The modern director is obsessed with the aerial drone shot. It is a lazy impulse, a desperate attempt to inject artificial scale into a film that lacks true emotional weight. In Nomadland, Chloé Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards confronted the massive, intimidating landscapes of the American West. But they refused to leave the earth.
Production Mechanics: The Terrestrial Perspective
Zhao’s primary directive was absolute, grounded authenticity. She and lead actress Frances McDormand did not retreat to luxury trailers between setups; they lived out of vans during the production. They populated the supporting cast with real, non-professional nomads.
To maintain this terrestrial, human perspective visually, Richards shot exclusively with wide Ultra Prime lenses while keeping the camera strictly on the ground. Bref, the audience is forced to experience the overwhelming scale of the environment exactly as Fern does—from the dirt.
Racing the Sun
C’est le risque du métier. True naturalism requires agonizing logistical sacrifice. Richards relied almost entirely on available, natural light, meaning the production’s most crucial scenes had to be captured during the fleeting “magic hour” (or golden hour).
This is not a casual artistic choice; it is a brutal logistical constraint. The magic hour only provides roughly 20 minutes of usable lighting per day. The entire production day must be reverse-engineered to accommodate this tiny sliver of time. It requires a crew that operates with the precision of a military unit, ready to execute complex tracking shots before the sun vanishes. The result is an undeniable, haunting luminescence that no grip truck could ever replicate.
Insights into Chloé Zhao and Frances McDormand’s immersive production methods, and Joshua James Richards’s use of Ultra Prime lenses and 20-minute golden hour shooting windows, were compiled from critical analysis in The Edge SUSU.