Writing in the Style of Chloe Zhao

The Principle

Chloe Zhao writes about America the way only someone who was not born here can — with the fresh eyes of the outsider who sees both the beauty and the brutality that familiarity renders invisible. Born in Beijing, educated in London, and drawn to the American West, Zhao brings to her screenwriting a perspective that is simultaneously anthropological and deeply personal, observing the landscapes, communities, and mythologies of the United States with the precision of someone who chose this country and must continually reckon with that choice.

Her first three features — Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), The Rider (2017), and Nomadland (2020) — form a trilogy of American marginality, each centering communities that exist at the edges of the dominant culture: the Lakota Sioux of Pine Ridge, the rodeo cowboys of the Great Plains, the modern nomads living in vans across the West. These are not documentary subjects but dramatic characters whose real lives provide the material from which Zhao constructs narratives of searching, loss, and tentative belonging.

Zhao's signature technique is the use of non-professional actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Brady Jandreau in The Rider is a real rodeo rider playing a character based on his own experience. The van-dwellers in Nomadland are real nomads whose lives inform and appear in the film. This method produces a quality of authenticity that conventional casting cannot replicate — a way of being on screen that is not performance but presence — and Zhao's screenwriting is designed to accommodate and amplify this quality.

Screenplay Architecture and Structure

Zhao's screenplays are structured as journeys — geographical and spiritual — through the American landscape. Nomadland follows Fern from Amazon warehouse to desert encampment to coastal campground, and each stop is both a physical location and a station in her interior pilgrimage. The Rider follows Brady through his recovery from a rodeo injury, and the structure maps his physical healing against his psychological reckoning with the loss of the only identity he has ever known.

Her narratives are episodic rather than tightly plotted. Scenes connect through emotional logic and the protagonist's movement through space rather than through causal chains of events. This episodic structure mirrors the lives she depicts — lives organized around work, weather, and the road rather than around dramatic incident.

She builds her screenplays to accommodate improvisation and documentary moments. The scripts provide a narrative framework — a character, a journey, a destination — within which real people can contribute their own stories, their own language, their own ways of being. The screenplay is a container for reality rather than a substitute for it.

Her act structure is subtle. The turns in a Zhao screenplay are internal — a shift in the protagonist's understanding of what they are looking for, a recognition that the destination they imagined is not the one they need. These turns are marked not by dramatic events but by quiet moments of seeing — a sunset, a conversation with a stranger, a memory surfacing.

Dialogue

Zhao's dialogue has the quality of overheard speech. Her characters do not deliver lines — they talk, in the rambling, digressive, unpolished way that real people talk when they are not performing for an audience. The non-professional actors she works with contribute their own verbal rhythms, and Zhao's scripts are designed to absorb and showcase these authentic voices.

She writes monologues that are not speeches but testimonies — real people telling their real stories in their own words, integrated into the fictional narrative as moments of documentary truth. Bob Wells in Nomadland talking about his son's suicide is not acting a scene — it is a man sharing his actual experience, and the screenplay creates the context that gives that sharing its narrative weight.

Her dialogue is sparse in the spaces between these testimonies. Characters communicate through gesture, through shared activity, through proximity and distance. A conversation conducted while working — fixing a van, grooming a horse, stacking shelves — conveys more through the shared labor than through the words exchanged.

When her characters do speak about their inner lives, they do so with the halting, imprecise quality of people who are not accustomed to articulating their feelings. The inarticulate moment — the search for the right word, the sentence left unfinished — is more revealing than any polished speech.

Themes

The American West as both myth and reality is Zhao's primary landscape. She photographs and writes the West with a reverence for its beauty that is inseparable from an awareness of its history of dispossession, exploitation, and broken promises. The landscape is gorgeous and the landscape is a crime scene, and both are true simultaneously.

The outsider's search for belonging — in a community, in a landscape, in an identity — drives every Zhao protagonist. Fern in Nomadland is looking for a place that feels like home. Brady in The Rider is looking for who he is without the rodeo. The Lakota teenagers in Songs My Brothers Taught Me are looking for a future that does not require leaving everything behind. The search is never completed, because Zhao understands that belonging is a practice, not an arrival.

Labor — physical, repetitive, unglamorous — is honored as both economic necessity and spiritual practice. Her characters work with their hands, and the dignity of that work is presented without romanticization or condescension. Work is what connects her characters to the material world and to each other.

Grief and its relationship to landscape — the way loss is processed not through therapy or conversation but through movement, through the road, through the relentless openness of the plains — gives her work its particular emotional texture. Her characters grieve by moving, and the landscape absorbs their grief and returns it as beauty.

Writing Specifications

1. Write the American landscape as a character — describe terrain, sky, light, and weather with the specificity and reverence of someone who understands that the land is not backdrop but the spiritual context of the story.
2. Design the screenplay to accommodate non-professional presence — write scenes as frameworks within which real voices, real stories, and real ways of being can emerge, rather than as dialogue to be performed.
3. Structure the narrative as a journey through physical space that is simultaneously a spiritual pilgrimage — each location the protagonist visits should represent a different possibility for how to live.
4. Write dialogue with the quality of overheard speech — rambling, digressive, unpolished, marked by the halting quality of people unaccustomed to articulating their inner lives.
5. Include at least one scene of testimony — a real or realistic account of personal experience delivered in a character's own words, integrated into the fictional narrative as a moment of documentary truth.
6. Honor physical labor through sustained attention — describe the work of the hands, the repetitive tasks, the unglamorous necessities that connect characters to the material world and to each other.
7. Build the protagonist as an outsider searching for belonging — someone who does not fit the world they are in but who finds provisional community through shared circumstance, work, or grief.
8. Pace the narrative episodically — connect scenes through emotional logic and movement through space rather than through causal plot mechanics, allowing the story's shape to emerge from the journey rather than from dramatic engineering.
9. Write grief as a physical experience processed through landscape and movement — let characters mourn not through dialogue but through the act of traveling, working, and being present in the open spaces of the West.
10. End with the protagonist in motion — not arrived, not settled, but moving forward through the landscape with a quality of acceptance that is not resignation but openness to whatever the road provides.