This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Chloe Zhao was only the second woman to win the Oscar for Best Director, and that was for her 2020 film, Nomadland, which starred Frances McDormand as an itinerant worker. Chloe Zhao is 43, and she's had a varied career ranging from low-budget contemporary westerns to making a Marvel film called Eternals, which was a supernatural epic with a colossal budget. Now Zhao has taken another distinct turn to hamlet a story about the creative life and the family life of William Shakespeare. Based on a novel by Maggie O'Farrell, Zhao's film is about Shakespeare as a young man grieving the loss of his only son. It stars Paul Muscal and Jesse Buckley. Chloe Zhao spoke with our staff writer Michael Schulman, who covers film and entertainment for the New Yorker. So how did this book and how did this project make its way to you? I was driving through New Mexico to Taylorite Film Festival, and then this one, Amblin, called me and told me about this project. Amblin meaning? Amblin Spielberg's production company. And when they said it over the phone, you know, the reception, if you haven't been to the four corners, not great. And so it's in and out, and they're saying, you know, it's about Shakespeare's wife and the death of their son. And I just thought, there's so many things in that sentence that I have no personal connection to. So I said no. And then a few hours later, I met Paul Muscal for the first time. I didn't know who he was because I've not seen normal people. His careers change a lot in a short amount of time. Yes. But I sat next to the creek with him and I just felt something about him. You know, there's something about him. There's a simmering discomfort in him, like an animal, you know, like a step and wolf just wants to burst out. And that's why he creates. So the energy was really strong. And he's talking about, oh, I asked him, would you ever consider play Young Shakespeare? And he said, where are you talking about? Hamlet. I love the book so much. You have to read the book. It's not what you think it is. Please read the book. So what about the book when you read it? Made you feel like you were the right person to do it? Were there details in the novel that really spoke to you? When I read the book, I thought the internal landscape was so beautifully described. That is my, that usually I have to really get to know, say Brady from the writer. I had to get to know him for such a long period of time. Would I understand his internal landscape? So then I can externalize it on screen so the audience isn't just relying on him verbally. Right. Maggie already done that work for all the characters. So I thought that's my blueprint. And also there's a rhythm to the way she writes. Has a heartbeat to it. That's very similar to mine. I found out later that her favorite filmmaker is Wong Kar-Wai, which is the person whose work that made me want to make films many, many years ago. So there was a death similarity as well. I mean, there's also an external landscape in the film that is so vivid. And you're a filmmaker who shoots the natural world beautifully. Anyone who's seen your first three features were all in or in part set in the American West and South Dakota specifically. Hamnet is set in Elizabethan England. You shot in Wales and her for sure. I'm curious about what you got from that very different kind of natural landscape as you were thinking about the film. The natural world, the reason why it has been such a big part of every film I've done is because I can now in my 40s look back at my career and say the reason why that is is because I have always had a deep fear of death. And I think that drives my creativity. And when you are free to die, you are actually not able to live fully. And I know that deep inside. And I when the light goes off, you know, phone shots off, I'm lying there. I know I'm not living my life fully. And it's because I'm so terrified. I don't feel safe in this world. And also my instinctual human self knows that when you go into nature, if you have a relationship with nature, then you develop a very embodied spirituality that is not relied on anyone else telling you, right? It's an embodied safety that you feel within oneness. And that you can only find in nature when you become one with your surroundings. That's all of our great prophets goes into nature to come back with the message for a reason. And so I just knew that as part of working on my own shit. So get myself into nature. And the second part of to answer that question is that in my 30s, I was much more like a pioneer, like going west, going into like finding treasures. I wanted to go as wide as possible chasing horizon after horizon so I can come back with the treasures that cameras in satiable. It wants to capture everything. And I want to move. I'm always on the move. And then in my 40s, after I'm in life crisis, I realized that I can't keep running from myself. And in the forest, it's the opposite of the planes. And the forest is deeply feminine and it makes you stay still. And when you stay still, you have nowhere to go, but into the underworld and into yourself where all your shadows are. So I knew in my 40s, this is the right place, right kind of nature for me to dive deep in. And when it comes to the forest in Wales, in terms of inspiration, I was... When I first visited that forest with my cinematographer Lukash, we wanted to go to find a language for the film or just let the forest tell us what the film is about beyond what we read in the book. And I was in Kiev right before that. And I was with somebody who was making a documentary about a strip of forest in the front line. And when I went to... When I left Kiev and went to Wales, and it was this beautiful spring forest that we were in, me and Lukash was there. And I was getting some images and footage from the front line in Ukraine. And I will see these dark holes, black holes in the ground. And some of them, they're limelight holes. Sometimes they're dugouts. And then I walk around our forest and I will see these black holes that are natural made black holes. I just had such a big emotional reaction to it. I start crying. I sat next to the void, this black void, because it's coming for all of us. And also in that is in that void, the compost, new life comes in this hole here. And the one in that front line, new life will come. And there's hope in Hamlet. He wrote, all living things must die, passing through nature to eternity. And to me, the eternity is love. And so then my Polish DP runs over and look at the hole and go, I understand this. We must film this hole. And then he filmed the hole. And we had Max Richter's sleep album playing. And then he started lifting up at some point, the tripod. And then it went up to the sky. And then it just started. It went up and down, up and down. It was like, ah, this is what the film is about. Right. So nature, we consider nature an HOD. The department head is constantly working with us. Director Chloe Zhao speaking with Michael Schulman. More in a moment. From WQXR and Carnegie Hall comes classical music happy hour. A new podcast hosted by me, Maniacs. Each episode will speak with a special guest about their lives, listen to musical gems, answer your classical queries, and take part in playful musical games. So grab a drink and press play on a new podcast celebrating our love for all things classical. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. So one of your main characters is William Shakespeare. I know. The William Shakespeare played beautifully by Paul Mescal. And you know, this is not the witty hyperverbal Shakespeare of Shakespeare love. He's actually a man of pretty few words. He's brooding. He's frustrated. As you and Maggie were writing the screenplay, how did you approach just the challenge of writing lines for William Shakespeare? I think the reason why the producers and also Maggie chose me is because I don't feel that way about William Shakespeare. I don't have the same reverence. I do have reverence intellectually, but I don't have the burden on my shoulders as many people in the West do. Maybe the same as I am with, you know, cowboys or Westerns. Right? I watched only two and a half Westerns when I made the writer. So but I watched more afterwards because I fell in love with it. And it's the same. I'm probably going to be doing more Shakespeare related things after this. But I didn't come feeling that he's any different than a man who fell in love with a woman and who didn't quite express his feelings. So I never, the pressure is on the actors. It's on Paul, who does have a lot of reverence in the sense that not only what we put him through, not only playing William Shakespeare, but also telling the story of Orpheus Uduridus' as William Shakespeare. So that and to answer your question, he's very different than in the book. Actually Maggie reminded me a couple of weeks ago when she was here. She's like, do you remember that? You see in the book, he's quite talkative. He's expressive, you know, an actor. And I guess I'm that was me. I guess I made a decision to change his character because I find a lot of artists, male artists, get into expressing themselves in their arts because they never felt safe to express their emotions in real life in our society. What are you looking at? You. Why? I thought you were a man of words, Master Tudor. As a, you know, as a little boy, they're told to toughen up or, you know, there's no space for your emotions because mom is crying, you know, my sister is crying. So I was raised by a man like that. I've loved and beloved by a man like that my whole life. So it just became natural for me and Paul as well was part of that decision as well. Like watching him. There's there's him in this character as well. And I can only work that way because moment by moment I need to feel love towards this character. Right. And I need to feel like I understand him. And there's a part of me that is like him. I feel safe in my fantasy world. I'm set. Then I can deal with emotional situations in life. So so Paul was under a lot of pressure because we don't talk about who this character is. We start shooting and find him. So that's day three when we did the Orpheus scene, you know, the scene where he goes, I don't talking to people is difficult for me. And then she said, tell me a story. We did that whole scene on day three and many, many takes. Usually I don't do that many takes just for him to find who is William Shakespeare, speaking one of the greatest myths to a woman he fall in love with. That very loaded. Yes. And then at one point he actually burst forth with the to be or not to be speech. That's also pressure on Paul. Yes. So I know you went to school in England as a teenager. Were you taught Shakespeare there? Was that your first encounter with sort of his actual texts? Well, I didn't speak English. So when you don't speak English and you have Romeo and Juliet in front of you in the equivalence of a ninth grade. So when I was on set of Hamnet, when Paul was delivering his speech, I only understand a third of it technically because I just don't understand what those words means. But at the beginning, Paul has said to me, look, I can study it and translate every word and understand what they all means. But Paul said to me, listen, if Shakespeare's performed right, you don't have to understand what they're saying. You feel it in the body. The language is written like that. And so in a way, me and Lukash, who also doesn't speak much English, we sat there and we watched Paul's performance. And in a way, we kind of embody Agnes, who doesn't quite understand everything, but we feel it. So in those days in the globe, I'm judging by me and Lukash's physical reaction. We start crying or we go, oh, you know, our heart, like our throat is tight, our stomach turns, then we know it's the right take. We didn't even have to understand every word, which is really magical. It's making me think about Shakespeare completely different. I mean, I think that's true for anyone watching Shakespeare. I believe you just wrapped directing the pilot of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer revival. So you're back working on a franchise with a very intense fandom. I wish I'm also one of them. Sure, that helps. But I'm curious as you move forward in your career, how do you see your relationship with the franchise-driven part of Hollywood? You know, I think from what I can tell, it's only getting harder and harder to make a movie that isn't based on something connected to some form of IP. And yet you've done both. You're continuing to do both. I mean, you could call Hamnet then William Shakespeare IP in some way, but you know, it's a- I thought about his celibacy when I signed up. Both Maggie's book and Hamnet's are just pretty strong IP for dealing with your- All right. So how do you see yourself fitting into the industry that is now so IP-driven? Why do you think that is? Because people want to save bets. It's hard to make money on a film. Yeah. You know, I just launched, I just made an announcement. Me and my producing partner, Nick Gangda, we teamed up with Kodansha, which is the oldest and one of the largest manga publishing house in Japan. And they have everything from Akira to Ghost in the Shell to Attack on Titan, you know, Sailor Moon. We just teamed up with them to launch Kodansha Studios, which means that we will be developing live action adaptations of their IP in-house before it goes through the studios. Tell me more about manga. Manga is quite different than Western comics, particularly American comics. It's heavily influenced by Shintoism, Japanese Shintoism. And if you don't know what that is, it's believing that every object has a spirit, right? Like this glass has a spirit within itself. There has been quite a complicated relationship between studios licensing Japanese IP and it's particularly manga IP. And the adaptation process has been quite complicated for years and years and years now. So I've always dreamt to be a bridge between the East and the West and to be able to create a safe and nurturing garden in a way for international filmmakers, writer directors and Japanese sensei's manga artists, authors to come together. And to at early stage, allow the artists to really see each other. Like, why did this artist create this story in Japan? You know, what is really the core of it? And then spiritually, emotionally, and then to find the right filmmaker and then can allow them to work together to develop the screenplay until the little, you know, the shoots of the plans are strong enough. And then we go to our studio partners. I think that's, I guess, one of my plays in the IP world. And I think adapting from IP is beautiful. I started my writing career as a fan fiction writer. Oh, really? In China. Pretty well known one, too. But you never know, because I will never share with you my pen name. But I don't mind. I think the word original is misunderstood in modern world. Because oracle means the source. It means old, the beginning. So original actually means going back to the source. Yeah, but our modern culture is so obsessed with new things, must have new things. It's a very masculine and dominated way of looking at the world. It must have new things all the time. But in nature, everything goes back to the source. So I don't mind working with IP. It's just how we do it needs to be, I think could be healthier, more wholesome. Yeah. This is the last thing I want to ask you about is you've described yourself as deeply neurodivergent and you've talked about how you become overstimulated and kind of shut down. You know, a director on a set has to deal with so much, so many people, departments, questions, images. So how does that challenge you on a movie set and how does it help you on a movie set? Good question. See, I didn't know, you know, I didn't have my official diagnosis until this year. So in the past, I always wondered, maybe I'm just built wrong. Something is off with me. And I mean, going to like premieres or press days, you know, promoting the film is even harder because the amount of exposure, you know, going to an award show or things like that. And so you feel a lot of shame around, why can't I enjoy it? You know, like the people around me could be. And then once I have some language around it, it's very empowering. I go, okay. So the fact that I'm good at some things, right, is my sensitivity, my intuition, my ability to process information, my pattern recognizing skills, I can watch people and find patterns and I can pretty much predict what they're going to do in a scene. Right. All those things I understand is because my brain takes in so much more information than the person next to me. So I need time to process that information. And if I don't process it and more coming in, then I could shut down and implode or just have a massive, you know, meltdown. So since then, and also a really strong perfume can give me a shut down. Really? Yeah. If someone's worrying, if you're going through the airport, you know, that's tough. Okay. So you won't be working in smell-o-vision. No. It's like, but I love, you know, anything with, that's natural from a natural world is fine. It's the chemical in the perfume that is overwhelming, like cleaning products, air fresheners, things like that. Well, you are very likely headed on the road to the Academy Awards again. So I hope that they are, that no one is wearing very strong perfume at them. That's lost cause. And congratulations on Hamnet. It's a really beautiful movie. The New Yorker's Michael Shulman speaking with director Chloe Zhao. You can find Justin Chang's review of Hamnet at NewYorker.com. And of course, you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, NewYorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for this week. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnel, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Boteen and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barisch, Victor Guant and Alejandra Deccan. I'm Erlon Woods. I'm Nigel Poor. We're the hosts and creators of Ear Hustle from PRX's Radio Topia. When we met, I was doing time at San Quentin State Prison in California. And I was coming in as a volunteer. The stories we tell are probably not what people expect from a prison podcast. Like cooking meals in a prison cell, keeping little pets, prison nicknames and trying to be a parent from inside. Stories about life on the inside shared by those who live it. Find Ear Hustle wherever you get your podcasts.
