How Chloé Zhao crafted her ambitious epic Eternals

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Eternals.

What do you do after winning an Oscar for your intimate road trip drama? If you're Nomadland director Chloé Zhao, you take a hard left turn and craft a trippy, ambitious space opera that upends one of the biggest film franchises of all time.

The 39-year-old Zhao directs Eternals (out now), a millennia-spanning saga that's part quippy superhero movie, part introspective meditation on human nature. It follows a group of ageless superhumans — played by Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Lia McHugh, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Ridloff, Barry Keoghan, Don Lee, Salma Hayek, and Angelina Jolie — as they keep watch over human history. It's not exactly your typical Marvel fare, but as Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige previously told EW, he knew Zhao was the only woman for the job.

"The truth is, we would not have even attempted this if it weren't for Chloé," Feige previously said. "We thought, here's a filmmaker who is equal parts cinematic visionary and genre nerd. She can outtalk any of us when it comes to manga and Star Wars and Marvel comics. It's quite an astounding combination. And this movie, I think, represents all of the immense multitudes of Chloé."

With Eternals now in theaters, Zhao opens up to EW about joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe and constructing the thoughtful, feminine blockbuster of her dreams. (Mild spoilers ahead!)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You've talked about how you've wanted to make a Marvel movie for a while now. Was there anything about this process that surprised you?

CHLOÉ ZHAO: Yeah, I came into the process as a filmmaker, but also a fan. I wanted to work with the team at Marvel because when I watch their movies, I feel like there's true love for the characters and true love for storytelling. So one thing that surprised me was how small the team was. There were about two or three people that I sent text messages back and forth with to make huge decisions, to get approved for things. That was really great. They created this bubble for me and really protected me to be able to explore things that I wouldn't otherwise feel safe to explore.

Last time we spoke, you said you drew inspiration from both the natural world and Jack Kirby's original Eternals art. Tell me a little bit about how you wanted to use those as inspiration.

Well, I think what was brilliant about Jack Kirby's work [was] that he managed to find these huge moments. He's telling huge stories but with very intimate details, and I felt that scale when I read the treatment. So, how do we capture that scale? And how do we blend that seamlessly into a film? For me, it was actually bringing the camera and taking a step back. We're not going to tell you the story with the flashiest camera moves. We're going to take a National Geographic approach, and we're going to work very hard to have what's in the frame as immersive, believable, and entertaining. So the camera is just slowly drifting. Whether you're creating a sun, or you're walking through a village in ancient Babylon, audiences get to discover what's in the frame.

You make room for those little moments of serendipity.

Yeah. Because things come to life within the camera, and the audience gets to make connections between these characters and what's in the frame. They get to do their own math. They get to make their own decisions about what the relationship is between Sersi and the world around her. That actually tells a bigger story about Sersi's relationship with humanity than anything she would say.

Throughout this whole film, was there anything that changed along the way or anything you loved that you had to let go of for the final cut?

Well, we have a few scenes that I really miss. Again, it's a huge cast, and we have to think about pacing. We wanted to play with the fantasy epic genre but also at the same time, make sure each character can stand on their own. So some things had to go, but they will make it to the deleted scenes. There are two in particular I love so much.

A lot of Marvel movies tend to end with a big action scene, and the good guys win, and that's it. This is a much more bittersweet, intimate ending that sort of departs from the norm. How did you want to approach that third act?

You know how after many years a genre will enter a revisionist period? I do believe we're kind of navigating that edge a bit now. We're trying to think: How can we challenge the genre itself? And I think often it's in the third act; The final thing happens, and it's a cheer, and it's black and white, like, "Yeah! We won!" But that's not how life is. We hope that in this film, the one side won, and you have a complex feeling about it. You're not necessarily cheering.

That's a scary place for us as filmmakers and studios to take that risk. It's much easier to just make it black and white. I would say that was the goal from the very beginning. Lately I've been thinking about the phrase "lead with love," which is what Sersi does. Her compassion and her boundary-less love for humanity and her fellow Eternals allows Ikaris to be vulnerable and trust in his love for her.

Sersi is interesting because she's not necessarily the strongest or the smartest Eternal, but she has this deep compassion. What was it about her journey that most interested you?

I think there was a time in our society, almost as if we've lost our mother. We're trying to regain that now today. To be feminine, to be loving, to be forgiving, to be compassionate — it's not a weakness. Again, we're trying to challenge the genre itself. She doesn't have to punch anybody. She doesn't have to put a man down. She doesn't even necessarily have to stand completely on the good side or the evil side. She can fall in love. She can be blinded by love. I think these are human traits, and these are traits that are incredibly brave and strong. And even her power — everything she changes is elemental. It's almost like she never kills anything. Even when she changes a rock into some birds, she keeps it going. Life.

When you were writing and working on this story, how much were you talking to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige or producer Nate Moore about Marvel's future? Were you thinking about how this story fits into the next 10 Marvel movies?

I talked to Kevin and Nate every day, but not about that. Since the beginning, Kevin and Nate had said to me, "We want you to make a standalone movie." They know I'm enough of a fan to completely understand where we come from and where we're going. But it's very freeing to know that I get to position this film in a place that's very important on the timeline. It's after the Blip brought everyone back, which is an ecological event, if you think about it. And to go from that moment, once you set that up, everything stands alone — and then it will affect the future of the MCU in a very profound way. You have those ends secured, and we get to do everything in the middle.

This film also teases what might come next for some of these characters, and it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. How far ahead were you thinking? Do you already have plans for a sequel?

No. We really set out to make this movie. Right now our baby is grown and is going to school, and we are just going to sit back and take a breath and enjoy this moment, watching them interact with the world.

I also wanted to ask about casting: You're perhaps best known for working with nonprofessional actors. What was the biggest difference about working with this starry cast?

I don't think I changed that much. I give a lot of props to the understanding and the patience my cast has for me, because for me, I always have three babies on set: the camera, the world, and the cast. I have to always struggle to keep the ship in the right direction, so I very much rely on them bringing in a sense of who they are to help me craft [each] character. And they did. I tried to rewrite, just like I do with non-professional actors, after I get a sense of who they are. I tried to rewrite in a way that they could have space to actually access themselves. It's not always successful, but we try as much as we can, and that's always super rewarding.

Was there anything about these actors that really surprised you as you got to know them?

Oh man. I mean, every single one of them brought things to me I didn't expect — not just the dynamic of themselves, but with each other. For example, Lauren Ridloff and Barry Keoghan. Makkari and Druig were friends in the script. There was nothing more than that. And I met the two of them, and right away, they were flirting. I was watching, like, "What?" As they kept going, I let them improvise, and I was sitting on the ground watching them. I go, "Excuse me, what is happening right now?" They're like, "What do you mean?" I was like, "That is going in the film." [Laughs]

Salma had this [moment]. She's a mother, and I don't have children. Right away, she said, "Chloé, Ajak is a mother [to the other Eternals]." I was like, "Oh yeah!" She was able to bring a lot of personality to a very imperfect but complicated mother who has to make impossible decisions. And Brian [Tyree Henry], too. Really, my whole cast.

Yeah, tell me a little bit about how you wanted to approach Phastos' story. He's married, and he has a family. Why was it important to you to tell that story?

I give a lot of credit to Marvel Studios. In their treatment, Phastos always had a family, and a series of events in human history had made him lose faith in humanity. Really, Phastos is looking for the bigger picture [throughout] his entire life. He's a workaholic. He just wants to help humanity advance, and then he loses faith, because he's looking at humanity as a whole picture. But when he zeroes down into one family, one individual, he falls in love with this one child, and he sees, "Oh, there's so much worth saving."

This film also features the first same-sex kiss in a Marvel movie. What kind of conversations did you have with Marvel about that?

It was in the script. When you have love, you want people to be physically affectionate and not be afraid to be physically close to each other and show affection with their family. [Of the] one human family we have in the film, they have to kiss goodbye.

That's one of the things I find really interesting about this film: You've got laser eyes and superpowers and big, universe-threatening stakes, but it's rooted in these small, tender, human moments.

I think that's probably why Marvel called me in for an interview, because I think they thought we could capture both the big and the small. That juxtaposition actually says a lot about our relationship with ourselves and our cosmos and our planet. We watched [Terrence Malick's] The Tree of Life together many times. It's funny. We had a DVD, and when we were packing up the office, there was that Tree of Life DVD on the shelf. I took a picture and sent it to Kevin, and he was like, "Where it all started." Because if you think about Tree of Life, it's talking about the story of the cosmos within one little family, and that was very much a motto for us. We just have a different family.

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