Chloé Zhao on intuition, instinct and Hamnet: “Directing is not intellectual” – LFF Screen Talk

Only 10 years on from the release of her debut feature, but already the winner of Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, Chloé Zhao – speaking at her LFF Screen Talk – reflected on finding balance and feeling “there’s something bigger at work” in her career. “It’s nice,” she joked to host Rhianna Dhillon, “if it doesn’t work out, I can blame that.”

Zhao’s naturalistic, contemplative, often lyrical filmmaking was echoed by her own introspective approach. Pensively staring into the distance at Dhillon’s questions, Zhao often left lengthy pauses before answering – either evidence of a considered style that replicates the authenticity of her films, or perhaps the result of Hamnet’s European premiere the night before. “I might be a little slow today,” she joked.

Zhao is not known for engaging with light-hearted subject matter, but her playful, easy-going demeanour stood out from the off. Her witty repartee – usually at the expense of herself or the industry (“Nobody goes out to make a film to win an Oscar,” Dhillon stated, to which Zhao responded with a pointed, “Really?”) – showed her to be a rare breed: a director who doesn’t take themselves too seriously.

The result was a balance between Zhao’s meditative, almost spiritual approach, and her self-deprecating humour. She described how “I never quite believed that we choose the stories we tell; it always felt like they chose me,” teasingly adding, “It’s nice – if it doesn’t work out, I can blame that.”

Given Zhao’s penchant for the abstract, Dhillon balanced the conversation with the tangible elements of filmmaking. Asked about her experience with financing and production, Zhao’s response was emblematic of her intuitive approach. “I have hit a lot of blocks in my career, some really massive ones, and yet whenever I stop fighting – relax into it – it always takes me to a place that later I’ll look back and go, of course, that’s where I should go.”

The difficult circumstances of Zhao’s early career crafted an artistic perspective that is ardent but not pretentious. Graduating after the 2008 financial crisis, funding fell through for her debut feature, Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015), on multiple occasions – the second time, she received the news after her apartment had been robbed and footage for the film stolen. Yet Zhao sought no sympathy. Instead, she decoded a message: “I learned an excellent lesson. In school sometimes there was too much emphasis on your vision… then, you’re at an empty apartment in Bushwick and you go, I think there is a message about my vision… your vision needs to be flexible.”

Asked about her cinematic influences, Zhao’s refreshing honesty shone through. “I don’t know,” she admitted to a laughing audience. “Usually I have a prepared answer – Wong Kar Wai, Werner Herzog.” Fans of Whoopi Goldberg will be glad to know that, when asked again in the Q&A, Zhao confessed that the first three western films she saw were The Terminator (1984), Ghost (1990) and Sister Act (1992).

She went on to quote Herzog when asked about her characteristic blurring of reality and fiction, referencing his idea of “ecstatic truth… finding the right moment to have logos and the right moment to have mystery, that is up to you, to do the balancing act.”

Her first two films, Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider (2017), blended fact and fiction in their use of non-professional actors. “I like working with non-actors. I think Werner [Herzog] said that it wasn’t about a professional actor or a non-professional actor, it’s about who can be present in front of the camera.” Zhao also referenced the benefit of her neurodivergence, which creates “an extreme sensitivity to dissonance in my brain. So, if you’re smiling, but you’re actually sad, I will feel it.”

Her third feature Nomadland (2020) also uses non-actors but added then two-time Academy Award winner Frances McDormand into the mix – a performance that won the actress her third Oscar. Zhao recalled watching McDormand dig through a pile of free items on the street. “Watching her was like watching Chaplin… I thought, if this film is just her walking around in the heartland of America, just doing stuff, someone will watch it.”

Watch people did, and the film also bagged Zhao the Best Picture and Best Director double. But many saw Zhao’s follow up, the Marvel- and Disney-backed Eternals (2021), as an uncharacteristic foray into big-budget Hollywood. Yet Zhao had “always loved” fantasy and its examination of “the human condition” – an area into which her newest feature, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s acclaimed novel Hamnet, delves deeper.

Asked about her “favourite scene” in the film, involving a confrontation between Will (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley), Zhao described why she used a fixed camera and single take: “I always try to see how much pressure we can build in a frame. The measurement comes from how much polarity there is in your characters – how much tension… when you cut, you lose tension, but you also have an element of surprise… you balance it out.”

With Hamnet gathering critical acclaim on the festival circuit, perhaps it is Zhao’s metaphysical approach to filmmaking that has resonated with audiences: “Directing is not intellectual. It’s half the time intellectual and the other half of the decision is made by what is happening in your own body. You’ve got to be in your body… to see how your body is reacting, not just how your mind is.”

Chloe Zhao was speaking at the 69th BFI London Film Festival, where Hamnet is The Mayor of London’s Gala.