What to Watch Next If You Liked Nomadland

By reminding viewers of the wide world beyond their four walls, Chloé Zhao's Nomadland was the perfect lockdown film. Now, with life slowly starting to return to something approaching normality, Cinema Paradiso takes a closer look at the making of this landmark picture and recommends 10 titles to try if you liked it.

By winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, Chloé Zhao's Nomadland (2020) joined Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), Michael Anderson's Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Barry Levinson's Rain Man (1988) and Peter Farrelly's Green Book (2018) in an exclusive club of road movies that have won Hollywood's biggest prize over the last 94 years. Moreover, the story of a widow searching for a niche in a changing world also won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, as well as being nominated for five other Oscars, seven BAFTAs and four Golden Globes.

The Book

American journalist Jessica Bruder first began reporting on the rise of nomadism among senior citizens in 2011. Three years earlier, the US economy had tanked during the so-called Credit Crunch and thousands had lost their homes in the ensuing subprime mortgage crisis. In 2014, Bruder wrote a cover story for Harper's Magazine entitled 'The End of Retirement', in which she revealed that a growing number of sixtysomethings and over were taking to the roads in search of work in the gig economy because they couldn't afford to put their feet up.

Inspired by the workampers she met, Bruder bought her own secondhand van - which she named 'Halen' - and embarked upon a three-year, 15,000-mile odyssey during which she met the likes of white-bearded Bob Wells, who shares his experiences on a YouTube show and the cheapRVliving.com website; Charlene Swankie, who got her motor running in 2009 after amassing a clutch of academic qualifications and kayaking in all 50 states; and Linda May, a grandmother in her mid-sixities who had endured a number of unfulfilling jobs before setting off in a trailer dubbed 'The Squeeze Inn' in order to earn the cash to build a sustainable, off-the-grid 'Earthship'.

The Brooklyn-based Bruder forged a close connection with May, while taking such short-term jobs as working in an Amazon warehouse and at a sugar beet harvesting plant. Consequently, Linda became the central figure in Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, which was published by W.W. Norton in September 2017.

Such was the book's impact that Bruder liaised with Brett Story to make the short documentary, CamperForce, which was executive produced by Laura Poitras, whose own films - My Country, My Country (2006), The Oath (2010), the Oscar-winning Citzenfour (2014) and Risk (2016) - are all available to rent on high-quality disc from Cinema Paradiso.

A month after publication, Bruder was approached by Jasmine Lake from the United Talent Agency offering to represent the book. Five days later, fellow UTA agent Brian Swardstrom brought the text to the attention of his husband, Peter Spears, who had acted in features like Charles Shyer's Father of the Bride, Part II (1995), Don Roos's The Opposite of Sex (1998) and Nancy Meyers's Something's Gotta Give (2003) before causing something of a scandal with the short, Ernest and Bertram (2002), which depicted the beloved Sesame Street (1969-) duo of Bert and Ernie as gay lovers.

Spears had spent a year trying to produce an adaptation of André Aciman's novel, Call Me By Your Name, and was about to embark upon the awards merry-go-round with Luca Guadagnino's interpretation, which harks back to the Italian summer of 1983 to chart teenager Timothy Chalamet's crush on academic father Michael Stuhlbarg's new intern, Armie Hammer. However, he immediately spotted the cinematic potential in Bruder's non-fiction tome. Swardstrom also mentioned the book to his client, Frances McDormand, whose career has been covered in Cinema Paradiso's popular Getting to Know series. She agreed to option the book with Spears and they started searching for a suitable director.

The Director

It was McDormand's idea to entrust Nomadland to Chloé Zhao and a deal was struck when Spears and the two women found themselves at the 33rd Independent Spirit Awards in March 2018. In the event, McDormand was the only winner for her performance in Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). But producer, actress and director hit it off immediately and Zhao began work on the screenplay.

Chloé Zhao was born Zhao Ting in Beijing on 31 March 1982. Her mother, Huang Tao, was a hospital worker who had been a member of a People's Liberation Army performance troupe. However, father Zhao Yuji divorced her when his daughter was at high school and married comic actress, Song Dandan. As a keen film fan (the first she saw was James Cameron's True Lies, 1994), Zhao was familiar with her stepmother's work. But she preferred pictures like Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together (1997) - which she now watches ritually before starting her own projects - although she was also heavily into Japanese manga comics and Michael Jackson.

Despite her father being become rich through property and equity investments made while working as an executive with the Shougang steel group, Zhao was denied entry into the Youth Communist Party because of her poor grades and she was sent to the Brighton College boarding school at 14. Here, she felt like an outsider because she initially spoke so little English and became something of a rebel. She has since likened the experience to being at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books and films (all of which are available on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K from Cinema Paradiso).

Zhao felt more comfortable in her Koreatown apartment, however, while she completed her high-schooling in Los Angeles before studying political science at Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, the alma mater of Emily Dickinson, who was played by Cynthia Nixon in Terence Davies's A Quiet Passion (2016). Having made the shorts, Post (2008) and The Atlas Mountains (2009), Zhao went east to enrol in the graduate film programme at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, where she had Spike Lee as one of her tutors (see Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert Guide to find out more about his career). Moreover, she made an assured start with the short, Daughters (2010), which follows the efforts of a 14 year-old girl to extricate herself from an arranged marriage in rural China.

In 2011, Zhao returned to her homeland to make her second year short, Benachin, the story of an only son who surprises his family by bringing home a Senegalese girlfriend, which Zhao has joked owed too much to Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern (1991). Back in New York, she formed a personal and professional partnership with cinematographer Joshua James Richards, who hails from Penzance in Cornwall. He joined her on the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to shoot her thesis project, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), which became her debut feature in centring on a rebellious Lakota Sioux teenager (John Reddy), who has to decide whether to make his way in the wider world or stay to look after his younger sister (Jashaun St John). After immersing herself in the local culture and producing 30 drafts of the screenplay, Zhao was dismayed to learn that her funding had fallen through. What's more, on the day she heard the news, her apartment was burgled and she lost all of the footage stored on her laptops and hard drives.

Cobbling together $100.000, she completed the shoot with a skeleton crew. Sadly, this fine film is not currently available on disc. But Cinema Paradiso users can enjoy The Rider (2017), which was also photographed by Richards at Pine Ridge on an even tighter budget. Reflecting Zhao's love of the American West, it features a standout performance from first-time actor Brady Jandreau as a rodeo star who has to find a way to make a living after being ordered not to ride again after incurring a serious head injury.

About two-thirds of the action was based on Jandreau's own life and it was this ability to draw compelling performances from non-actors that convinced McDormand that she had found her next director when she caught The Rider at the Toronto Film Festival.

The Story

'I'm not homeless,' a sixtysomething woman tells the young girl she used to tutor after bumping into her while out shopping with her mother. 'I'm just houseless.' This distinction is the essence of Nomadland, which strays from Bruder's text by centring around a fictional character named Fern (Frances McDormand). She has recently been widowed and decides to sell up and try her luck on the road when the US Gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada closes down in 2011.

While working for the winter in an Amazon packaging hub, Fern makes friends with Linda, who invites her to the forthcoming desert rendezvous in Arizona to learn more about life on the road. Fern declines, as she need to find employment. But, after she suffers a puncture, a lecture on preparedness from the experienced Swankie persuades Fern to stop seeing herself as an outsider and embrace the van-dwelling community.

During a stint at the Cedar Pass Campground in Badlands National Park, South Dakota, Fern befriends Dave (David Strathairn), who develops feelings for her. She visits him in hospital after he falls ill and, while they are working at the Wall Drug Store restaurant, she encourages him to convalesce with the estranged son who is about to become a father for the first time. Fern presses on to take a job at a sugar beet processing plant in Nebraska. But she has a family encounter of her own when her van breaks down and she has to ask her judgemental sister, Dolly (Melissa Smith), for a loan.

Convinced she's doing the right thing by keeping moving, Fern pays Dave a visit before returning to Amazon for the Christmas rush. At the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, she chats with founder Bob about the loss of her husband and his son's suicide. Laying her ghosts during a trip to the now deserted Empire, Fern disposes of the possessions she has been keeping in storage and heads back on to the highway.

The Shoot

Prior to meeting Spears and McDormand, Zhao had been working on a project about younger vandwellers, but admits her 'terrible script' wasn't coming together. Instead of focusing on the bohemian #vanlife movement, therefore, she was happy to switch to the Baby Boom generation that Bruder had profiled. Although she had been hired as a consulting producer, Bruder left Zhao to make her own film. However, she did make available interviews and photographs that she had not used for her book, in case these 'B-sides' and 'outtakes' could be useful.

As she had to work on the fly, Zhao sent team members ahead to scout locations and interview anyone who might make an interesting character. She incorporated these new elements into her scenario so that her footage would be as authentic as possible and so that the workampers could hear their own voice in the dialogue. Indeed, as she was so keen to let the non-actors express themselves in their own way, she decided that Fern had to be a listener, who could help connect the audience with the roving way of life.

As Zhao had committed to direct the big-budget Marvel Cinematic Universe picture, Eternals, she had to pack a lot into the four-month shoot, which started in the autumn of 2018. Travelling in a van named 'Akira' (after Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 anime, which is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K), Zhao shot her first scene in the Badlands National Park, as both Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider had been filmed in South Dakota in September and the good vibes clearly rubbed off.

The production would also visit Arizona, Nebraska, Nevada and California, with the weather often dictating the schedule. In addition to having Richards as her cinematographer, Zhao also added Mollye Asher and Dan Janvey to her team. The latter had produced Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) and would reunite with him for Wendy (2020). Moreover, he had further experience of working on films blending fact and fiction, most notably Jonas Carpignano's remarkable migration drama, Mediterranea (2015), which had an entirely non-professional cast.

Shooting with a budget around the $5 million mark, Zhao had to make the most of every second. But she was keen not to overtax McDormand (who was also serving as a co-producer) so that she remained spontaneous on camera. Nothing fazed the dual Oscar winner while on the road, however, and she relaxed by playing Travel Scrabble. As readers of the Cinema Paradiso Getting to Know article will be aware, McDormand had often said that she would change her name to Fern and hit the tarmac when she was 65 and she confided in one interviewer that there was a lot of herself in the character, right down to the autumn leaf-patterned plates that Fern treasures, which McDormand's father had given to her as a graduation present.

No sooner had Zhao completed the shoot than she was due to start work on Eternals. Not much time, therefore, to spend in Ojai in the Topatopa Mountains with dogs Taco and Rooster or her three chickens, Red, Cebe and Lucille. But, even though she claims (as the descendant of rice farmers) to be a homebody, Zhao has spent much of her own life on the move. Perhaps that's why she is able to identify with the van-dwellers and why she couched Nomadland as a neo-Western, in which the progeny of the pioneers who had settled the West hit the trail (under a very different form of horse power) on their own journeys of self-rediscovery. It would explain why the first and final shots of Fern resemble those of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in John Ford's classic Western, The Searchers (1956).

Depression and Recession Films

No film directed by a woman had ever won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director and Actress. But Nomadland completed the hat-trick on 25 April 2005 and Zhao only missed out on winning three Oscars in one night when Mikkel E.G. Nelson took the editing prize for his work on Darius Marder's Sound of Metal. Yet, while the American news networks went big on the fact that Zhao had become the first woman of colour to achieve such success at the Oscars, there was no mention of her at all in bulletins back in China.

A few articles picked up on the fact that Nomadland was part of a growing number of films reflecting the impact of the Great Recession on ordinary citizens. As opposed to the likes of Jason Reitman's Up in the Air (2009), Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), J.C. Chandor's Margin Call (2011) and Adam McKay's The Big Short (2016), which dealt with the high financial aspects of the 2008 Global Economic Crisis, Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008), Andrea Arnold's American Honey (2016), Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete (2017) and Debra Granik's Leave No Trace (2018) delved into the everyday dilemmas facing those having to struggle to survive.

Back in the 1930s, Hollywood itself fell victim to the Great Depression following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. But, while rare realist dramas like William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road (1933) tried to confront the realities of the poverty and despair that most Americans faced, the corporate suits who bankrolled the studios demanded escapist entertainment to keep social and political themes off the screen and allow audiences to forget their troubles for a few hours in the darkness. Moreover, with the enforcement of the Production Code after 1934, they cracked down on the spate of gangster films that had made heroes of bootleggers and racketeers.

Comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were seemingly forever on the road in search of a square meal, a bed and a job. Things didn't work out for the Little Tramp in Modern Times (1936) and went wrong with hilarious inevitability for Stan and Ollie in Hog Wild (1930), The Music Box (1932), Busy Bodies and Dirty Work (both 1933), which can all be rented from Cinema Paradiso on the shorts collection entitled, A Job to Do.

Musicals like Lewis Milestone's Hallelujah, I'm a Bum and Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933 (both 1933) sought to unite the nation with a song and dance. And, as we have seen in the Instant Expert's Guide to Frank Capra, underdog tales like the Gary Cooper vehicles. Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1935) and Meet John Doe (1941), examined life on the margins with a feel-good factor that led to the coining of the term 'Capra-corn'. Similarly, chance encounters across the class divide, such as Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (1936) and 5th Avenue Girl (1939), put a screwball satirical spin on the scene, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal policies that would eventually manage to kickstart the country.

But it was only after the worst of the crisis had passed that Hollywood was able to reflect upon a desperate decade in such John Steinbeck adaptations as Lewis Milestone's Of Mice and Men (1939) and John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Academy Award for Best Director, even though Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (both 1940) took Best Picture. Ford would also direct Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, which was released in the same year that Preston Sturges gloriously lampooned Hollywood's response to the national emergency in Sullivan's Travels (1941).

The 1930s faded into memory in the boom period that followed the Second World War, as suburbia embraced consumerism. But odd titles like Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) exploited the decade's sense of hopelessness, while Robert Mulligan's adaptation of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) used its attitude to race relations to challenge entrenched positions in the face of the rising Civil Rights movement.

Director Sydney Pollack twice returned to the decade of his birth in the 1960s, as he accompanied railroad agent Robert Redford into a dwindling Mississippi town in This Property Is Condemned (1966) and followed the fortunes of Jane Fonda and her fellow dance marathon contestants in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), which was adapted from a Depression-era novel by Horace McCoy.

Another book, Joe David Brown's Addie Pray, provided the material for Peter Bogdanovich's monochrome gem, Paper Moon (1973), which saw Tatum O'Neal become the youngest-ever winner of an Academy Award alongside father Ryan in the story of a Depression con artist and a quick-witted orphan. John Huston's Annie (1982) would also focus on the hard-knock life of a parentless girl who is appalled by a Hooverville camp on the edge of town full of dispossessed souls seeking work and shelter.

But many Depression features during the New Hollywood era presented uncompromising recollections of the hardscrabble existence that had been toned down during the studio years. Among the most compelling were Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha (1972), Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us (both 1974) and Walter Hill's Hard Times (1975), with the latter anticipating Ron Howard's Cinderella Man (2005) by focusing on the murky world of 1930s boxing. How different everything looked to the family residing on a Virginia mountain in the long-running TV favourite, The Waltons (1971-81).

Riding the rails was the only way for many to get across the country at the height of the Depression, as Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North Pole (1973) and Hal Ashby's Bound For Glory (1976) ably testify. Folk singer Woody Guthrie, the subject of the latter biopic, used to call this "hard travellin'" and its exploration of the itinerant nature of job-seeking makes it an ideal companion piece to Nomadland.

Woody Allen put a lighter spin on the toughest of times in Zelig (1983) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). But the fact that the 'Greed Is Good' mantra of the 'Me Decade' produced so many casualties prompted the production of a number of films about the 30s ordeal. Among the finest were Robert Benton's Places in the Heart (1984) and Héctor Babenco's Ironweed (1987), which respectively earned a Best Actress Oscar for Sally Field and nominations for Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Even Disney recalled these dark days in Jeremy Kagan's The Journey of Natty Gann (1985), which sees tomboy Meredith Salenger set out with a rescued wolfdog to find her workaway father.

The fallout from Reaganomics continued into the 1990s and prompted Gary Sinise to revisit Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1992). The decade's other Depression sagas proved an eclectic group, with family ties driving Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill (1993), lost love inspiring James Foley's Two Bits (1995) and the relationship between prison guards and their inmates bolstering Frank Darabont's much-loved adaptation of Stephen King's The Green Mile (1999).

Homer's Odyssey and Guthrie-style folk ditties combined in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Joel and Ethan Coen's paean to a time when adversity brought out the best and the worst in people. Dane Lars von Trier riffs on a similar theme in the audaciously stylised Dogville (2003), while the fortunes of a famous racehorse and the animals performing in a travelling circus provide some old-fashioned family entertainment in Gary Ross's Seabiscuit (2003) and Francis Lawrence's Water For Elephants (2011). By this time, of course, film-makers had recessional misery on their own doorstep and the focus shifted on to alternately gritty and witty items like Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, Todd Phillips's The Hangover (both 2009), Gavin O'Connor's Warrior (2011), Ramin Bahrani's 99 Homes (2014) and David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water (2016).

Adventure in the Hopfields (1954)

Long before Fern toiled at a sugar beet plant, East End families used to head into Kent to spend their summers hop-picking in order to get some fresh air away from the inner-city grime and earn a few bob into the bargain. Young Mandy Miller's mother won't let her go in this adaptation of Nora Lavin and Molly Thorp's book, The Hop Dog (which can be found on the BFI's Children's Film Foundation Bumper Box, Volume 3). However, in need of money after she accidentally breaks a cherished ornament, she persuades neighbour Mona Washbourne that she has permission to go, only to fall foul of local boys who lock her in a windmill. If you fancy something more grown-up or up to date, try Frances Lea's Strawberry Fields (2011).