Chloe Zhao made history on Sunday at the 78th Golden Globe Awards, becoming only the second woman and the first Asian woman to win the best director for her drama “Nomadland.”
The last time a woman took home the biggest directing award was almost four decades ago, in 1984, when Barbara Streisand won for “Yentl”.
Zhao’s nomination for the award was already historic, as she was one of three women nominated for Best Director’s Trophy this year, along with Regina King for “One Night in Miami” and Emerald Fennell for “Promising Young Woman.” ”. It was the first time more than one woman had been nominated for this category in the 78-year history of the awards ceremony.
A total of eight women have been nominated in this category since the Golden Globes began, CNN reports, including Barbra Streisand, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay and Kathryn Bigelow.
What did Zhao learn from the scrapping of her first film
Zhao, 38, grew up in Beijing, China. He attended boarding school in London, graduated from high school in LA and studied political science at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. After graduating, he spent a few years as a bartender and took up strange jobs until he decided to enroll in film school at New York University during what he thought was a “quarter-life crisis.” she said in an interview with Vulture.
Over the next few years, he developed an intimate storytelling method that required him to integrate into new communities and gain the trust of the people who would become the subjects of his films. She planned for her first film to be set in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and spent a year getting to know the locals until she felt she had heard the real stories – beyond the stories of poverty, alcoholism and historical trauma Zhao would transmit to journalists and artists who have sunk in the area for materials.
Zhao spent three years in the area, including a stint as a substitute teacher for a high school creative writing class, and wrote 30 film projects. But then the funding fell sharply. She and her filming and romantic partner, Joshua James Richards, found out the news while on a camera test in New Jersey. When they drove back to their New York apartment immediately afterwards, they discovered that their apartment had been broken into and all the previously collected footage had disappeared.
Having to start over proved to be beneficial in the long run: “I stepped forward,” Zhao told Vulture. “I thought that movie was my identity. When it was taken, I actually woke up because I wouldn’t have made it that way.”
Zhao took the $ 70,000 he had in the bank, raised another $ 30,000 and returned to South Dakota for a fresh start. Her first feature film released in 2015, “Songs My Brother Taught Me,” is about a Lakota Sioux teenager from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, who is considering following her girlfriend to Los Angeles when she leaves for college. Zhao drew from the lives and events of the actors who took place in the reservation to write scenes every day.
His second feature film, “The Rider,” from 2017, stars Brady Jandreau, a Lakota horse trainer and rodeo contestant whom the director met while researching projects in South Dakota. She learned that Jandreau had recently suffered an almost fatal and end-of-career injury during a rodeo. performance, but against the wishes of his doctors, he returned on horseback a few months later. Zhao developed the script based on these events and threw Jandreau as the leader.
The slower path to success
Zhao told the Atlantic that building relationships with underrepresented communities, rather than going straight to big-budget projects, was the key to her success: “In this industry, if you’re not honest about who you are, you’ll attract people you don’t want to work anyway. By being who you really are, you may be a little slower to succeed, but you will slowly gather people who are your tribe, your people kind of. “
Zhao’s indie work led her to direct “Nomadland” from 2020, adapted from Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book of the same name, which follows a group of older Americans living in their cars and vans after the Sea. Recession. The comprehensive story of nomadic workers down and out is a top Oscar nominee for the 93rd Academy Awards on April 25th.
If you are genuinely who you are, you may be a little slower to succeed, but you will slowly gather people who are your tribe, your people.
Chloe Zhao
Director awarded the Golden Globe
On Sunday, while Zhao accepted the award for Best Director for “Nomadland,” which also won Best Drama, she thanked the cast and nomadic subjects and actors who shared their stories for movie. She shared a message from one of the subjects, Bob Wells: “Compassion is the destruction of all barriers between us. A heart-to-heart connection. Your pain is my pain. It is mixed and shared between us ”.
“Now that’s why I fell in love with making movies and telling stories,” Zhao continued, “because it gives us a chance to laugh and cry together and it gives us a chance to learn from each other and have more compassion for each other. “
Although he made a name for himself by working on smaller projects and with topics that are not often seen on screen, Zhao’s future work will be on a much larger scale: He directed the upcoming Marvel movie “Eternals” with Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek in the lead roles. November, and she is going to direct a sci-fi film from Dracula.
However, Zhao told Vanity Fair that she doesn’t stick to big-budget projects now that her career is booming: “I want to go back and make a film with an even smaller budget than ‘The Rider?’ “One hundred percent. If the right story is presented. “
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