Chloe Zhao's career success has come at a cost
Chloe Zhao admits that her career success has come at a cost.
Chloe Zhao's career has taken a toll on her personal life.
The 43-year-old filmmaker has enjoyed huge success in the movie industry, helming projects like Nomadland and Eternals - but Chloe admits that it's come at a cost, too.
Speaking to Sir Sam Mendes at a screening in London, Chloe explained: "It does cost something. And only now in my 40s, I’ve come to terms [with it], to say ‘That’s okay.’ Before, I used to hate that, and I would read as many self-help books as possible and go like, ‘I must fix this!’ But alchemy costs things. You can’t transform without letting something die.
"There’s a certain kind of life that I might have to give up. Certain things that I grew up watching in movies and I’m like, ‘Oh, I wish I had that. It seems so safe and cosy.’ It isn’t going to be like that."
Chloe believes it's difficult to balance a successful career with a happy family life.
The director said: "I used to think that you can have it all. You know, that you could be summer all the time. I hate winter — things die and compost. But now I realise, no, you have to let something die. And as we were talking about earlier, and in the film we tried to talk about, we live in a culture that didn’t teach us how to let go of things and how to let things die.
"So it feels like the shame – there’s something wrong with me that I can’t make certain parts of my life work, you know, like, why don’t I have this? Why don’t I have that? You know, I don’t have children. I really want to, but I started to wonder if that was [ever] going to come."
Chloe previously admitted to feeling like an "outsider".
The director told The Talks: "Wherever I go, I am drawn to outsiders because I am one myself. And I feel like an outsider almost wherever I go.
"Loneliness is a big word for me. There is a difference between loneliness and solitude, for me personally. I’ve also done a lot of traveling alone in my car when I was making my first two films."
Chloe also enjoys the challenge of making films about people living on the fringes of society.
She said: "If I were living in China or the UK, I would be drawn to the people who live in the peripheral society in those places, too. But in America, there has definitely been a trend of minimalism living, decluttering and the tiny home … All of us are feeling not as enamoured with the pressure of a capitalist economy or consumer-driven economy.
"We all felt a bit tired because we realised it doesn’t necessarily make us happy. We are more miserable because our expectations for happiness come from when your expectations and reality meet each other, but a capitalist society has to keep consuming if it wants to survive."
