The Principle
Chloe Zhao makes films that exist in the dissolving boundary between fiction and documentary, between myth and reportage, between the American West as a real place and the American West as a state of mind. Her characters are often played by the people whose lives inspired them — Brady Jandreau playing a version of himself in The Rider, the real nomads of Nomadland appearing alongside Frances McDormand. This is not a documentary impulse. Zhao does not seek to record reality. She seeks to find the fiction that reality already contains — the narrative shapes, the dramatic arcs, the mythic resonances that exist within actual lives if you look with the right eyes and in the right light.
That light is almost always golden. Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards shoot predominantly during the magic hour — the period around sunrise and sunset when the sun sits low on the horizon and the world is bathed in warm, horizontal light that turns skin to amber and transforms mundane landscapes into something approaching the sublime. This is not mere prettiness. The golden hour light does specific emotional and philosophical work: it says that this world, this moment, this face, this landscape is beautiful and that this beauty is transient. The light will change. The moment will pass. The beauty of Zhao's cinema is always tinged with impermanence, and that impermanence is itself the source of the beauty.
Zhao came to American cinema from Beijing, and her outsider's perspective on the American landscape is essential to her vision. She sees what Americans have stopped seeing — the vastness of the land, the strangeness of rodeo culture, the loneliness of the interstate, the particular beauty of a face weathered by outdoor labor. Her films restore wonder to a landscape that American cinema has rendered as cliche (the Western) or invisible (the flyover states). She films the Pine Ridge reservation, the rodeo circuit, the seasonal worker camps with the fresh eyes of someone for whom these places are genuinely extraordinary.
Visual Language: The Camera in the Landscape
Joshua James Richards and the Nomadic Eye
Cinematographer Joshua James Richards has shot all of Zhao's independent features, and their partnership has produced a visual language defined by naturalism, spontaneity, and an almost spiritual attention to light. Richards works primarily with natural light, handheld cameras, and long lenses that compress the relationship between subject and landscape. His images feel captured rather than constructed — as if the camera happened to be in the right place at the right moment, witnessing something that would have occurred whether or not it was being filmed.
This apparent simplicity is, of course, an illusion sustained by extraordinary craft. Richards and Zhao plan extensively around the movement of the sun, chasing golden hour light across shooting days, building their production schedules around the natural rhythms of dawn and dusk. The "discovered" quality of the images is the product of patience, planning, and a willingness to wait — sometimes for hours — for the light to be right. The naturalism is earned, not accidental.
The Portrait in the Landscape
Zhao's signature composition is the human figure set against a vast landscape — a rider on the prairie, a van dweller against the desert, a face lit by the last light of day with miles of emptiness behind it. These compositions reference the tradition of the American Western (John Ford's Monument Valley, Terrence Malick's golden fields) but they feel different because the people in Zhao's frames are not Hollywood cowboys. They are real Lakota rodeo riders, real seasonal workers, real nomads. The mythic composition applied to actual bodies creates a tension between the epic and the intimate that defines Zhao's aesthetic.
The Long Lens and Compressed Space
Richards frequently works with long telephoto lenses that compress the distance between foreground and background, creating images where a character and a landscape element (a mountain, a sunset, a herd of horses) seem to occupy the same plane. This compression creates a visual intimacy between person and place — the landscape is not behind the character but with them, around them, continuous with them. In Zhao's cinema, people do not inhabit landscapes. They are part of them.
The Unbroken Moment
Zhao favors long, unbroken takes that allow moments to unfold in real time. A horse being trained. A meal being prepared. A conversation happening in a parking lot at dusk. These moments are not dramatically significant in the conventional sense — they do not advance plot or reveal character through dialogue. They are significant because they are real, because they capture the texture of lived experience that conventional narrative filmmaking edits away. Zhao understands that life is mostly made up of these undramatic moments, and that cinema's refusal to depict them is a form of dishonesty.
Narrative Structure: The Fictional Documentary
Non-Professional Actors Playing Themselves
Zhao's most distinctive narrative strategy is casting non-professional actors to play fictionalized versions of themselves. Brady Jandreau in The Rider is a real Lakota bronc rider who suffered a real head injury, playing a character named Brady Blackburn whose story parallels his own. The nomads in Nomadland — Swankie, Bob Wells, Linda May — play themselves, sharing their real stories and philosophies within a fictional framework. This approach creates a narrative texture that is neither fiction nor documentary but a third thing — a space where the boundary between performance and reality becomes porous.
The risk of this approach is exploitation: using real people's lives as raw material for aesthetic consumption. Zhao navigates this risk through collaboration — her non-professional performers are involved in shaping their characters' stories, and the final films honor rather than distort their experiences. The performer's investment in their own story produces a quality of emotional truth that is unmistakable on screen and that cannot be replicated by even the most skilled professional actor.
The Seasonal Structure
Zhao's narratives follow natural rhythms rather than conventional dramatic structure. The Rider moves through seasons on the South Dakota reservation. Nomadland follows the seasonal migration of van dwellers across the American West — beet harvest in the fall, desert in the winter, recreation areas in the summer. Songs My Brothers Taught Me follows a year on the Pine Ridge reservation. This seasonal structure creates a narrative that feels organic rather than imposed, driven by the rhythms of the land and the weather rather than by plot mechanics.
The Lyric Mode
Zhao's films operate in what literary critics call the lyric mode — a form of narrative where the primary action is contemplation rather than event. Her characters spend significant screen time simply being in the world: watching sunsets, driving empty roads, sitting with horses, looking at landscapes. These moments are not pauses between dramatic beats — they are the drama. The characters are processing their lives, making sense of their choices, coming to terms with loss and change. The audience is invited not to watch this processing but to participate in it.
The Elliptical Edit
Zhao's editing (she often edits her own films) is elliptical — jumping forward in time without explanation, omitting events that conventional narratives would depict, arriving in moments already underway. This elliptical approach creates a sense of life's continuity — the feeling that the story began before the camera arrived and will continue after it leaves. The audience must do interpretive work, filling in gaps, inferring events, constructing the narrative connections that the film withholds. This active participation deepens engagement and creates the sensation of encountering a real life rather than a constructed story.
Sound and Music: The Voice of the Land
Ambient Sound as Score
Zhao's films privilege ambient sound — wind, grass, horses, insects, distant traffic, the hum of a refrigerator in a van — over composed music. These sounds are not background; they are the voice of the world the characters inhabit. The sound design creates a sonic environment that is as specific and as immersive as the visual one, locating the audience in a particular place at a particular time with a specificity that music cannot provide.
Ludovico Einaudi and the Minimal Score
When Zhao does use composed music, she favors minimalist piano compositions — Ludovico Einaudi's score for Nomadland is the prime example — that provide emotional support without narrative direction. The music does not tell the audience what to feel. It creates a space within which feeling can emerge. The sparse, repetitive piano phrases mirror the film's visual aesthetic: simple, patient, cumulative, and ultimately deeply moving.
Diegetic Music and Community
Music within Zhao's films — the country songs at the rodeo, the campfire songs at the nomad gatherings, the hip-hop in the reservation cars — functions as social document. It tells us about the communities these characters inhabit, their tastes, their cultural contexts, their ways of creating meaning and pleasure. Zhao pays attention to the music people actually listen to, and she uses it to create cultural specificity that expository dialogue would destroy.
Themes: Impermanence and the Open Road
The American West as Elegy
Zhao's West is not the triumphant West of classic Hollywood — it is an elegiac West, a landscape of beauty and loss. The reservation in The Rider and Songs My Brothers Taught Me is marked by poverty, addiction, and the aftermath of colonialism. The nomad trail in Nomadland follows the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis. The land is beautiful, but the beauty exists alongside and within histories of violence and dispossession. Zhao does not editorialize about this history — she lets the landscape speak it. The beauty of a South Dakota sunset contains, in its very grandeur, the story of what was taken to create the America that exists today.
The Injured Body
Zhao returns repeatedly to the image of the body that has been damaged by the physical demands of its work. Brady Jandreau's head injury in The Rider. The aging bodies of the Nomadland nomads, bent and aching from years of physical labor. The rodeo riders' accumulated injuries, each one a mark of their devotion to a way of life that is slowly destroying them. Zhao films injured and aging bodies with tenderness and respect, finding in their damage a kind of beauty — the beauty of a life fully lived in the physical world, the beauty of a body that has been used for something the person believed in.
Community and Solitude
Zhao's characters exist in tension between their need for community and their commitment to solitude. Brady is part of the Lakota community but is increasingly separated from it by his injury. Fern in Nomadland moves through temporary communities of fellow nomads but ultimately chooses the road over settlement. This tension is never resolved — Zhao does not privilege community over solitude or vice versa. She presents both as necessary, both as insufficient, and both as expressions of the same fundamental human desire: to live authentically in a world that makes authenticity difficult.
The Animal and the Human
Animals — particularly horses — are central to Zhao's cinema. The Rider is a film about the relationship between a man and his horse as much as it is about anything else. Nomadland's landscape is populated with wildlife. Zhao films animals with the same patient attention she gives to human performers, and she is interested in the moments where the boundary between human and animal consciousness becomes thin — when Brady communicates with a horse through touch, when a nomad watches a bird with full attention. In Zhao's cinema, the animal world is not separate from the human world. It is the world, and humans are guests in it.
Labor and Meaning
Zhao is deeply interested in work — not as drudgery but as a source of meaning and identity. Brady's identity as a rider. Fern's seasonal labor in Amazon warehouses and beet processing plants. The nomads' various forms of work and self-sufficiency. Zhao depicts labor with documentary attention, showing the actual physical processes of work — how horses are trained, how beets are harvested, how vans are maintained. This attention to labor is both aesthetic (the beauty of skilled physical work) and philosophical (the way work creates meaning in a life, the way the loss of meaningful work creates crisis).
Collaboration and Process
The Open Script
Zhao works with open scripts that are structured but not fully written — frameworks that leave space for non-professional performers to contribute their own language, their own stories, their own emotional truths. Scenes may be outlined rather than scripted, with the actual dialogue emerging through rehearsal and improvisation. This approach requires a director who can shape raw material into narrative in real time — who can recognize, in the flow of an improvised conversation, the moment that belongs in the film.
The Small Crew
Zhao works with minimal crews, creating an intimacy on set that allows non-professional performers to forget the camera. The small crew also allows for the mobility that her shooting style requires — the ability to chase light, to follow a subject across a landscape, to set up quickly in a location that was not planned. This nimbleness is essential to Zhao's aesthetic of found beauty: you cannot find what you are not free to look for.
Writing and Directing Specifications
- Dissolve the boundary between fiction and documentary by casting non-professional performers in roles drawn from their own lives. The character and the person should overlap without being identical — the fiction provides shape and narrative, the person provides truth and specificity. Collaborate with your performers to build characters that honor their experiences while serving the story's needs.
- Shoot during golden hour whenever possible, building your production schedule around the natural rhythms of light. The magic hour light is not a stylistic preference — it is a philosophical statement about beauty and impermanence. Every golden hour shot says: this moment is beautiful, this moment is passing, these two facts are inseparable. Plan for the light. Wait for the light. Earn the light.
- Use long lenses to compress the distance between character and landscape, creating compositions where the human figure and the natural world occupy the same visual plane. Your characters are not separate from their environments. They are continuous with them. The lens should make this continuity visible, collapsing the distance between person and place until they become aspects of the same image.
- Structure narratives seasonally rather than dramatically. Let the rhythms of the natural world — the movement of the sun, the change of seasons, the cycles of weather and migration — provide the structural framework for your story. Plot events should emerge from and respond to these natural rhythms rather than overriding them.
- Privilege the undramatic moment. Give screen time to the actions and observations that conventional cinema edits away: the preparation of a meal, the grooming of a horse, the long drive through an empty landscape, the silent watching of a sunset. These moments are the substance of lived experience, and their inclusion creates a texture of reality that dramatic scenes alone cannot provide.
- Design the soundscape around ambient environmental sound, using composed music sparingly and only to support (never to direct) the audience's emotional response. The wind, the grass, the animals, the distant sounds of human activity — these are the music of the world your characters inhabit. Let them be heard. Let them create the emotional atmosphere that score would otherwise impose.
- Film the injured, aging, and working body with tenderness and respect. The bodies in your films should show the marks of the lives they have lived — scars, weathering, fatigue, strength. These marks are not flaws to be concealed. They are the visible record of a life lived in the physical world, and they are beautiful.
- Work with minimal crews and flexible shooting plans that allow you to respond to the accidents of reality — a change in weather, an unexpected gesture, a moment of genuine emotion. The best material often comes from what was not planned. Create conditions that allow you to capture it.
- Edit elliptically, trusting the audience to fill in the gaps between scenes. Do not show everything. Do not explain everything. Let the audience do the work of connecting moments, inferring events, and constructing meaning. Their active participation will deepen their engagement with the story and create the sense that they are encountering a real life, not a constructed narrative.
- Find the myth within the real. The American West is both a real landscape and a mythic one. Your characters are both real people and archetypal figures. The work of Chloe Zhao cinema is to hold both of these truths simultaneously — to see the cowboy in the rodeo rider, the pioneer in the van dweller, the hero in the seasonal worker — without ever losing sight of the actual person, the actual place, the actual struggle beneath the myth.