Tutorials Video

Chloé Zhao: From Boarding School Outsider to Marvel's Eternals

Profile · ~16 min

Overview

Chloé Zhao (born 1982) moved from Beijing to a boarding school in London and then Los Angeles as a teenager before studying political science at Mount Holyoke College and film at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, going on to win the Academy Award for Best Director for Nomadland (2020), becoming the first woman of color and second woman ever to win the award.

What You Need

Where to Start: Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), The Rider (2017), Nomadland (2020)

Steps

Student years: boarding schools, then formal film school at NYU

Zhao attended a boarding school in London and later Los Angeles as a Chinese teenager navigating unfamiliar cultures and languages, before studying political science at Mount Holyoke College and eventually pursuing an MFA in film production at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts: a formal film education, but one arrived at after a genuinely displaced, cross-cultural upbringing that she has cited as shaping her interest in outsider and drifter characters.

Low-budget beginnings: casting non-actors on a Lakota reservation

Zhao's first two features, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), were both shot on very low budgets on and around the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, casting real members of the community as versions of themselves rather than professional actors. An ultra-independent, documentary-adjacent method developed out of necessity that became her signature approach.

The Rider: critical breakthrough on a scale that opened studio doors

The Rider, based closely on the real life of injured rodeo rider Brady Jandreau (playing a version of himself), earned widespread critical acclaim on the festival circuit and demonstrated that Zhao's low-budget, non-actor, landscape-driven method could produce work with major studio-level critical impact, directly leading to her being hired for Marvel's Eternals.

Nomadland and the pivot to studio-scale filmmaking

Nomadland (2020), blending professional actor Frances McDormand with real-life nomadic workers playing themselves, won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, making Zhao the first woman of color and only the second woman in Oscar history to win Best Director, and she then moved directly into directing the studio blockbuster Eternals for Marvel, an unusually fast jump from micro-budget indie to major franchise filmmaking.

Pro Tips

Casting non-professional actors to play close versions of themselves, blending documentary authenticity with scripted narrative structure. A technique carried consistently from her first feature through Nomadland.
Naturalistic, available-light landscape cinematography (developed closely with cinematographer Joshua James Richards) that treats the American West's open spaces as a central emotional and thematic presence, not just scenery.
Blending professional and non-professional performers within the same film, requiring a directing approach flexible enough to get consistent, believable performances from both types of actors simultaneously.
A demonstrated ability to carry an intimate, character-driven directing style into large-scale studio blockbuster filmmaking, rather than treating indie and studio filmmaking as requiring entirely different skill sets.

Knowledge Base

What You'll Learn

Zhao's path from a displaced, cross-cultural upbringing through formal film school into ultra-low-budget reservation filmmaking, and then rapidly into Best Director recognition and studio blockbuster work, is one of the more compressed indie-to-studio trajectories in recent film history.

Awards & Recognition

Zhao won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director for Nomadland in 2021, becoming the first woman of color and second woman ever to win Best Director, alongside a Golden Lion win at the Venice Film Festival for the same film.

Why Zhao Still Matters

Her method of blending professional actors with non-professional performers playing versions of themselves, refined across genuinely low-budget independent productions, offers a directly replicable model for filmmakers without large budgets to still achieve significant critical and awards recognition.

Where This Fits

This guide covers one specific part of story and editing craft. The wider picture, hooks, stakes, structural templates, pacing against retention data, and how structure gets rewritten in the edit, is in Story Structure for YouTube: Hooks, Stakes, and Payoffs, which frames the discipline as a whole and links out to the detailed guides underneath it, including this one. If you are starting from scratch rather than solving a specific problem, read that first and come back here.

FAQ

Q: Did Chloé Zhao attend film school?
A: Yes, after studying political science at Mount Holyoke College, she earned an MFA in film production from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, though her most distinctive filmmaking method (casting real community members as versions of themselves) developed through her subsequent ultra-low-budget features rather than in film school itself.

Q: How did Zhao go from indie filmmaking to directing a Marvel movie?
A: The critical acclaim and industry attention generated by The Rider (2017) demonstrated that her intimate, naturalistic directing style could translate to significant impact, and combined with Nomadland's Best Director Oscar win, led directly to Marvel Studios hiring her to direct Eternals (2021), an unusually fast transition from micro-budget indie to major studio franchise filmmaking.