Chloé Zhao’s astonishing career has been a series of hairpin turns. Born in Beijing, in 1982, she wound up at New York University’s film school, where she studied under Spike Lee. Starting in 2015, she directed three small-scale, slow-burn features set in the American heartland: “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” “The Rider,” and “Nomadland.” All three capture the expansive beauty of the West—in particular South Dakota, with its moonlike badlands and wide, grassy plains—while using local nonprofessional actors to achieve documentary-like naturalism. “Nomadland,” about a rootless gig worker living in her van, mixed in two established stars, Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, and in 2021 won the Oscar for Best Picture. Zhao also won Best Director, becoming the first woman of color to win the category. How did this young Chinese filmmaker so effortlessly encapsulate middle America’s underclass? Before you could answer that question, Zhao was making a Marvel movie—“Eternals”—with the likes of Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek playing immortal beings shooting lasers out of their eyes.

“Eternals” was an unloved entry in the M.C.U. canon, but it retained some of the spiritual, searching quality that infused Zhao’s indie neo-Westerns. Now another twist: her newest film, “Hamnet,” is a period drama set in Elizabethan England. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel, it imagines the answer to a devastating mystery: What, if anything, did the death of William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, at age eleven, have to do with his writing of “Hamlet,” just a few years later? (The spellings of the two names were interchangeable, and yet a number of plays, including the frolicsome “Much Ado About Nothing,” came in between.) Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), however, is a secondary character; the film belongs to his wife, Agnes Shakespeare (also known as Anne Hathaway), played by Jessie Buckley, in a performance that is already considered a front-runner in the Best Actress race. Meanwhile, Zhao has just shot the pilot for a revival of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

All this may sound peripatetic. But, to hear Zhao tell it, her artistic trajectory makes perfect sense, guided by her yearning for nature, for spiritual sustenance, for truth. She’s described herself as a student of Carl Jung and Hindu tantra, and she speaks in metaphors and mysticism, even when discussing the M.C.U. Recently, she joined me at the New Yorker offices to talk about “Hamnet,” her childhood love of manga, the link between microbudget Westerns and superhero blockbusters, and how neurodivergence has shaped her way of seeing the world. Our conversation, part of which you can hear on The New Yorker Radio Hour, has been edited and condensed.

I know that you don’t come to this film as a Shakespeare scholar, but I thought we should start with what we do know about Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and his relationship to “Hamlet.” What’s the historical nugget that this comes from?

My loyalty is to Maggie O’Farrell’s book, and she’s done a lot of research. When she was in high school studying Shakespeare, her teacher mentioned that his son was named Hamnet, and then “Hamlet” was written a few years after he died. Maggie thought, It must be the most natural thing that Hamnet would have been mentioned in all the writings about Shakespeare’s life and his work, but it’s rarely mentioned. So, for many years she has been wanting to bring this little boy forward.

How did this book make its way to you?

I was driving through New Mexico to the Telluride Film Festival, and that’s when Amblin [Steven Spielberg’s production company] called me about this project. The reception was in and out, and they were saying that it’s about Shakespeare’s wife and the death of their son. I just thought, There are so many things in that sentence that I have no personal connection to, so I said no. Then, a few hours later, I met Paul Mescal for the first time [at Telluride]. I didn’t know who he was, because I had not seen “Normal People”—his career changed a lot in a short amount of time. But I sat next to the creek with him, and I just felt something about him. There’s a simmering discomfort in him, like an animal, like a steppenwolf, that just wants to burst out. That’s why he creates. I asked him, “Would you ever consider playing young Shakespeare?” And he said, “Wait, are you talking about ‘Hamnet’? I loved the book so much! You have to read the book.”

What about the book, when you read it, made you feel like you were the right person to do the film?

I still wasn’t sure if I was right. Only lately have I thought, I guess I was the right person. You just don’t know. You have to look for signs that are saying, “Yes, you are,” and these synchronicities, these signs, are where I create from. It’s O.K. to have that doubt. When I read the book, I thought the internal landscape was so beautifully described. Usually I have to really get to know, say, Brady [Jandreau] from “The Rider,” for such a long period of time to understand his internal landscape, so that then I can externalize it onscreen. But Maggie had already done that work for all of the characters. I thought, That’s my blueprint. And there’s a rhythm to the way she writes. It has a heartbeat to it—very similar to me. I found out later that her favorite filmmaker is Wong Kar-wai, whose work made me want to make films many years ago.

The external landscape in the film is so vivid. Your first three features are shot in the American West, while much of “Hamnet” takes place in a forest. You shot in Wales and Herefordshire. Can you tell me about finding those locations and what resonated with you about this very different natural landscape?

The natural world has been a big part of every film I’ve done, and I can now, in my forties, look back and say the reason is because I have always had a deep fear of death, and that drives my creativity. When you are afraid to die, you are not able to live fully. I know that deep inside. At night, when the light goes off, I lie there—I know I am not living my life fully, because I’m so terrified. I don’t feel safe in this world. When you go into nature, you develop a very embodied spirituality that is not reliant on anyone else. It’s a safety that you feel when you become one with your surroundings. All of our great prophets go into nature to come back with a message. So that’s part of working on my own shit.

In my thirties, I was much more like a pioneer: going west, finding treasures. I wanted to go as wide as possible, chasing horizon after horizon. The camera’s insatiable. It wants to capture everything. I was always on the move. Then, in my forties, after a midlife crisis, I realized that I can’t keep running from myself. And the forest is the opposite of the plains. The forest is deeply feminine. It makes you stay still, and when you stay still you have nowhere to go but into the underworld—and into yourself, where all your shadows are.

When I first visited the forest in Wales with my cinematographer, Łukasz [Żal], we wanted to find a language for the film, or just let the forest tell us what the film is about, beyond what we read in the book. I was in Kyiv right before that, with someone who was making a documentary about a strip of forest on the front line. When I left Kyiv and went to Wales, and it was this beautiful spring forest that we were in, I was getting some footage from the front line in Ukraine, and I would see these dark, black holes in the ground, and sometimes they’re land mines. And then I would walk around our forest in Wales and see these natural-made black holes. I had such a big emotional reaction to it. I started crying. I sat next to this black void, because it’s coming for all of us. No matter how unimaginable what is happening in the world, there is the bittersweetness of the great equalizer in the end. In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare wrote, “All that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity.” To me, that eternity is love. So, then Łukasz runs over and goes, “I understand this! We must film this hole!” I was, like, Ah, this is what the film is about. We consider nature a department head. It’s constantly working with us.

This is a movie about a mother’s grief for her son. You’ve said that part of your hesitancy to take it on was that you are not a mother. How did you imagine your way into that grief and what it would look like for Agnes Shakespeare?

There’s a scene in the film when Hamnet dies and she lets out this very guttural scream. We can’t measure grief. Grief has no edges and yet many colors. I can never come in and say, “This is my vision of what grief should look like,” or “I’ve talked to a hundred mothers, and we’ve decided this is what it looks like.” The rawest human truth, I believe, exists only in this moment, right here, right now. That may be challenged a few years from now, and I’m open to that. But right now I create a container, an environment to allow Jessie to hold that tension between knowing and not knowing, consciousness and unconsciousness. Her body’s like a lightning conductor. Only when you hold tension long enough can the answer for “To be or not to be?” come through.

So, after a few different setups, that scream came out of her. She wasn’t planning on it. I wasn’t planning on it. But, in that moment, she wasn’t an actress; she was a channeller.

Jessie Buckley gives an astounding performance. People are saying that the Best Actress race is all locked up. Let the record show Chloé is crossing fingers on both hands.

Selfishly!

One of your characters is William Shakespeare. This is not the witty, hyperverbal Shakespeare of “Shakespeare in Love.” He’s actually a man of few words: brooding, frustrated. How did you and Maggie approach the challenge of writing lines for William Shakespeare?

I think the reason why the producers and Maggie chose me is because I don’t feel that way about William Shakespeare. I do have reverence, intellectually, but I don’t have the burden on my shoulders, as many people in the West do. Maybe the same as I am with cowboys and Westerns. I watched only two and a half Westerns when I made “The Rider.” But I watched more afterward, because I fell in love with it. I’ll probably do more Shakespeare-related things after this. But I didn’t come in feeling that he’s any different than any other man who fell in love with a woman and couldn’t quite express his feelings. The pressure is on the actors—it’s on Paul, who does have a lot of reverence! In the sense of not only what we put him through, not only playing William Shakespeare, but also telling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as William Shakespeare.

He’s very different than in the book. Maggie reminded me a couple weeks ago, “Do you remember in the book he’s quite talkative?” I made a decision to change his character, because I find a lot of artists—male artists—get into expressing themselves in their art because they never felt safe to express their emotions in real life, in our society. As a little boy, they’re told to toughen up. There’s no space for your emotions, because mom is crying, or your sister’s crying. I was raised by men like that. I have loved and been loved by men like that my whole life, so it just became natural for me. And Paul was part of that decision as well. Watching him, there’s him in this character as well. I can only work that way, because, moment by moment, I need to feel love toward this character, and I need to feel like I understand him. And there’s a part of me that’s like him. I feel safe in my fantasy world on set. Then I can deal with emotional situations in life.

This movie, among other things, is about the act of creation. I’m curious if you saw yourself in the process that Shakespeare goes through.

Yes, I do, but not as good as him! Let’s put it on record. It’s an uncomfortable process. It is extremely uncomfortable to be in the “To be or not to be” space. A great surfer would tell you about that liminal space, when a big wave is coming and they’re sitting there, this moment when life and death is pulling you that tight—or, in this case, grief. As artists, when we sit in that crucible, when we sit in that alchemical fire long enough, it’s going to come. But it’s very uncomfortable to sit in it.

You mentioned that you didn’t grow up with the reverence for Shakespeare that is instilled in the West. Was he taught in school in Beijing?

I wouldn’t say there was no reverence. The word Shā shì bǐ yà, which is his name in Chinese, sounds like royalty—very upper class, highly intellectual. Very few can understand or are allowed to. So it’s quite satisfying to demystify that. This is just a man who’s lived a life, and who, at least in our version, cannot quite put order to his chaos.

What kind of art was important to you when you were a young person?

I have to be honest: it was manga. In a way, my early education was always in myth, symbols, fantastical storytelling, allegorical storytelling. I use a lot of metaphors—volcanoes, black holes. I think it’s because metaphors help me understand and process all these difficult emotions and complicated things about what is happening in the world. That’s why myth is so important. Nowadays, I’m a student of Carl Jung. It’s all about symbols and metaphors. That’s not that different from my obsession with manga when I was young.

Tell me more about manga. Is there an example of something that captured you?

Manga is quite different from American comics. Manga is heavily influenced by Japanese Shintoism—believing that every object has a spirit. It gave me comfort to understand that we all contain within ourselves something other than what I see. That’s the kind of subtle spirituality I craved growing up, in a country where we didn’t have religion the way Americans do, or the rest of the world. Japan, since the Meiji Restoration, has been interacting with the West the way no other countries in Asia were doing at the time, so manga also reflects that. And then, thirdly, morality in manga very much exists in the gray area. It celebrates the shadows as much as the light. In American comics, sometimes that can be black-and-white, in terms of what’s good or evil.

Your father was an executive at a major state-owned Chinese steel company. Your stepmother, Song Dandan, is a famous sitcom actress. I’ve heard her described as the Roseanne of China.

She’s very funny.

So you grew up in what sounds like a rarified echelon in China. I’m curious how you would describe the Beijing of your childhood, a place that was rapidly transforming and industrializing—and your father was directly connected to that industrialization.

My father’s job is not that special. He was a government official, and most people in China work for the government. I was fifteen when I left, and that’s around the time my dad married my stepmother. It’s also around the time when China really sped up its development, so, every time I would come back from the U.K. or America, I would not recognize anything. My memory of Beijing is always the one from my childhood, which no longer exists.

Which was what?

Imagine there’s no telephone wires, no cars on the street. Forget about the internet. There was not much infrastructure. And we didn’t have a lot of connection to the outside world, so we were sort of in a snow globe. I mention snow, because I always remember the snowy winters there, and that’s when Chinese New Year is. You could walk to your grandmother’s house, and everyone knew everyone. I felt very safe within that community. I remember the first time MTV showed up on television, or watching “The Terminator” or listening to Michael Jackson for the first time, and going, What is this world outside the snow globe? Like in any myth, when you know there’s a world out there, you start to have yearnings. There was an age of innocence that I experienced. It doesn’t mean that there was no grief, no pain, no loneliness—there was all of that. But also innocence.

Did your family experience a change in wealth at that time?

There’s talk of my family being billionaires, and that is so far from the truth. Things happened very fast for a lot of people, extreme wealth, and my family’s not one of them. I’ve seen a lot of tragedies that came from that. We weren’t swept away by the economic boom. We had the equivalent to a middle-class income in America, but it was considered very comfortable in China. It allowed me to study abroad. When things change that fast in any society, it doesn’t have a solid foundation. Spirituality, a connection with something bigger, something rooted in our ancestors—when that is lacking and you suddenly are given a huge amount of material goods, there is a hunger that can never be fulfilled. And artists put their lives on the line to create, because we feel that void.

You’ve always forged your own path. But was there a conventional path that you were expected to follow? What did your parents want you to do?

You’re really digging on the parents, aren’t you?

I’m digging on what made you an artist.

I can be super honest about this: I’m not close to them. I was quite a rebellious young person. Everything my parents said or did, I was, like, I’m going to do the opposite. My parents walked a fine line between not very present and also letting me be who I am. I became a storyteller because I needed to make sense of what I was experiencing. It was not an easy childhood, and that is because my parents didn’t have easy childhoods. Neither did their parents. Stuff gets passed down. They didn’t really mind what I did. I hear stories of people whose parents say, “You’ve got to be a doctor,” or “You’ve got to be a lawyer.” There’s a safety in that container. I had no container growing up. I’m that black hole. I needed my father, or the masculine consciousness in my mother, to step up and say, “Here is order. Here are the banks of the flood, so your water can calm down and go deep.” I didn’t have that. I was spinning in my chaos until I found the language of cinema.

What shape did your rebelliousness take?

I would climb out of the window when the teacher turned around so I could get to the basketball courts, because there were only a few available, so you had to get there as soon as the bell rings. I would literally jump out of the window. And of course I’d get caught, and I’d get detention. Things like that.

You left China at fifteen to go to Brighton College, a boarding school in England, and then wound up in L.A. at nineteen, living in a studio apartment in Koreatown near a Sizzler—is that correct?

Yeah, on Virgil. That Sizzler’s still there.

L.A. is a really difficult place for anyone to show up and make a life. What was your plan?

There was no plan. I just wanted to get to America, because I saw it in the movies. I was going to go to St. Andrews and study painting. Then, when I was given the opportunity to go to America, I thought L.A., because that’s where Hollywood is. But, of course, when I got there, in 1999, I thought, This is not what I’ve seen in the movies. I had no idea about America. That is why I ended up studying American politics in college.

Right, at Mount Holyoke.

Yes. And my third day at school was when 9/11 happened. Many of the people in our department went into international politics, but I was only a year into being in America, and my English was not the best. I was wondering, Why did this happen? So I remained in the American-politics department, because I wanted to understand this picture-perfect country that I saw in movies. That’s when I fell in love with it, because it was now real.

You wound up at N.Y.U. film school, and one of your professors was Spike Lee. What did you learn from him?

I had one class with him. We would get into massive arguments in his office. I think that’s what I learned from him: Just be yourself. Because he’s so himself—painfully so, sometimes. Beautifully and painfully so. Whenever I’m with him, I can just be myself—beautifully and painfully so. Sometimes we would go at each other. But I prefer that. A lot of professors would be overly nurturing, to the point where I wasn’t sure if the compliment was real or not. If you get a compliment from Spike, you know you’ve done something right.

Your first three features took place, at least in part, in the American West—the land of rodeos and cowboys and open plains and mountains and sunsets. The first two, “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” and “The Rider,” were set in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota. How did you discover this part of America?

I remember deciding, in New York, what to do for my first film. I never take it for granted that people’s precious time will be used to watch my films. You go to a film festival, and the brochure has hundreds of films in it. Why would anybody come see yours? At the time, I knew that I could never make a better film in New York than the people already here making them. Of course, there was, I now understand, a yearning to go to nature, having been in big cities my whole life. But I remember seeing an image taken by Aaron Huey, a photographer for National Geographic. He walked across America and took photos. One picture was of a Lakota boy with a bandanna and a Tupac T-shirt, sitting bareback on a big horse at the Big Bat’s gas station in Pine Ridge, with a cigarette in his hand and the beautiful plains behind him. I went, That’s America. That’s how beautiful and complex and heartbreaking this country is. I thought, Somebody will look at that image in the festival brochure and go, “I’ll see that!” I drove out to South Dakota because of that picture.

Those early films are cast with people from that world—I hesitate to call them non-actors, because they act so beautifully in the films.

Nonprofessional actors, we say.

I’m curious, particularly at the reservation, how you won the trust of the people there. There’s a fraught history of Native Americans being portrayed in movies, and you come along as a profound outsider.

Do you feel like you can trust me?

You’re very open and easy to talk to, so I would say yes.

Well, I’m curious. That’s probably it. Sometimes people go to these communities, and they have an idea about what they want to say about the world, and these communities become a tool for getting a message across. Nobody wants to be an issue or a museum piece. Nobody wants to be known just for their trauma. And sometimes, when you go there, that’s the first thing they perform for you. I wait for that to be over. “Yeah, yeah, but what’s your favorite football team? When’s the last time you cried?” You just have to be curious about the other person, and also not have an agenda.

The star of “The Rider,” Brady Jandreau, was a real rodeo cowboy who was injured and then got back on the horse, literally. That’s the story of the movie, as well. Similarly, the main character in “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” is weighing whether to leave the reservation. And Frances McDormand’s character in “Nomadland” is a wanderer, and when you see her in a guest bedroom in a house you feel as uncomfortable as she is. Was that sense of rootlessness something that you were exploring about yourself?

They all share a commonality, which is that the characters lose something that makes them no longer able to be who they thought they were, and they have to go through a journey to discover who they truly are. That is probably what was happening to me. In my forties, I understood that sometimes the answer is not outside. Sometimes you have to descend into yourself to do that same journey. But that’s even more uncomfortable—as everything is when you go into the second half of your life.

“Nomadland” is a kind of hybrid film, where for the first time you had two stars, Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, alongside people like Linda May and Bob Wells, who were in Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book “Nomadland.” How did your directing style differ from one to the other?

Fran is like an alien. The ability to act in the moment—she understands what it takes. When I had forty minutes to shoot in magic hour and a bunch of nonprofessional actors, I would have to do their coverage first. But, in order to cut, I needed various reactions from Fran. So a lot of times it was me doing all these takes with our nonprofessional actors and then going, “Fran, there’s forty-five seconds left, and I need these five expressions. Go!” And she goes. That was probably the hardest four months of her life. When it came to Paul and Jessie in “Hamnet,” I needed to make sure I gave them the most comfortable environment to be where Fran was for four months doing “Nomadland.”

Zhao and her crew shoot Frances McDormand on location for “Nomadland,” in 2020.Photograph courtesy Searchlight Pictures / Everett

O.K., but in between you made quite a left turn, into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And it’s not like you won the Academy Award for “Nomadland” and then were handed a Marvel movie.

No, Kevin [Feige, the president of Marvel Studios] hired me based on “The Rider”! I hadn’t shot “Nomadland” yet.

What was the budget of “The Rider”?

Eighty thousand dollars.

And what was the budget of “Eternals”?

I think two hundred fifty?

Million. Let’s clarify.

Million. I know. What a dream. I mean, crazy.

How did this come about?

I remember walking into Marvel Studios, to the conference room where I went in to pitch, and I had exported my video with the wrong ratio, so it looked really bad on the screen. And Kevin walks in, and everybody sits down, and I’m standing there. The next day, I’m supposed to get into my van to start shooting “Nomadland.” I just went, “To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower! To hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour!” They’re, like, “Beautiful!” And I said, “This is how Sersi sees humanity. One human being contains a universe, and I want to make a film about our relationship with the divine.” And I can see Kevin going, Interesting . . .

Talk about going from non-actors to professionals! You’re now working with Angelina Jolie and Kumail Nanjiani and Harry Styles. How did you have to adjust to that level of stardom?

It is not not intimidating to meet Angelina Jolie for the first time. I actually have a tattoo, on my back, because she had one—the dragon she used to have here. [Shows her forearm.] I was twenty-two. And she had hers removed, eventually. I showed mine to her when I met her, and I said, “But you had yours removed.” She said, “Now it’s yours.” When I went into “Eternals,” all my childhood fantasies came true, wanting to be a manga artist. A huge amount of my attention went into the world-building. I’m not saying that I wasn’t there for my actors, but they’re playing archetypal characters. It wasn’t that complicated when it came to working with them on set.

On the one hand, you were now working with a budget that was bigger than anything you’d ever had by an order of many magnitudes, which affords a certain freedom. If you wanted a claw to emerge from the sea, you could do that. On the other hand, you’re working within this big corporate machine, where every movie is connected to every other movie, and there’s a big budget but also a big expectation of the financial performance of the film. Was it freeing or less freeing to be working in that milieu?

I’ve always only said one version of that answer and it’s never satisfying to people, but the truth is it’s not different from making “The Rider” to me. At the end of the day, I’m interacting with the few people around me: producers, my D.P., my actors. If you have good producers, they’ll keep it that way. On “Nomadland,” I had twenty-seven people around me, and on “Eternals” I had twenty-seven people around me. They just had massive armies around them. I also had a fearlessness going into “Eternals,” because it was right after “Avengers: Endgame.” “Eternals” was supposed to be this little artsy kid in the corner in the cafeteria. “Eternals” as a comics property has always been the weird one. Then the pandemic came, and the Marvel continuation stopped. Suddenly, “Eternals” was this big thing coming back. That break, I think, made us all yearn for what we were familiar with.

The film is very existential. I spent ten years learning about humanity, making my first three films. “Eternals,” at the end of the day, is about a pantheon of gods discussing the nature of humanity, like an old Greek play. It was a big eruption that came out of me, for better or for worse. It took me four years to contain that, cool it down, and excavate, in the shape of “Hamnet.”

“Eternals” got a rocky reception. You mention the fandoms—fandoms are tricky, because they have a certain expectation.

I’m one of them, so I can understand where they’re coming from.

You just wrapped directing the pilot of the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” revival, so you’re once again working on a franchise with a very intense fandom.

I’m also one of them!

As you move forward in your career, how do you see your relationship with the franchise-driven part of Hollywood? It’s only getting harder to make a movie that isn’t based on something or connected to some form of I.P. You could call William Shakespeare I.P., in a way.

I thought about his sellability when I signed up. Both Maggie’s book and him. It’s pretty strong I.P. we’re dealing with here. I just made an announcement, with my producing partner, Nick Gonda, that we’ve teamed up with Kodansha, which is the oldest and one of the largest manga publishing houses in Japan. They have everything from “Akira” to “Ghost in the Shell” to “Attack on Titan.” We just teamed up with them to launch Kodansha Studios, which means that we will be developing live-action adaptations of their I.P. in-house before it goes to the studios. I’ve always dreamed of being a bridge between the East and the West, and to create a safe and nurturing garden, in a way, for international filmmakers and Japanese manga artists to come together. Why did this artist create this story in Japan? What is really the core of it? And then allow them to work together to develop the screenplay, until the shoots of the plants are strong enough, and then we go to our studio partners. I think adapting from I.P. is beautiful. I started my career as a fan-fiction writer in China.

Really?

A pretty well-known one, too. But you’ll never know, because I’ll never share my pen name. I think “original” is misunderstood in the modern world. “Original” means going back to the source. But our modern culture is so obsessed with new things. It’s a very masculine-dominated way of looking at the world. Must have new things all the time. In nature, everything goes back to the source. So I don’t mind working with I.P. It’s just that how we do it could be healthier, more wholesome.

You’ve described yourself as “deeply neurodivergent,” and you’ve talked about how you can become overstimulated and shut down. A director on a set has to deal with so many people, departments, questions, images. How does that challenge you or help you on a movie set?

I didn’t have my official diagnosis until this year. In the past, I always wondered, Maybe I’m just built wrong. Something is off with me. And going to premières or press days is even harder. I feel a lot of shame around, Why I can’t enjoy it like the people around me? Once I had some language around it, it was very empowering. The fact that I’m good at some things—it’s my sensitivity, my intuition, my pattern-recognizing skills. All those things are because my brain takes in so much more information than the person next to me, so I need time to process that information. If I don’t process it, and more is coming in, then I can shut down and implode, or have massive meltdowns. Also, a really strong perfume can give me a shutdown.

So you won’t be working in Smell-O-Vision.

No, but I love anything that’s natural. It’s the chemical in the perfume that is overwhelming. Cleaning products, air fresheners, things like that. Tags on clothes—if it’s there and I can feel it, then all I can think about is this tag scratching me. On set, we do ask people to kindly not wear strong perfume. I also wanted to make sure my actors know that if I go into my tent, I need a moment. I need to put my headphones on, put a blanket over me, so I can make myself less stimulated. The last thing you want is an overstimulated director. But that time I take—five minutes here, fifteen minutes there—allows other people to take that time. How a film is made is structured as a machine that produces the most in the least amount of time, which is what a capitalist society considers good. I want to ask the question, Is the modern world too much? Is it too loud, too fast, too many chemicals? I like to think about it that way and not feel ashamed that I have to be accommodated, because I have seen the results of these very small shifts that actually help a lot of people around me as well.

Are you willing to share what the diagnosis was?

I don’t like to use labels—it’s more than one—because those labels come with the “lack of” or the “less normal.” It’s a soup of things. And I’m always going to question the truth that’s attached to that label. All I can say, the word “neurodivergent” helps. I’m more sensitive to the world. If you are smiling and telling me, “I feel great,” and you don’t feel that way, I feel it. That makes me good at working with actors but terrible at a loud dinner party where small talk is happening, because I can feel the dissonance in people.

Well, you are likely headed back to the Academy Awards, so I hope that no one is wearing strong perfume there.

[Laughs.] That’s a lost cause. ♦