The woman who plays Fern’s sister is actually one of Frances McDormand’s oldest friends in real life.
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Almost the entire cast was made up of “real” people, that is, not professional actors.
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In fact, all the characters in the film are named after the people who played them in real life – except Frances McDormand and the woman who plays Fern’s sister Dolly.
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The woman who plays Fern’s sister Dolly is actually one of McDormand’s oldest friends in real life, Melissa Smith.
The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco has announced that conservatory director Melissa Smith will leave the organization on December 31. Peter J. Kuo and Danyon Davis will join @ACTSanFrancisco. https://t.co/oVHiGj1Sjm
Smith served as director of the conservatory and acting chief at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco for 25 years and served off-Broadway in New York, the United States and England.
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When she was younger, McDormand said her dream was to change her name to Fern and “hit the road” in a trailer when she turned 65.
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McDormand told Variety that when she was 45, she told her husband that when she turned 65 she “would start smoking Lucky Strikes, drink Wild Turkey and hit the road in my trailer”.
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And the entire crew lived on vans, including the one in the movie, “Vanguard” (Fern’s van), during the shoot.
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They traveled together for five months to more than seven states while filming.
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They were able to film inside an Amazon packaging facility simply by “asking”.
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“Fran wrote a beautiful letter to Amazon asking if we could do this and they said yes,” Richards told The Wrap.
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McDormand’s husband, writer / director Joel Coen, came to visit the set one day.
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Director of photography Joshua James Richards laughed, “I looked up and saw Joel Coen watching me film Fran with a small LED on a C-stand and I thought, ‘We are really pushing the obstacles here, Joel, I hope you like it. , is my biggest configuration. ‘”
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McDormand – who also produced the film – met director Chloé Zhao at the Toronto Film Festival.
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McDormand knew that she wanted Zhao to drive Nomadland after watching the pilot film The pilot in TIFF.
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As the production was physically demanding, McDormand said she was actually assigned a “nanny” to make sure she went to bed and woke up on time, so she wouldn’t be exhausted.
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“I was the oldest member of the company, I was 61 at the time of filming, so it was literally about following,” said McDormand.
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The film is based on the nonfiction book Nomadland: surviving America in the twenty-first century, but filmmakers really think of it as another “complementary play”.
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In fact, many of the real people in the film were also in the book, like Bob Wells, for example.
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Zhao and McDormand started shooting scenes for Nomadland just three months after the actor’s second Oscar win.
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They met at Zhao’s home in Ojai to find out how they would shoot the scenes in such a small and confined space.
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And that night, while they were in the van, McDormand had an upset stomach from dinner and really shit in a five-gallon bucket.
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“I literally experienced something not very pleasant, but it was really great because we shot a few things,” McDormand told the Hollywood Reporter.
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Wall Drug is a very real place. In fact, it is one of South Dakota’s most popular tourist attractions.
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One of the film’s producers, Peter Spears, has a small role in the film like, well, Peter. He’s one of the other people at David’s son’s house.
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Spears was also a producer of Call me by your name, in which he ALSO had a cameo.
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And finally, the Autumn Leaves dishes that Fern said were given to her by her father in the film were REALLY given to McDormand by her own father when she graduated from college.
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