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Q&A with Chloé Zhao and Mollye Asher

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Nomadland.

Your films feel so naturalistic— as though you just took your crew to a location and filmed what was going on there. But the reality is quite different, isn’t it?

Chloé Zhao: Well, the trick is to make the audience feel like we just showed up. That we have not planned or manipulated the situation… but of course we did! And, you know, it’s not that different from a more traditional film: we start with a script, and the script gives us the parameters, so it’s a road movie… So the locations come first. And then we go from there.

Mollye Asher: After Chloé finalizes the script, we’ll know exactly what she needs. By that I mean, there will be specific places that Chloé knows for sure that she wants. For example, Wall Drug in South Dakota is a very famous place, and so we’ll go through that process of getting those locations. But then there are other things that Chloé and Josh, through their travels, are going to find as they’re location scouting. For instance, for the mechanic, Chloé and Josh drove around to a lot of different places until they found one that was interesting looking. And when they did that, they found this amazing character, Ken, who is in the film. So a lot of times the casting of locations is also casting the actors.  

I don’t believe in “locking” the script until the morning of the last day of the shoot

It’s fascinating that Fern was not in the book, and is so central to the film. How did you create her?

CZ: We divided the whole story by three: There’s a third from the book, a third from the lives of our previous films and our travels, and another third from Fran, really. Including locations as well— for instance, the redwoods, and the Pacific coast… those places were very dear to Fran. We knew from the start that Jessica Bruder [the author of the book] had captured such a unique time in America. Everything from Empire Nevada to work camping at Amazon to Bee Harvest Nebraska. It’s a very rich, rich world that she built. We needed to create a character that had a strong enough of an emotional arc to be able to take us through that kind of territory. And for us, to be able to very greedily include as much as we could from her book. And so we collaborated with Fran to create a character that’s sort of a version of Fran — the same way that the non-professional actors were going to play versions of themselves. So that’s sort of how Fern was created.

How did you crew this film? It must be a delicate task, given that you are placing non-actors alongside a master like Frances McDormand.

MA: We brought them with us on the road. And, you know, casting crew is something we’ve done on all of Chloé’s movies. It’s very important, because we’re going into communities that are not our own. We try to find crew that can, in a way, become invisible. And that they will be OK with that idea, too. We took a long time looking for what I kind of call “unicorns,” because they are able to do many different jobs and that’s key to these small crews. I think we had twenty three people in total. And then of course, you know, finding personalities that all work together. Because you’re all living together for so long.

Can you talk about the scene between Fern and the young boy? It was absolutely amazing.

CZ: Basically, the character was in the script, but… the thing about the script is, it’s sometimes more of a placeholder. And I don’t believe in “locking” the script until the morning of the last day of the shoot. That’s when the script locks for me. Like, before I met Derek [Endres], the character was supposed to be a young girl named Echo who was pregnant and on the road. And then we went out to look for Echo. And Hannah Peterson, who helped us with casting, filmed a bunch of young people she met who were living in tents in the dessert. And from those videos, there was Derek. And as soon as he started speaking, we were like, “there’s our character!” What era is this guy from?! It was like he had just walked out of a Walt Whitman poem. So we found him… and then we had to re-find him, right Mollye? He took a bus somewhere and you had to track him down. But you did, and then we got to know him… and just incorporated him into the film. We rewrote the scene for him, very similarly to how we wrote the scenes for the other main characters of the RTR, and rewrote the scenes based on some of the stuff they said, so we didn’t have to hire actors to play them— we had them play themselves. So the process isn’t really that different, they just have to memorize a few lines (which they’ve basically already said), and that’s it.

Fern is so natural in her body. It’s both beautiful and surprising, for the audience.

CZ: Well, I think for much of that I have to give credit to Fran. From early on, we wanted to celebrate aging. To celebrate the full arc of life. Because you know, sunsets are beautiful — and yes, it’s towards the end, but it depends on how you look at it. And I think unfortunately in our culture, in this country where the cosmetic industry is so enormous, and also in the film business itself, we’re quite focused on appearing a certain way. Even in cinematography, Josh has talked about this— we don’t want to put too much between the lens and the audience. We want you to see Fran as she sees her own face and her own body, without all the filters and lighting to help. We want to truly believe in our audience and have faith in our audience, and trust that they will find that being human is beautiful. And I think we feel pretty good about that so far with the responses we’ve gotten to the film.

Q&A with Chloé Zhao and Brady Jandreau

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Rider.

Can you take us through the process of making this film? There was a long period of time when you were building toward something like this.
Chloé Zhao: During my third year at NYU, I was thinking about what feature film to make. That’s when I first went out to Pine Ridge. It took three years to make my first movie, and on the fourth year I was going back to visit. And on the fifth year, I went out there and met Brady. Immediately I was very drawn to him, watching him training horses that same evening. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. There’s such a sharp focus between him and the animal. Nothing else mattered. And I thought that kind of presence that can be present with another being is what you hope your actor can do on screen. I tried different stories for about a year and then when he got injured at a rodeo a year later, the story presented itself to us.

“I was scared to go to Cannes with a cowboy movie.”

Can you just talk a little bit about being introduced to the filmmaking process before your injury, and also how that experience changed you?
Brady Jandreau: I met Chloé around April 1st of 2015 and she came back numerous times to research ranch lifestyle. She wanted to make a movie about cowboys in the heartland of America, primarily Indian cowboys. She came back several times throughout the summer, learned how to ride, moved cattle on the ranch with us, gathered them to be doctored, and just basically learned about that. She had some exposure to the rodeo world, but she actually wanted to learn about the root of rodeo like horse training, raising cattle, and just being a cowboy. And I got to know her pretty well and there was one little thing I said to her the first day I met her. She said, “What’s this part where the horse’s neck meets his back?” And I said, “That’s the withers. That’s a little bone God put in there to keep the saddle on.” And she took out a notepad and wrote it down. She’s like, “What would you think about possibly being an actor? Possibly acting in my movie?” I knew she was a director, and you know I kind of chuckled about it at first to myself. I never dreamed of doing anything like this. I never did any drama class or anything like that. But Chloé wasn’t scared of horses and cows, so why should I be scared of cameras and lights? I’ve always been presenting myself in front of people, and at a very young age I kind of gave up on basically worrying about what people thought. I always just tried to be myself the best I could, and as long as I was happy with myself, that was all that really matters.

You stay in a very wide space with your actors and you really get a sense of the world around them, and Brady gives a performance that is very brave, because you’re really exposing everything. Could you talk about your choices in location and how that impacted production?
CZ: I come from the Terrence Malick school of filmmaking. It is really important for both me and my DP to be able to choose wide angle lenses. We want you to see Brady and these characters in this landscape. Because that’s the point of the film. The land chooses them and they choose the land. It’s a very mutual decision. So for you to understand that relationship, I want to see what’s behind them, and what’s around. How they interact with it. And also to shoot as much 360 degrees as we can. And we had a six person crew, five toward the last week including me. We used natural light. These are real locations and there’s not much production design. I didn’t have a production designer, but I would like to work with one in the future, that would be great! But in this case you know we were lucky enough to be able to film in people’s homes. Even the supermarket is the one that they have been to many times. So there is a little ecosystem that’s going on there and you have structure your set, interview your crew, everything has to be part of the process of maintaining that ecosystem for everything to feel authentic.

How were you able to create a compass for yourself to gauge where you were emotionally?
BJ: There had been times where I talked about Lane. It was therapeutic for me. And so I would cry sometimes to talking about him to her. And so after we visited Lane, she was able to say, “OK, now you just talk about Lane and cry.” But every time I thought about Lane, I thought about how much progress he made in the last few weeks. He was very sick before we went down to Omaha to visit. So every time I thought about Lane I just wanted to smile. So instead, she asked me, “What’s one of the saddest moments from your young childhood?” And I said, “Well when I was like around 7 or 8 years old, there was this foal, and it’s mother died giving birth to it. And I raised it on a bottle. That winter, it was turned out to pasture and it fell through the ice on the damn where it watered. And then the following year there was another colt that was born, and it was actually injured by another horse– about one out of every ten male horses will react this way to a newborn foal. Just like a lion would, going to kill another lion’s cubs. This colt was severely injured and it was very new. So I brought it in the house and I fed it on a bottle for a few days and it must have had some serious internal damage because it passed away in my arms. I talked to her about these two things.

CZ: I used that to make him cry. It was very mean, but it worked!

What was it like working with your family?
BJ: At first it was kind of hard for my Dad to take it seriously. But after about the third take the giggles were out, and he was ready to go. We were all kind of like that. We just had no exposure whatsoever. It’s like if I showed up at your house with a horse or something! But we got to know Chloé pretty good. We trusted her, and she trusted us. So Lily, ever since she was very small, was playing back kiddie shows, recording audio, recording videos. She would memorize lines and reenact things and record herself. She was very excited about it.

What did it fell like to actually bring a film to life and to share it with an audience?
BJ: The first time I ever watched the movie I remembered everything. It was the first time I ever watched any of the footage at all. I laughed a little bit. I would remember what I was doing that day or whatever the heck it was. The first time I watched it was on a big screen with an audience present. It was a lot more emotional and heartfelt. I was very excited to see the enthusiasm of the audience. I couldn’t believe how it all came together, to be honest.

CZ: The thing that had moved me the most about this very long festival run was that I got pretty cynical and jaded after my first film, but I was so moved by it all this time. I was scared to go to Cannes with a cowboy movie. But then from the reaction it seemed that it doesn’t matter how liberal the audience is or how they feel about rodeo. Whatever. People were relating to Brady’s story. And throughout our travels, we’ve gone everywhere from the heartland to the coast. There is a need to relate to another human being, and our society and politicians are telling us you shouldn’t care about that. And they need to see that the good in others is so strong in a time like this. That was so moving for me.