Eternals filmmaker Chloe Zhao thinks it is vital that the movie industry doesn’t “write off” comic book films, despite the genre falling in popularity in recent years.
Chloe Zhao has urged the film industry not to “write off” comic book movies.
Chloe Zhao has defended comic book movies
The Oscar-winning director helmed the 2021 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) flick Eternals, which failed to live up to box office expectations and received lukewarm reviews from critics, but continues to see value in the genre despite its decline in popularity in recent years.
Speaking at the Venice Film Festival on Friday (04.09.26), Zhao said: “I do feel it’s important to not write off stories because we don’t consider them high art.
“The purpose of storytelling for me, humbly, is to create containers for people… to try to process what they need to process. Archetypes are such a great way to do it — and we see them in myths — is because it’s something we all share.”
Zhao described directing Eternals, which starred Gemma Chan, Richard Madden and Angelina Jolie, as a “dream come true”.
The 44-year-old filmmaker said: “I loved doing it. For any of you who love anime, I know you know this was a girl’s dream come true. Comic books are the western equivalent of [manga]. They are very different, but I live in the west, and that’s what I had access to.”
Zhao became just the second woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director through her work on the 2020 movie Nomadland but explained that she didn’t watch a lot of films when she was growing up.
The Hamnet director said: “I was still longing to tell stories. Film became a very natural choice. I always say film directors don’t actually need to know how to do anything really well. I see it as someone who is going to manage an ecosystem, bringing everyone together.”
Despite her immense success, Zhao admits that she has been pondering the purpose of her career.
She said: “My life is occupied by screens. Am I missing life because I was always there trying to capture it? I am going through that crisis right now.”
Zhao previously lamented the difficulty in balancing her directing career with her personal life.
Speaking earlier this year, she 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.”
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