See You Down the Road

WITH SIX ACADEMY Award nominations and three of the biggest awards Nomadland—Chloé Zhao’s investigation into the nature of grief, critique of American consumerism and search for an alternative lifestyle—was the biggest winner on Oscar night. It won Academy Awards for best picture, director and female actor. Zhao, who is Chinese, became only the second woman (since 2010 when Kathryn Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker) and the first woman of colour, to win the award for best director. Frances McDormand plays Fern, a widow forced to pack her life into a van and join a tribe of older workers to spend their golden years working odd jobs across the American West. Nomadland is McDormand’s third Academy Award for best actress after Fargo (1997) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2018). The film is a moody piece that examines an economy fed by cheap and elder labour and is a meditation on loneliness and connections. Excerpts from an interview:

CHLOÉ ZHAO

Congratulations on your iconic win, very well deserved. Where do you go from here?

Driving the Great Plains will be the first place I go back to. I don’t know what there’s about an ancient landscape, that I think how fast we’re moving. As humanity is moving, it gives me a lot of anxiety. I come from an incredibly old country. And with every bit of dirt, a lot of it is turned, it’s discovered, it’s inhabited. On the Great Plains, in South Dakota, there are areas where you still see the bone of an animal that was left there for a long, long time and you stand on that land, it hasn’t been touched by us. You just feel, without feeling cliché, that this is the dirt I’m going into when I die. And you will be there long after any of these things we’re worried about right now. And I think for someone who is quite in their head a lot and gets anxious, it just makes me feel like a more wholesome person.

Those are profound words. What inspires you to tell stories about people who are generally neglected or seem invisible?

Every time I pass a small town or an industry that is gone—whether it’s mining or fishing, traditional fishing or ranching—I look at the people who are there, who have been doing it for generations, people who have been living in these small towns for generations. I wonder; how would you like to be remembered? We live in a society where if they’re no longer serving the bigger picture, they’re gone. It’s just erased. I always feel my heartstrings pulled by people like that, whether the things they’re doing is progressive or not, what is good for the environment, good for the world or not. What about their history and then their legacy? And how do they want to be remembered? I think that would really draw me to try to capture these things that are going to be gone, that are fleeting. And if I were a documentary filmmaker, I’d probably be making films about places that are going to disappear or animals that are going to be extinct.

What are you searching for? Do you try to find yourself in the characters that you create?

To me, it’s the constant search for the next horizon, that’s very much part of the creation of this country. That’s in the bones of not just how the country is constructed physically, but also I think in the heart of every American. On a personal level, it’s the search for self as well. It’s part of the legacy of the road. You know we hit the road as, maybe, whatever defined who we are is no longer there. Whether we lost it in a tragedy or we decided that this is no longer who we are, and then we set out and to find ourselves and connect at that level. I didn’t understand what it was like for people like Bob Wells and Swankie and Linda May [real-life nomads who star in the film] who are in the twilight of their lives and hitting the road. I was brought up an atheist, I’m not religious, and as I’m getting older, I do feel this anxiety of feeling like where do I belong. People coming and going. I never was afraid to say goodbye until when we were making the film. We get to a place, we pack up and we leave, we get to a place, get very close to people, pack up and leave. We did that for five months. And then we were drained. I was emotionally drained feeling depressed. And then one of the last things we filmed was Bob Wells talking. He mentioned the idea of ‘see you down the road.’ Although we’ll all see each other again. Whatever that meant to him, or to someone else who maybe believes in god or whatever spirituality they have, I felt what he said. I had to walk away to compose myself. And it was extremely healing because of the idea of we’re all a part of something bigger and we’re all connected, especially now, as the pandemic happened. I felt very lucky having gone through that and having someone like Bob say those words to me.

Every time I pass a small town or an industry that is gone—whether it’s mining or fishing or ranching—I look at the people who have been doing it for generations and I wonder, how would you like to be remembered?, says Chloé Zhao, director

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What was it like working with Frances?

You know, Frances is a dream to work with. And when we first met, I told her the process. I explained it to her, she’s a producer, she completely understands and she knew what she was getting into. You know it’s not going to be conventional. I do not see it much as a transition because she stepped into our world of filmmaking and she adapted herself into mine. So, it was an incredible experience.

I see it this way: I have three babies when I’m on set. I’m the mother. I have the characters, and then I have the world, and then I have the camera because this is cinema, the camera is just as important if not more sometimes. So, for me, there’s a constant negotiation happening with each of these babies. I am emphasising which one I am compromising; it’s never an easy decision, but it’s my job to see the bigger picture. So, it’s something that I’m constantly trying to understand where that delicate balance is when it comes to working with professional actors.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

How much of Fern is within you, because your performance in Nomadland was flawless.

I’m from a working-class, American background, and my family mostly lived in rural areas or small industrial cities, or agricultural farming areas and then a small steel mill town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So, I’m representing the people that I know, the people who raised me. I’ve never really lost anyone close to me like Fern has but it’s part of my job to make you believe that I have, isn’t it? That is the power of practising my craft, that I can make you believe that you can trust me, you can follow me into emotional territory that seems empathetic and seems like a place that you can trust me to take you. The storytelling that Chloé and I were both interested in was taking an audience to a place where they haven’t been to before, but doesn’t seem that unfamiliar. These are not people who make crazy choices. Their choices might make them a little crazy, might make them a little more anxious or stressful, because they’re leading an unconventional life, but they made their choices very specifically because they weren’t being supported by their government and what they think, and what we’ve bought into it is that we think, that we are supposed to be able to gain something over time rather than lose it.I’ve been in a relationship with my husband and know what it means to then find yourself alone, the horror and the freedom, the sadness and the joy of being alone and having to depend on yourself.

What are some of Fern’s experiences that you relate to?

I started working when I was about 15. I washed dishes in restaurants like a lot of us did, did some babysitting, all those jobs. When I was in college, I did a lot of work study. I worked in the cafeteria, at drama school, I worked in the shop building sets, and I worked in the costume department. During the summers, I was a manager of a laundromat doing press and fold as we called it, washing peoples’ laundry and folding it. In my foray into wash and fold, I left a red sock in a woman’s whites and everything turned pink and that was a disaster, but she still paid. I was so amazed that she still paid for her laundry. It was folded very nicely. Every time I moved in graduate school, I would sell a few things on the sidewalk to get enough money to move to the next apartment. I actually sold a flute in one of those sidewalk sales. I was always really sad about that. I told Chloé about that, so she found me another one for the movie. That’s why Fern was playing a flute in the movie because Chloé thought it might be fun to see how much I remembered. But I was very fortunate, by the time I graduated from drama school, I only had three jobs that weren’t related to acting. I worked as a cashier in a restaurant in New York. I answered fan mail for AC/DC, I’d one other word processing job. Besides that, I was able to support myself as an actor.

The storytelling that Chloé and I were both interested in was taking an audience to a place where they haven’t been to before but doesn’t seem that unfamiliar, says Frances McDormand, actor

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There is a deeper message in Nomadland. Are you happy with the way it has shaped up?

It’s serendipitous, isn’t it? The way that we all met, the way that we all did the film, the way that we were invited into the van dwellers’ lives and now the story that we’re being able to tell at this time, when we’re all spending so much more time with ourselves and inside our individual homes. One of the things that I have done pretty much on a monthly basis since last March is clean out my closets, pantry, and drawers. We’ve—my family, we’ve always lived small—always lived in apartments. Our house is only 1,100 square feet, so it’s about always purging and divesting things, so it was interesting for me because I do live small. I started imagining living in the van and I started meeting people who were living in a Prius. One of the most extraordinary rigs that I got to visit at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous was Prius Dave who somehow made the interior of a Prius one of the most elegant living spaces that I’ve ever seen. At one time, he was a ceramic potter and he took his teak board that he had from his ceramic studio and he laid it across from the dashboard to the back of the car on the passenger side and that was his kitchen counter every morning and then at night, he would roll out his sleeping bag on top of it and that was his bed. But it was elegant, and gives you an idea of just how little you really need, how little you really need to survive and I think that we’re all re-evaluating how we have been manipulated by the capitalistic system and the idea of more is more. And less is scary to people, but actually we’re going to get better at it. We’re going to have to get better at it.

About The Author

Noel de Souza