Nomadland (Movie)

"In contrast, the film is very much the result of the approach to filmmaking that Chloé Zhao developed on her previous film, The Rider . In that film, she intended to make a very different movie. She had a script written, but on encountering the characters on which the script was based, she realized that what she had was inadequate. She threw away the screenplay, and made an entirely different film, rooted in the reality that she found. I think this gave her the context and the seeds for her approach to Nomadland in a way that other filmmakers would find very difficult to navigate. The book already presented a world that could be the basis of her film. However, Chloé Zhao chose instead a dramatic narrative around the emotional journey of a fictional character called Fern, who’s played by Frances McDormand. Fern is a character who leaves her hometown of Empire, which is discussed in the book, after the gypsum plant has been shut down and her husband has died. She goes on the road, leaving her belongings in storage. During her travels, she meets the real people from the book: Linda May and Bob Wells, the man who organizes what is known as the ‘Rubber Tramp Rendezvous’ meeting place for the houseless travelers. Another character who’s found both in the book and the movie is Swankie. So the film is a kind of meta-fictional hybrid. Real people are characters. They don’t have to act. They are just themselves. In one scene, they’re sitting around a fire telling their stories. It’s the most primal form of storytelling. We think of cinema as a recent art form. I once said to Martin Scorsese, ‘Cave paintings tend to be in chambers away from natural light with good acoustic qualities.’ In other words, there would have been a fire, there would have been chanting, and these pictures would have been drawn and painted and looked at. Cinema is very primal to us, I believe. When we see these people sitting around the fire, talking about their experiences, it’s absolutely riveting. I write about it in my book. Fern is seen working in an Amazon warehouse: that scene is also in the book. But the narrative of the book is substantially changed because the nature of discourse is more cinematic. We have landscapes, images from nature, features of small-town life—generally in terms of emptiness, actually. These create a rich and compelling world. Much like Linda May in the book, Dave, another fictional character, seems to be settling down at the end. He is going to live with his son’s family, and indeed invites Fern to join him there. But Fern decides not to and chooses to go back on the road. In one important shot—very similar to the shot in Zama —she stands on the right of the frame, with her van behind her, looking across to the left, to Dave’s son’s home. It’s the same principle in terms of cinematic language. In contrast to the prose in the book in simplifying the best of journalistic address to the reader, much of the movie’s imagery takes on a poetic quality. The vista, the play of light, the mesmerism of absence and emptiness, work alongside the details of dailiness in the lives of the characters. So, again, two wonderfully conceived and articulated and executed pieces of art—both the nonfiction book and the fiction film. When we’re talking about books and films, I didn’t want to exclude nonfiction as a source of a story. There’s historical fiction, I suppose. Napoleon is nonfiction. Generally, it’s about grand characters, isn’t it? Again, it was a cause célèbre. In American movies, people want huge events all the time. The notion of taking the ordinariness of experience, of people who there’s nothing hugely dramatic about, fascinates me. Another example is Perfect Days, the new movie by Wim Wenders. It’s masterly, it’s sublime, it conjures all of the spirit and approach of Yasujirō Ozu in its gentleness. There are no big events. There is no huge trauma. There are upsets in the life of a main character that we discover, but there’s a humanity to it, a compassion, which is perhaps the opposite of the action movie."