really been a big thing in the MCU overall.

Oh, and I don't think Zhao's coasting on her wealth, there is something more to her work than that, not least in how she simply allows the people in her films to just be without signalling their status within the US system as an easy point of reference for people to glom on to for "Meaning". The Rider, for example, was set on the Pine Ridge reservation, but that was never really dwelled on or even made completely explicit, instead she just let them be who they were and left the fullest context to remain implicit. But then again I tend to find more to like about a lot of Bigelow's work then some people do, so mileage may vary.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:45 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


I don't disagree. The fact they're American stories is also a big factor why no one's roused themselves through a Global Times tweet. But i suppose we'll find out when the promo cycle begins, something political inevitably happens in my part of the world and the blessed silence from the cast and crew who'd usually would at least do a minimal tweet of support*. I mean, Simu Liu isn't slated to be in the Eternals right? To which all i can say, phew he's dodging a bullet considering his socmed activity.

*I lived through this in the Rogue One promo cycle.
posted by cendawanita at 7:51 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Zhao's got an interesting challenge with Eternals for those characters being the least known

"My name... is Starlord."
"Who?"
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 10:30 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


The Chinese are still figuring out how to claim her. Or not.

The second interview appeared in New York-based Filmmaker Magazine in 2013. Explaining why she chose to make a film about a Native American teen on a North Dakota reservation, Zhao said: “It goes back to when I was a teenager in China, being in a place where there are lies everywhere.

“You felt like you were never going to be able to get out. A lot of info I received when I was younger was not true, and I became very rebellious toward my family and my background.”

posted by toastyk at 10:54 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


Nomadland is an absolute jewel of a movie.
posted by vibrotronica at 11:13 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


With Nomadland, she had me at Frances McDormand. Honestly, I would watch her watch paint dry. As for punting on Amazon, while watching the movie I initially had a similar reaction, but decided that simply depicting her at work at the immense Amazon warehouse was indictment enough. I mean, seeing their logo on the warehouse seemed more like indictment than product placement. But to me that job paled in comparison to the rutabaga harvest. That’s heavy, hard work.

With regard to Zhao being from an evidently rich background and making films about the precariat—maybe she’s using her powers for good and not for evil?
posted by scratch at 12:42 PM on March 3, 2021


I loved this very detailed interview with her that delve into her upbringing, values, and artistic process.
posted by Pantalaimon at 7:43 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]


Suddenly, everything's bankrupt. And then everyone says the phrase elevated genre.

neorealist New Recession Cinema! :P
posted by kliuless at 1:06 AM on March 4, 2021


Well i I guess they've decided their policy then: Chloe Zhao’s ‘Nomadland’ Censored by China After Nationalist Backlash.

First, the film’s promotional posters vanished from Douban in the wee hours of the morning. Soon, its listed release date suddenly disappeared.

Next, “self-media” blog accounts found that censors had deleted prior articles related to “Nomadland.” One particularly well-regarded Wechat account posted a screenshot with two messages it had received from censors, stating that its content had, “after examination by the platform,” been found to have transgressed the “Development and Management Rules for Public Information Services on Instant Messaging Platforms” and accordingly had been deleted.

The articles in question were titled “This Film Industry Person Probably Knows Chloe Zhao Better Than Anyone in the World” and the innocuous-sounding “‘Nomadland’ Sets a April 23 China Release; Chloe Zhao Becomes the First Asian to Win the Best Director Golden Globe.”

Later in the day, certain key search topics related the film were blocked on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform. Searches for the hashtags “#Nomadland” and “#Nomadland Release Date” currently yield the message that “The topic’s page cannot be shown due to related laws, regulations and policies.”


RIP Disney's chances in having the Eternals play in China.
posted by cendawanita at 9:53 PM on March 6, 2021 [2 favorites]


Saw Nomadland last night and loved it so much. For a filmmaker on only her third film, Zhou seems so in control and confident. I realized that she not only directed but wrote and edited the film and knocked it out of the park with all three. I'm astounded that someone who didn't grow up in the US could write dialog for Americans that sounds that real.
posted by octothorpe at 6:14 AM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


« Older The State Birds Are Garbage (SLYT)   |   A ticket on the ecodisaster train Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments