During the Labor Day weekend, “Port” (November 27, Focus) Werner Herzog theater at Telluride turned into a river of tears. And it did the same, at least, at Toronto’s 2,600 seater Roy Thomson Hall on Sunday evening. (Toronto is often waiting until after the opening weekend to show Telluride titles. Not this time.)
Anyone who has seen “Nomadland”, who received the best picture and director Oscar For Chloé Zhao 2021, knows that this director is skilled at eliciting emotions, from her actor and her audience. “I don’t think I’ve shown any of my films in a theater so great before,” she told IndieWire the next morning at Zoom. “It’s huge, and since it’s three floors and it’s round, it’s actually like the Globe Theater.”
It is Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, which Zhao had rebuilt on about 70 percent scale for “Hammen“A heartbreaking period family drama based on Maggie O’farrell’s best seller 2020 about William and Agnes Shakespeare (Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley). Well attended film Traces their early romance and marriage and the birth of three children, two girls and one boy, the harbor. Their lives are rocked by grief as they lose the harbor to the plague, and Shakespeare buries themselves by writing the tragedy “Hamlet.”
When Sam Mendes withdrew from developing the “port” in 2022, Amblin Entertainment called Zhao to check out her interest in director. She drove through New Mexico’s four corners on her way to Telluride. She had never read the book and initially said “No.” A few hours later, she got a call that Paul Mescal wanted to meet her at the festival. She did not know that his work (he had done “normal people” and “Haftun” was a secret show at the festival). “I had no idea who he was,” she said. “I googled him. I see pictures of him and saw a clip.” I like his vibe. Why don’t I just meet him? “
During their walk in the forest, they stopped at a stream. Zhao looked at his profile. “Have you thought about playing young Shakespeare?” she said. “‘Harbor’?” he said. “I read the book. You must read the book.”
“It was exciting to meet him,” she said, “because it was not so different than meeting my rodeo cowboy for” The Rider “, because I didn’t know him as an actor or what he’s doing, I just felt that this person could do this.”
Then she read the book. “If I had read the book, I wouldn’t have said,” No, “she said.” I had never heard of the book. “And she wanted Jessie Buckley to play Agnes.” I felt her work. I had a feeling that she would not be afraid. There was no vanity in her, which is what from McDormand had. I am neurodian, and when there is dissonance, I can’t work. I can’t look at the person. So I need that authenticity and vanity is the first enemy to authenticity. Actors, their great blessing that they can give to their authenticity and vanity.
Getting people to cry is not Zhao’s goal, in itself. “I never really know what I do when I was trying to do something, and why,” she said, “because I never really know what is real or what is true. Literal truth does not make sense to me. When something is completely present at the moment without dissonance at all, it is when I say,” Catch it immediately, “because it is the truth that can be linked to it.
Early in Zhao’s career, her films were reality -based. They tried to catch something in the real world. And then she directed Marvel’s “Eternals”, which is the opposite. While she got her Worst reviews For that movie, it taught her many skills, including how to build a world. The 16th century “port” needed to be created, built from the ground up. It is not except on the pages in O’Farrell’s book. This is one reason why Zhao turned to O’Farrell to write the script with her.
If O’Farrell refused to write the “port” script with her, Zhao would not have made the film, because she had built a world in the book. “Not only that, she had also been swimming in that dust for so long that she knows what she didn’t put in the book,” Zhao said. “To have that book, she must have written 10 of them to distill it in her research. I needed to know what is in the book, because things will change. We add scenes. And so without her I couldn’t have done it.”
O’Farrell made a first pass and arranged everything in chronological order. Zhao made another pass to condense it, choose things to hold and throw away. And with that spine they add and subtract “until we both go,” Ok, this is it, “said Zhao.
It helped to have Steven Spielberg on hand to give notes on the script and editing. After reading the first drafts, he told Zhao, “I miss a moment between Will and the port, between father and son.” So she wrote “Will you be brave?” scene. “He helped,” she said.
With regard to Zhao, she and O’Farrell and the actor and the crew contributed to the film every day, from Oscar-winning sound designer Johnnie Burn (“The Zone of Interest”) and ASC winning cinematographer łukasz żal (“Cold War”) to the co-editor Affonso Gon.
“The emotionalness of the film was the emotional truth about what we caught like a village,” she said. “We don’t know how we do it in any other way. We swam the river together. So that’s what we ended up with. And I have a belief that I am doing – I am not a traditional religious person – but this belief I have as an artist is that if we do that work and we have conviction and we show every day, something much and older is to try.
“The Port” must be filmed on a smaller scale than her Marvel film “Eternals.” “There is no other sunset that I could capture more dramatically than” Eternal, “Zhao said.” Catch sunsets in ancient places, with 500 people waiting and superhero-like, I’ve done enough sunsets now. In my 30s I chased the horizons as a nomadic person, because for me it was easier to keep running. It’s hard for me to sit with myself. ‘The port’ needed depth, maturity. I challenged myself: a frame, a room, a scene. You go?
The day when everyone on the set went deep was the death of the harbor. The night before, Jacobi came to Zhao and said, “I will break your heart tomorrow.” She said, “Good! I have high expectations.”
When the day came, “I didn’t know Jessie would scream,” Zhao said. “I didn’t know it. I didn’t know what Jacobi would do. I had no idea what the two would do. We create an environment. Then we have been together for a couple of months, threw the crew, everyone knew what today is, it was like a ceremony. It was not a scene. The diocese could release. Everyone in that moment we knew something from the beginning of the day. We need to stand.
One of the reasons why Zhao originally shook away from the book was to avoid managing a mother figure. “When you have a deep mother’s year, from your own personal life or ancestors, a story tells about motherhood,” she said. “That’s why, if you watch my movies before, that character is not there. She is either not present or dead. So when I heard about Synopsis, I said I was not anywhere close to doing it. I was also in the middle of going through the middle of life, (I was) to turn 40-41, around that time.” If I do not heal that wound, the other half will be hard. So I read the book and saw how Agnes loses her mother, lost her connection to nature, her connection to her child.
But then Zhao saw something she could grab, “a safe place,” she said, “which is actually William Shakespeare -side of the story, because I also wrote from myself. I fled into the fantasy world because I did not want to sit around the dinner table. It was not safe. So I know that the character, it is my safe place. Finally meet each other.
Crying together goes back to the Greeks. “In every domestic tradition you get around the fire, and then the shaman would channel a story,” said Zhao, who used daily meditations and dream meetings with his actors and arranged weekly rituals to release the steam.
“Animals, dreams, visions. People have strong feelings. Warriors come back from the battle. They are not just taking medication. They can go home again. They sit around in the fire, and they dance, and they release these feelings, and it turns into theater, these Greek tragedies. You stay together, everyone gets angry together, and they are raging.
At the end of the film, The Grief Agnes, who feels prepared for her child and her husband, comes away to write and assemble “Hamlet” to the Globe Theater to see the premiere. She stands on the outskirts of the stage with hundreds extra behind her. (Spoiler alert.) She is riveted when the actor who plays Prince Hamlet (Noah Juppe) is on stage with her husband, Will, who plays the ghost of her father, King Hamlet.
“There were four of the most difficult, but also life -changing days of my life,” Zhao said. “There is hardly any dialogue. This language is quite universal for everyone, right? Sometimes our truth can only be felt in silence and perhaps with Max Richter music playing in the background. All we pray is to see each other and seen without assessment, unconditional and it was healing and also hard to experience. Shakespeare worked hard all his life.
She added after the TIFF premiere, “and that’s how I felt yesterday in the theater. Only during the short time do you go to these events, you keep each other’s grief and anger and fear and shame in the short time.”
