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Frances McDormand
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Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland—which began streaming on Hulu, free to all subscribers, today—is in many ways a tour of the American West, and it is beautiful. The story follows a woman named Fern (played by Frances McDormand, who is also a producer on the film) who lives out of her van, traveling and looking for work. She’s not the only one—she’s part of a community of nomads, many of whom are older Americans who lost their homes in the 2008 economic recession.
Adapted from the 2017 non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder, writer/director Zhao shot Nomadland in 2018 with cinematographer Joshua James Richards and a small crew. Here’s what we know about where Nomadland was filmed.
Where was Nomadland filmed? What are the Nomadland filming locations?
Lots of places! According to the Nomadland press notes, the shoot was spread out over six months beginning in September 2018 in South Dakota for the scenes in the Badlands and at the Wall Drug store, which is a roadside tourist attraction adjacent to Badlands National Park. (AKA, the place with the giant dinosaur.) Then the production company moved on to film in Nebraska.
“We drove through Deadwood on our way down to Western Nebraska for the beet harvest,” says Spears. “From there we were off for a little bit of time, and then we reconvened in Empire, Nevada, which is near Black Rock Desert, where Burning Man happens,” producer Peter Spears said in an interview for the film’s press notes. The city of Empire, Nebraska was a real place, until the zip code was discontinued after the recession.
Other locations include Point Arena in Mendocino County on the Northern California coast, for the scenes with Dave (David Strathairn) and his family; Yuma, Arizona; San Bernadino County, California; and Quarsize, Arizona, where Zhao filmed the real-life gathering of RV-dwellers known as the “Rubber Tramp Rendezvous,” hosted by famed vandweller Bob Wells. Wells was featured in the film, as were other real-life nomads, including Linda May and Swankie.
In an interview with Indiewire, Zhao and her cast and crew very much lived the Nomadland experience while they were making the film, moving from place to place, filming wherever was doable.
“Everything happened very quickly because of what we wanted to capture, the seasons, and the scale of landscapes we were trying to get in the American west when it was actually doable,” Zhao said. “We went from high desert to low desert to the plains to the ocean.”
