Akira, a white Ford Transit van, was parallel-parked along Pacific Coast Highway one crisp, sun-dazzled February noon. Behind her, a showy gold-toned 500-horsepower Mountain Aire. Ahead of her, the open road. On the passenger seat, a denim patchwork quilt and a copy of “Story,” the screenwriting manual by Robert McKee. On the roof, an excessive amount of solar panelling.
“I would show you inside, but it’s just been gutted,” Joshua James Richards, a cinematographer who co-owns Akira with his partner, the writer-director Chloé Zhao, said, before reluctantly opening the sliding door. Inside was an unmade double bed, and no kitchen. “If any of the nomads saw that, they’d be ashamed of me.”
He meant Linda May and Swankie, two of the real-life van dwellers who play versions of themselves in Zhao’s new film, “Nomadland.” It stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a woman who hits the road after losing her husband, her job, and her town. The gypsum plant where she works closes, and the town becomes a modern-day Pompeii, abandoned mid-thought, coffee cups still on counters. Her conveyance is Vanguard, a careworn white van, its headlights searching out a new future, everything bungee-corded down. “I’m not homeless, I’m just houseless,” Fern says. Radical self-sufficiency is her true north.
Richards, who is thirty-six, with a scruffy beard, was wearing a navy barn jacket and grimy jeans. He was director of photography on the film, and head of production design. He outfitted Vanguard in the front yard of his and Zhao’s house, in Ojai. “A neighbor came up to me and gave me his friend’s card—a guy who decks out vans,” he said. “He thought I was trying to make it nicer!”
Richards and Zhao got Akira in 2018, and that summer drove all around the West, scouting locations, meeting van dwellers and train hoppers, and trying to be unobtrusive in R.V. parks and campgrounds; they became connoisseurs of Famous Dave’s. “Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Nevada. We were trying to write a movie and live in a van,” Richards said. “As soon as the door shuts, the curtains close, you’re in a cocoon. Once you close it, there’s no one knocking on the door. Ted Bundy vibes! You feel very safe.”
He clambered over some rocks that formed a breakwater between the highway and the surf. “This is how I grew up really, in Cornwall, sitting on rocks on the beach.” His family were nomadic, too, and not well-off. Born-again in a country of Anglicans, they moved every couple of years, as his father, a preacher, sought out new congregations. “It was always being the new boy at school. Casting out demons on a Sunday morning when you want to be skating with your mates.” He wanted to go to America, to find out how the story of Western expansion ends.
He found his way to N.Y.U.’s film school, and then to the campus bar, where he met Zhao. “There are two kinds of students,” he said. “Those who go home to work on their script, and those who go to the Apple Bar.” He went out West with her, to the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota. “It was the American West of my dreams,” he said. “There’d be multiple lightning storms going at once. You think about the religion of those people. Of course they have a thunder god!” On the reservation, Zhao made “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” using locals to tell a loosely fictional story about a Native boy and his sister. Richards shot it, and submitted it as his thesis.
“Tarantino says digital is the death of cinema,” he said. “Fuck you, man. Chloé could get no backing, because she’s a Chinese woman. With digital, we could make our own movies for a hundred thousand dollars at the level they could be shown as cinema.” Zhao’s next film is “Eternals,” a two-hundred-million-dollar Marvel movie with Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie, and Richards, operating the camera.
It was low tide, and a fisherman stood in the shallows, surf-casting, dark against the light-crazed sea. Richards held up his index fingers like goalposts, an imaginary viewfinder. “Madness and loneliness,” he said. “It’s Herzogian.” He said that he was starting a new project, focussed on the old surfers in the shore community known as carps. He looked up and down the beach. There were characters everywhere. “California nomads! It’s capturing something that’s kind of gone, hanging by a thread.”
What other story is there, anyway? Zhao, he said, had edited “Nomadland” during the pandemic. A sense of loss pervades the film; wistful dusks deepen into dark, as Fern walks across the Plains with her lantern. The Amazon warehouse, where she works during the holidays, is a fluorescent Death Star.
“We’re all in existential crisis,” Richards said. “We need to give ourselves time to mourn. To grieve for the life we’ve had that’s not coming back. When Fern walks out of the only life she’s ever known, it’s that complete paradigm shift we’ve all had.” ♦
