Author: Maria Fontoura
Translator: issac
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Rolling Stone (January 26, 2021)
On November 7, the dark clouds over Ohai, California, had dissipated, and Zhao Ting couldn't stop laughing. This dreary Saturday, she had planned to stay at home, spending time in post-production of Marvel's Eternals, which will be released later this year. But just five days before the pain (or centuries ago?). She changed her plans after the news came out that Joe Biden had become the winner of the presidential election. Now, it's time to celebrate with pizza and tiramisu from her favorite Italian restaurant – damn lactose intolerance.
"For some reason," she said in a humorous tone, "the sun is out and it's beautiful outside." So, I might spend a day ordering a lot of food that I tell myself never to eat and enjoy the sun."
As it turned out, this was only a brief respite. Biden's victory gave way to denial and violent resistance from Trump supporters, and the coronavirus crisis raged wildly. The severity of the epidemic has not only delayed the release of "Eternals", which was scheduled to be released in November, but also delayed the release of Zhao Ting's third independent film, "The Land of No One", which is expected to compete for the Oscar. Originally scheduled to be released in December, the film is now rescheduled to be released simultaneously in theaters and on hulu platforms on February 19.
"The Land of No One"
For Zhao Ting, 38, it's a long road. Starting in the fall of 2018, she shot both films almost simultaneously for most of the two years. When Marvel hired her to direct The Eternals last September, she began shooting "The Land of NoBody" like a guerrilla war, which lasted four months, depicting a lower-class American class of older itinerant workers who lived in vans and chased seasonal jobs to survive. With the exception of Francis McDormand and David Stryzern, all of these people were real-life nomads. The film provides a unique, poignant diagnosis and treatment of the current cultural era.
"It's a vitamin injection," McDormand said of the film. "This period of time has broken the empathetic nature of people, because everyone needs this society very much, and we are very eager to connect. People who have seen it (told me) it's a catharsis. It takes them out of their small selves and makes them wonder what the whole world is doing."
Although "No One Land" is at the crossroads of policy and its impact on humanity, it is clearly a film that has nothing to do with politics. Zhao Ting respects the characters in her shots too much, so she doesn't reduce them to the embodiment of a metaphor or idea. Their stories are the most important; their voting habits don't matter. They're poor and need government services — are they liberals? They're older, and they're white — are they Trump supporters? Not only have these issues never been mentioned, you never even thought about them.
This neutrality is unique to Zhao Ting's work. While she insisted on focusing on neglected people — whether it was her 2015 debut " The Song My Brother Taught Me to Sing " Or " The Knight " , which focused on lakota Sioux teenagers living on the South Dakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation — she didn't force you to accept anything. She's not Alan Sorkin. In real life, Zhao Ting may have publicly expressed her bias toward the left, but on the screen, her only goal seems to be to introduce you as a person to another person's world. In a world where every detail is rendered so delicately that you can almost breathe in their air and feel your chest rise and fall with them. The movies she makes are like a heartbeat.
The Knight
"I have my own political views — strong opinions," Ms. Zhao said. "But as a storyteller, I'm not fit to convince people to believe my point of view. I do that at the dinner table. But when I'm interested in a world and the people in it, I'm more interested in creating the experience as authentic as possible for the characters."
For all of her budget-limited indie films, that meant blending in with a group until she found someone who could grab her interests — and was ready for close-ups. She often goes to bars, attends local events, and even goes to gas stations, chats with people, and looks for compelling stories that she might adapt into movies.
In composing The Song My Brother Taught Me to Sing, she focused her attention on a young horse whisperer named Brady Jandro. After he wrestled at a rodeo, she often called him to report the situation. Jandlow, who played Brady Blackburn in Knights, experienced painful recovery and adjustment, and because of his injury, he may never be able to ride again. His father and sister are played by his own father and sister; his friend Ryan, who falls and is paralyzed at his own athletic meeting, is played by his friend Ryan. The script, while not a one-to-one re-creation of their lives, fully embodies their personalities and absorbs the basic details of their experiences.
"The Song My Brother Taught Me to Sing"
"She was basically like a journalist," McDormand said. "During the casting process, she asked to meet the people in my life. She asks questions, learns about your story, and then creates a character based on your story. This brings depth to her stories, and she believes the magic of those stories will create something extraordinary.
Ms. Zhao said it was surprisingly easy to strike up conversations with strangers, and the farther away you are from america's crowded coastal cities, the easier it is. ("In Pine Ridge, if the door isn't locked, I'll go straight into someone else's house," she said. But it takes a little effort to build personal relationships, especially in remote places, where the media may come once or twice a year, report on some of the dilemmas that are happening, and then disappear. Zhao Ting looks for the story behind the story. She knows how to build trust.
"Especially in marginalized communities, people have a bunch of things to say to you because they think that's what you want to hear," she said. So I usually have to sit there and listen to them preach. And I said, 'Hey, okay, which soccer team do you support?' I always like to study things about humans. And then once you get to that point —about dinner, about our high school sweethearts, about things we all understand, things we all share —then they say, 'Well, maybe there's more.'" That's when I invest."
She applied this methodology to "The Land of NoBody", which had a profound and touching effect. Some of the characters are described in journalist Jessica Brudd's 2017 nonfiction book of the same name, based on which the film is based. Others were met on the road by Zhao Ting and McDormand, who chose the book and was also the film's producer.
For more than four months, Zhao Ting and her actors drove their own vans through South Dakota, Nebraska, Arizona, Nevada and California, interspersed with stories of people they met. McDormand worked side by side with his fellow nomads, packing boxes in warehouses in the Amazon, harvesting sugar beet processing sugar, and cleaning toilets at desert campgrounds. There is no pity or manipulation in their depictions. As McDormand puts it, Zhao "draws a clear line between emotion and sentimentality."
"Each of us will experience our own doom at some point," Ms. Zhao said of the film's themes. "We are forced to fight, sometimes to redefine ourselves, because everything that once defined us has disappeared ... The ability to persevere, to find a new life and self-awareness — for me, that's the human spirit."
McDormand plays Fern, who has been looking for his way out after the death of his husband and the closure of a manufacturing plant that underpins the town's economy. She had no job, couldn't afford a house, and had to go on her own. She is a stoic and independent person, but at the same time a warm and gentle person - a mixture of traits that Zhao Ting extracted from the real warrior McDormand, and even herself.
Zhao Ting said: "Ever since I started preparing for my first film, I've been living on the road, in cars, in campsites, in motels. I spend a lot of time alone. I like it. Finding a sense of calm and solitude is one of the hardest things to do, but having it is also an incredible thing because it allows you to get through almost everything."
Zhao Ting has been wandering around since she was a child. An only child who grew up in Beijing, she was a "troublemaker" at school, tearing off the cover of textbooks in order to hide cartoons in class. She is obsessed with Western culture and binge-watching movies like MTV, Terminator and Nuns Crazy Too. (She's a movie freak, and we're chatting on Zoom with stills from 2001: A Space Odyssey.) Her parents indulged her restless spirits and sent her to boarding school in London at the age of 14. But by the time she was 17, she couldn't stay, and her desire for America was too strong. She told her parents she wanted to go "where the Hollywood Sign is," and she transferred to Los Angeles High School.
"I know too little," Zhao Ting said with a smile. "Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince — that's what I really care about. I was well protected and ignorant. But when you put me in downtown Los Angeles in 1999, I found a lot of things." She laughed. "There's a lot to discover."
2001: A Space Odyssey
Recognizing that Zhao Ting knew nothing about the complexities of her new home, a high school teacher in the government department (under Feinstein's guidance) tutored her every day after school on American history, which sparked her interest in politics. Zhao Ting later studied political science at Mount Holyoke University in Massachusetts, and after working as a bartender in Manhattan for a time, studied film at New York University.
Her films are typical of American cinema — her shots project affectionately on our plains and mountains, our typical remote areas — a result of her innate curiosity and desire to travel. But she also has less "burden" on her shoulders, because she is from China, "for history, for the meaning of everything, because I am not involved in it." Zhao Ting said. "Then I have more freedom."
One project that Zhao has been working on for several years is the biographical film by Bays Rivers, who was once a slave and became the first black American marshal west of the Mississippi River in Oklahoma in the late 19th century. His story played a key role in Damon Lindelof's Watchmen episode, inspiring the idea of a subversive genre that the original superhero was a black man. But Zhao Ting said she was not upset that Lindelof was ahead of her, and there were still many stories to tell.
Watchmen
"I hope there are more movies and TV series about this person being made," she said. We should have paid attention to him long ago. There are not many specific stories about his early life. At the time, Indian territory, in what is now Oklahoma, was considered "lawless." So people from all walks of life went there; it was a real melting pot, and it was brutal. So, before the state agencies came in and defined here, there was a lot of tension here, but there was also a lot of cooperation between a lot of people. This is the beauty of America, and it should not be forgotten. Something about that time —and it was really the end of the Old West—I'd love to explore and capture."
But first, we'll see how Zhao Ting's "Eternals, the Eternals, is the key to the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe." The movie already has a voice, and Marvel promises to have its first open gay superhero. If a big-budget, rock-and-roll," star-studded film (Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Kumel Nanjani, Brian Terry Henry) seems to be a far cry from an intimate, naturalistic film by Zhao Ting herself, then we need to think again.
"Eternals" set makeup photo
"Not only did Ting Zhao make extraordinary, small-scale, personal films in an extraordinary, small-scale, personal way, but her ideas were grand, cosmic, and incredible, which was a perfect fit with what we wanted to do," said Marvel chief Kevin Feige, who thinks the tone zhao created for the film was the best he's ever seen. "The Eternals is a grand story that spans thousands of years. And she's just done."
The heroes may be immortal aliens, but Zhao said she hopes the film will feel down-to-earth and immersive, "like you're with these characters." In fact, she used the equipment she used to shoot No Man's Land. While her cast is all top-notch this time, her approach — infusing their humanity into the film through dialogue with the actors — is the same.
She said: "I always try very hard to get any character to have the same amount of performance. I want to continue to work in this way in the future, both big and small. Because I always find that people are just so interesting. Did you know?"