Chloé Zhao on showing all the seasons of life in her work

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:13Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. This year's Sundance Film Festival was the last to take place at Park City, Utah. And it was there I spoke with award-winning writer-director Chloe Zhao, the first woman of color to win the Best Director Oscar for her film Nomadland. Her adaptation of the novel Hamnet has been nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture. Here's that conversation. One of the reasons you're back, and we should talk about this too before we get into talking about what you've done with your incredible career, is you're really here to keep alive the spirit of Sundance that brought you here, aren't you?

0:57Absolutely, yes. And especially this is the last year in Park City. What was your memory of your first time coming here? Well, I came here in 2012, and it was the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and it was right before the festival there was the labs. And I remember lots of snow, and I was in the same year with Kugler and David Lowery, Mario Heiler, and Jonas Campignano, and we all remained really good friends until today. And so last night seeing them and seeing Michelle's back here over a decade later, it was a really emotional experience. Your work is about people kind of finding their way into feeling comfortable with their own bodies and getting past that feeling of loneliness, of separation and connecting with something.

1:51So that you had to have that experience yourself coming here. It really makes sense why so many of your films deal with that. Well, also, like, you know, look around. Bob Redford, he chose this place for a reason. These mountains and especially the labs at the resort. There's something about being surrounded, being in a valley, being surrounded, being in this bowl, surrounded by these really ancient structures. is when this very chaotic, creative tsunami that you probably feel vibrating inside of you, sometimes driving you crazy. And depth loves structure because only when there are strong enough containers can the water quiet down and start to go really deep and you can hear your own voice.

2:38So I think there's something about even being here inside of New York and LA has something quite unique. But I do think it's the altitude because I think it forces you to, as you say, to recognize your body, to breathe deeper. Yeah, absolutely. And as we talk about this, I just flashback on the first 10 minutes of The Rider, which is everything you're talking about is in that movie. Does it feel autobiographical to you in retrospect? Hmm. He's good at this. It's the altitude. No one's ever asked me that because I bet if you look at your journals or your earlier works and you go, oh my God, there are so much more I didn't realize I was doing.

3:27And I think if I, now I quickly react to what you said, it was about somebody who had a very single-minded idea of who they are and who they need to be and then suddenly lost that ability to do that thing and then have to surrender to that loss. So I think I have also, like many of you, have experienced various forms of loss. And that loss could even be a loss of sense of self, of who you thought you should be. And then you get there and you go, oh my God, this doesn't fulfill me at all. That emptiness is even bigger. And so then you have that disillusionment and you, a total ego death. And then you go, now what do I do, right?

4:16And that's an opportunity, like in the writer. But that is an opportunity, at least I hope for, even in Nomadland, you know, when she lost everything, is to find a new type of connection, like a rebirth, that you can actually get closer to who you are as an artist and as a human being. So I definitely went on that journey myself. This is The Treatment and my interview with our old friend, Oscar-winning writer-director Chloe Zhao. Her new film, Hamnet, is nominated for eight Oscars.

5:12but the four seasons, there is always a cycle. Something dies and something is born. Always cycling. And the creative process is the same. Our own journey in life is the same. And I think many of us, myself included, didn't get taught the dying process, you know, the wintering process very much, because we sort of build a modern society that want to ignore that part or skip that part. because it's not producing so it's not it's not productive so it's not good but what i've learned is that that period the composting period is the most essential thing because when you you tend to that compost long enough even though you're not producing anything a bird in the springtime would drop a seed in that perfectly compost soil on the perfect day and when that project started to grow, you're being supported by the energy of the planet.

6:16You know, it's undeniable. But if you don't tend to that soil, if you just keep producing, then it's going to get dry. And it's actually very hard to feel that level of support. And that has to come from yourself. Your work is so physically reflective, or so reflective, so much about the body. That's why I admire Eternals so much, because it's It's the first of those big epics that's about acknowledging that the world is cyclical. Acknowledging loneliness as part of that world, a part of that life, and having to sort of, the death of self is, when you become part of a community, then that self is reborn.

6:58Someone said to me recently that I, for Hamnet, that really helped me to contextualize this, that they say grief or the period of grieving is the placenta that's going to allow you to be reborn. Or you can call it a chrysalis. So you actually died when you lose something, whether it's sense of yourself, your purpose, your ability to do the thing you love, your loved ones, anything, faith. you died because the version of you that existed in that world that contained that is no longer so to acknowledge how intense that is is really important and we don't tend to do that you know even leaving a production a film you have lived with this family for months and months and had such an intense experience together and then overnight you don't see any of them there's a lost there and it's like a little mini death so but that grief that kind of if you can't get out of bed that day and that is absolutely okay and actually to sit in that depression right like to go low onto the ground it's actually the the the composting and the the percentage that needs you You need to be held in that in order for the rebirth to be glorious.

8:28You know, and that's actually where you're headed. And a lot of people, myself included, had gone through this, whether it was creatively or personally, were stuck. We're stuck because I didn't have a presenter around me. I couldn't get reborn to the next version of myself because I was stuck. The cycle of Hamnet is really about that. And because we talk about that final scene at the Globe. is really about the acknowledgement of that. I mean, that's, and it's to me, it's the thing that's really wonderful because in you doing an adaptation, you really have to sort of let that other form, the other iteration die and let it be reborn as a film because the bones are there, but your habit is very different from the book.

9:12Yeah, I think in every bit of the process from adapting to even editing to the last minute, to your luck, everything, I think every moment, every day coming to work is having the intention of this is what I think is. And then moment to moment, allow it to die and to be reborn. You know, even my actors are the same. They got to a point where they can enter a scene, have no idea whether they're going to get to the end as scripted. When they can feel safe enough to do that, then I get very excited. You know, so there's one thing about that period when I'm feeling unbearable sitting in that tension.

9:56I think that's when I look for poetry and music and art and storytelling to try to make that decomposing period a little more bearable. And I think that's what Hamnet is trying to say. so whatever tools and skills I find I keep it very close so that if we're writing and we feel like something's so important to us we have to let go we make sure we not like everything has to be a ceremony but we we lovingly let it go and we pay attention to how that make us feel you know including Maggie this is this is her baby you know her book and she had gone to a point and she said, I realize the film, that's my nephew.

10:48But the constant of moment by moment of letting go for every HOD, your whole cast and crew, if they can all get to that level of safety to be doing that, so the whole ecosystem have no stuckness. Every department is shedding and rebirthing moment to moment. You're listening to my conversation with Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning writer-director Chloe Zhao from this year's Sundance Film Festival. There's more to come after this break. It's The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. Welcome back. From the Sundance Film Festival, it's The Treatment and my conversation with Oscar-winning writer-director Chloe Zhao, whose film, Hamnet, is nominated for Best Picture and Best Director Oscars.

11:37Oscars. Hamnet is, I think, more than any other film you've done, really about tracking four seasons of a relationship or of a story. Because the book is kind of broken into two pieces, but this is really four distinct parts. And I wondered, as you were constructing with her, that you were thinking about this thing that's clearly so integral to who you are, about the idea of one winter leading to another winter, but there's flowering and life in that intervening time. Did you talk to her about that? Yeah. I mean, in these really long voice notes I sent her, sometimes they're like 50 minutes long.

12:18And her daughter will walk in listening to the podcast. She's like, no, it's just Chloe working hard the night before. Maggie and I are very chaos in order. We know exactly what we're good at and we're great partners in that sense. But I think what drew me to Hamnet, yes, it is the connection someone like Agnes has with her own body and with the natural world, but also the importance of storytelling, of art from William Shakespeare's perspective. That is a big change than the book. The book had a little bit, very little bit of him and also had almost no play, no Hamlet in the end. That's probably the biggest change other than the chronological order.

13:07The book is not linear and we made it linear. And so the reason why Maggie and I came to that agreement is because we know both the four seasons inevitable. but also we need something to handle the transition period. The transitions are the hardest. And again, that is where creativity comes from, imagination comes from. And that's why we brought him forward more. I think it's interesting too, because again, that sequence when he's directing the actor to deliver the line, which is kind of astonishing to me, because he's basically going through the five stages of grief in that scene. I mean, dealing with this, I don't want to give the movie away for people who haven't seen it, the Oscar-nominated Hamnet, by the way.

14:02Thank you. But that scene is sort of writ small, his entire emotional story, than the way he's dealing with it versus the way she's dealing with it. But I want to ask you about that here because that, to me, is one of the most astonishing things that you've ever done. The idea of what the actor can do with repetition. Don't get me started on that. I am so passionate about that. The ritualistic reputation of a gesture, whether it's you're reaching out, when you do it over and over and over and over, what it does is it actually creates a container for something to come through. You know, the gesture itself, what's repeating of the same word over and over.

14:47Shakespeare knew that. And so sometimes we forgot about that these almost ritualistic ceremonial gestures and repeating things like a chant. You see that, you know, in ceremonies, people chant. They make the same body movement for a reason. It's to get yourself to a vibration. You can tap into something bigger than you. and so we would do somatic exercises my cast, my actors, they would do those things to get themselves there and it's important to we say that there's an invitation to be profound never be casual with the work we do it's easy to sort of make jokes about it and I do, you know, in this kind of settings but don't be casual and then trust the container trust the ritual, and it will come through.

15:45I mean, even writing. I will write the same sentence over and over. Sometimes I'll start doing it with my left hand, my non-dominant hand, because that's the hand that your logos have less control of. And then see what comes through you, how you feel. And then write down that feeling. Maybe that's what your character needs, your own body as a writer or as an editor is as important as your lead actors because it's a vessel to do that kind of channeling work. So often your characters are fulfilled when they connect with somebody else. And it's not always through relationship, but it's the mirroring where you sort of see kind of something that's you but the reverse of you.

16:38And they are like the reverse of each other. And so that seemed to be followed a few scenes later about that extraordinary sequence at the Globe Theater where it's not, it's a ceremony rather than a play. I mean, because we know that that Globe, we were just talking about earlier, they were throwing tomatoes and eating chickens and having picnics and changing their kids. And this is very different. I mean, it's this kind of ritualistic letting go of what had been this tragedy between them. I mean, it's enormously, I just think there's so much beautiful stuff in this movie. And it's you and all your departments working together so incredibly well.

17:17Thank you. It was at the beginning when she first walked in, it was like that. People are selling food, they're screaming. And it's a bit like that, you know, when you go into a meditation class or you go into a ceremony. And at the beginning, you come with all the layers that you've been building up throughout the day and the weeks and months. At that time, it was during the plague that happened twice by then. People covered in scales of protection, of deep grief and hard-heartedness. And they were coming and rage and anger, all kinds of stuff. and it's quite moving to think every day they will come into this wooden hole, this circle and they will come in like that, like you said, completely separated from each other, mostly strangers on different vibrations and then through music and then through a story and actually every Shakespeare play always ends with a dance there's a chance, not always but there's a chance that they could start vibrating into similar frequencies some need to shed some stuff, some need some more strength from the person next to them to build it up and go to a concert or a football game you feel it and then suddenly there's a moment the illusion of separation gone.

18:48And then you feel like you're taken by something bigger. Like, whoa, I bet many of you have had that experience before. Then you don't even doubt any decisions you make as I was directing, as my actress is acting or DP is making decisions because you trust your decisions so much because you know you're being moved by something bigger than you. Are you used to getting the call that you've been an Oscar nominee? Now this happened to you a couple of times? It always feels obviously happy, you know, like, yay. But, you know, recently I put on my social media a dance video at the Globe Theatre after we wrapped.

19:34Yeah, to be honest, we found love. And the joy that I felt there, nothing's going to top that. And I think you all know this. When the joy is now coming from external validation, you know, it's like magic hour. You and your whole team move as a group, and then you caught something you never could catch. Or you figure out a thing when you're writing, and the kind of joy you're feeling that's coming from the source is internal. You know, you feel like a part of you grew and shifted, and it was part of almost like a metamorphosis. Something happened to you, and the joy come out of that. I don't feel the same kind of joy when I get external praise and validation.

20:18It doesn't matter how great they are. So it's never going to look like the explosion for me. And I think that's okay. I used to think something's wrong with me. I have trauma that's keeping me from feeling that way. Now I realize I think that's okay. I've accepted that. But that also means when I don't get it, it isn't as painful.

20:39I'm going to ask you to toast Chloe Zhao. Thank you. Thank you for doing this. Thank you.

20:49Chloe Zhao got her start at the Filmmakers Lab at the Sundance Film Festival. She returned this year for the last Sundance in Park City to receive its Trailblazer Award, which will go along with her Best Director and Best Screenplay Oscars for Nomadland. Hamnet, her most recent film, is nominated for eight Oscars. Previous conversations with Oscar winners, such as Chloe Zhao, at the archive, kcrw.com slash thetreatment. At kcrw.com slash thetreat, you can hear cultural influencers talk about their influences. This week, it's writer-director Josh Safdie, whose film Marty Supreme is nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Director.

21:35His Treat is a classic melodrama that had the impact of a horror film on him as a kid. All this month, we'd love to hear how and why you listen to The Treatment. Please share that information at kcrw.com slash surveys. The show is produced and edited by Rebecca Mooney and mixed by Katie Gilgrest. To better days, everyone, I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's The Treatment.