Chloe Zhao made history at the 78th Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, 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 award for best director was almost four decades ago, in 1984, when Barbara Streisand won by “Yentl”.
Zhao’s nomination for the award has already made history, as she was one of three women nominated for this year’s best director trophy, alongside Regina King for “One Night in Miami” and Emerald Fennell for “Young Promise”. It was the first time that more than one woman was nominated for the category in the 78-year history of the awards ceremony.
A total of eight women have been nominated in the category since the beginning of the Golden Globes, reports CNN, including Barbra Streisand, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay and Kathryn Bigelow.
What Zhao learned from undoing his first film
Zhao, 38, grew up in Beijing, China. She attended boarding school in London, completed high school in LA and studied political science at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. After graduating, she spent several years working as a bartender and doing odd jobs until she decided to enroll at New York University’s film school, during what she considers a “quarter-life crisis,” she said in an interview with Vulture .
In the years that followed, she developed an intimate method of storytelling that required her to join new communities and gain the trust of the people who became the subject of her 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 people in the area until she felt like she was listening to their authentic stories – in addition to the narratives of poverty, alcoholism and historical trauma that they would relay to journalists. and artists who dived into the area in search of material, Zhao told Vulture.
Zhao spent three years in the field, including a stint as a substitute teacher for a creative writing class in high school, and wrote 30 drafts of the film. But then funding dropped suddenly. She and her romantic filming partner, Joshua James Richards, heard about the news during a camera test in New Jersey. When they drove back to their New York apartment shortly thereafter, they found out that their apartment had been broken into and all the images previously collected were gone.
Having to start over has proven to be beneficial in the long run: “I overcame myself,” Zhao told Vulture. “I thought that film was my identity. When it was taken, I really found out why I wouldn’t have done it the right way.”
Zhao took the $ 70,000 he had in the bank, raised another $ 30,000 and returned to South Dakota for a fresh start. His first feature film released in 2015, “Songs My Brother Taught Me”, is about a teenager Lakota Sioux from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation who is thinking of following his girlfriend to Los Angeles when she goes to college. Zhao was inspired by the lives of the actors and the events that took place on the reservation to write scenes every day.
Her second feature film, “The Knight” 2017, stars Brady Jandreau, a Lakota horse trainer and rodeo competitor the director met while exploring projects in South Dakota. She learned that Jandreau had recently suffered an injury almost fatal and that ended his career during a rodeo performance, but, against the will of his doctors, he returned to the horse a few months later. Zhao developed the script based on these events and cast Jandreau as the protagonist.
The slowest path to success
Zhao told Atlantic that building relationships with underrepresented communities, instead of going straight for big budget projects, was the key to his success: “In this industry, if you are not honest about who you are, you will attract people with who you don’t want to work in anyway. Because you’re authentically who you are, it may take you a while to become successful, but you’re gradually bringing together people who are your tribe, your kind of people. “
Zhao’s independent work led her to direct 2020’s “Nomadland”, adapted from Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book of the same name, which follows a group of older Americans living off their cars and vans after the Great Recession. The breathtaking story of depressed nomadic workers is one of the leading candidates for the Academy Awards for the 93rd Academy Award on April 25.
Because you are authentically who you are, it may take you a while to become successful, but you gradually bring together people who are your tribe, your type of people.
Chloe Zhao
Golden Globe Winning Director
On Sunday, when Zhao received the award for best director for “Nomadland”, which also won the best film in the drama category, she thanked the cast of the film, as well as the nomadic guys and actors who shared their stories for the film. She shared a message from one of the guys, Bob Wells: “‘Compassion is the breaking down of all barriers between us. A heart-to-heart bond. Your pain is my pain. It is mixed and shared between us.’
“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 she made a name for herself working on smaller projects and with subjects rarely seen on the screen, Zhao’s next work will be on a much larger scale: she directed the next Marvel film “Eternals”, starring Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek, which opens in November, and she is expected to direct a sci-fi western in “Dracula”.
Still, Zhao told Vanity Fair that he is not focused on big budget projects now that his career is on the rise: “I want to go back and make a film with an even smaller budget than ‘The Rider?’ One hundred percent. If the right story comes out. “
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