Chloé Zhao Defends Comic-Book Movies at Venice: Don't Write Them Off

0:00So I want you to imagine sitting in a masterclass at the Venice Film Festival. Just, you know, really picture it for a second. Oh man, the absolute pinnacle of cinematic snobbery. Right, exactly. And I mean that in the most affectionate way possible, of course. Well, yeah, naturally. But you're on the Lido and you're just surrounded by critics in these crisp linen suits, industry insiders, cine files who can literally debate the merits of a, I don't know, a 1960s French New Wave tracking shot for hours on in. Which sound is exhausting, honestly? It really does. But you expect to go into this room and hear about the torture genius of the Artur, right? The sanctity of the silver screen and this absolute unbreakable dividing line between high art and, you know, everything else. That popcorn stuff. Right, exactly. But instead, the two-time Oscar-winning director sitting on the stage casually admits two things to this very serious crowd. First, she's better 20s as a totally lost bartender who originally just wanted to draw comic books.

1:00Which is wild for an Oscar winner to just admit in that setting. Completely wild. And second, she tells them that superhero walkbusters are doing the exact same psychological work as Shakespeare. I mean, that completely shatters the expected decorum of a place like Venice. I'll totally. You have the ultimate gatekeepers of high culture being told by one of their own most celebrated champions that the walls they've built between important cinema and popcorn entertainment are essentially just an illusion. A total fabrication. And that's exactly what we're getting into today. We are unpacking this really comprehensive September 2026 report from Variety that basically captured this entire mind-blowing masterclass. Yeah, and it's such a rich piece of reporting. It really is. Our mission for this deep dive is to essentially take a crowbar to those rigid dividing lines we all have in our heads. We're using director Chloe Zau as our case study today to untangle why we value certain stories over others. Because her career trajectory is just,

2:00well, it's nothing short of fascinating. It makes no sense on paper. We're looking at a self-described lost bartender who couldn't draw manga, who somehow pivoted to directing these super intimate indie road movies, and then suddenly found herself commanding a $200 million Marvel budget with Immortal Aliens. Right, just a casual pivot. Just a casual Tuesday. And then she jumped right into a 16th century Shakespearean plague drama. And finally, at the absolute height of her powers, she triggered this massive existential crisis about the very screens we all stare at every single day. Which I think is the core reason this conversation is so vital for anyone listening right now. I mean, we exist in the state of perpetual information overload. Oh, it's terrifying. Our screen time metrics are terrible. Exactly. And whether we are absorbing a three hour prestigious tearjerker or a 30 second TikTok or a massive CGI battle sequence, understanding the mechanics behind why we consume these narratives is crucial. Right, it's not just a Hollywood thing.

3:01Not at all. This isn't just a breakdown of a Hollywood career. It's an exploration of how we use narrative structures to process our own increasingly chaotic reality. So let's start with the origin story, because it completely devised the standard Hollywood Hollywood. Usually when you hear a best picture winning director talk about their childhood, you get the exact same tired narrative. Yeah. They were eight years old. They found an eight millimeter camera in their dad's closet. And they just spent their entire adolescence worshiping Hitchcock or Kubrick. Yeah, the classic one to kin story. Exactly. But Zau revealed at Venice that she didn't grow up watching many films at all, like almost none. Her primary obsession was manga. She desperately wanted to be a manga artist, which is such a specific and demanding art form. It is. But there was this physical roadblock. She literally lacked the drawing skills. She told the audience, and I quote, I wasn't up to standard. And just think about the friction of that situation

4:01for a minute. She possesses this massive inherent drive for visual storytelling. Manga is incredibly complex. Well, totally. It's not just doodles. No, it dictates pacing, framing, emotional beats, all through sequential art. She understands the language of it perfectly in her mind. But the specific physical medium is walled off to her, simply because her hand cannot execute the lines, her brain is demanding. It actually reminds me of a musician who has this sprawling 60 piece symphony playing flawlessly in their head. Right. They can hear every note. Exactly. They hear the cello fading out. They hear the brass section swelling. But when they sit down at a piano, their fingers just lack the dexterity to play the physical notes. They are trapped. That is a great way to put it. So to get the music out, they become a record producer. You use a mixing board and other musicians to achieve the sound they hear in their head. And for Zau, the creative drive was entirely preserved. She just had to swab ink and paper for a camera and a crew.

5:03And that pivot wasn't immediate either. It's not like she just woke up one day and said, ah, I'll direct. There wasn't a sudden magical realization. Now, it took years. The variety report highlights that she spent her late 20s working as a bartender, feeling totally adraft. And in the hyper competitive context of the film industry, spending your 20s pouring drinks instead of, you know, networking at a prestigious film school or fetching coffee on a studio a lot, well, that's traditionally viewed as a massive deficit. I would argue most people view pouring drinks at 28 as actively failing. If your goal is to be a world-renowned artist, I mean, where is the advantage there? Well, the advantage is the complete absence of institutional dogma. Interesting. What do you mean by that? Think about it. Film school teaches you the mechanics of the medium, which lends to use for a close-up, the rule of thirds, the history of the author. But it often insulates you from the very subjects you were supposed to be filming, which is real people. Ah, right. You're in a bubble with a bunch of other film nerds.

6:03Exactly. A bartender, on the other hand, is a captive observer of unfiltered human behavior. You are watching micro-expressions when a couple argues. You are studying the cadence of how people speak when they are drunk, when they are grieving, when they are celebrating. You're getting a masterclass in humanity. Yes. You are learning the raw mechanics of human interaction without the artificial filter of a script. So instead of learning how to light a scene, she was learning how a human to actually act when the lights go down. Beautifully put. Yes. That context makes a quote she dropped later in the masterclass even more provocative. She told the Venice crowd, film became a very natural choice. I always say film directors don't actually need to know how to do anything really well. Which is such a controversial thing to say to a room full of critics. Right. And she goes on, she says, I see it as someone who is going to manage an ecosystem bringing everyone together. Now, I have to challenge this. Go for it. When she says she doesn't need to know how to do anything well, part of me thinks that is either massive false modesty

7:06or it's just a complete cop out. It sounds like she's just describing creative middle management. I mean, isn't a director supposed to be the visionary who knows more than everyone else in the room? You're bumping up against the Auteur theory there, which has dominated our cultural understanding of filmmaking since, gosh, since the French critics popularized it in the 1950s. Right. The whole one-man vision thing. Yeah. The Auteur theory insists that the director is the singular dictatorial author of the film. We are taught to revere the image of Kubrick demanding 100 takes or Hitchcock tightly controlling every single storyboard imposing their iron will on the production. And Zau is just radically dismantling that. But isn't there truth to the Auteur theory? Like, if the director isn't the singular genius, what are they even doing? Let's look at the actual mechanics of a film set today. It is a highly specialized industrial environment that camera department alone might have 30 people. Right. It's massive. The director doesn't physically pull the focus on the lens.

8:07The director doesn't rig the lighting grid. If a director pretends they know more about rigging a light than a gaffer who has done it for 30 years, they are driven by ego, not efficiency. OK, that makes a lot of sense. By describing her role as managing an ecosystem, Zau is acknowledging the reality of the medium. An ecosystem requires hundreds of distinct, specialized organisms to thrive. Her job isn't to micromanage the gaffer's knots. Her job is to ensure the gaffer, the actor, and the production designer are all experiencing the exact same climate, the same overarching conditions, so there are specialized skills aligned toward one cohesive goal. OK, when you frame it as setting the climate rather than dictating every single physical action, it makes total sense. And think about how this applies beyond Hollywood. Oh, it applies to almost everything. Right. If you are listening to this and you lead a team at an office where you run a small business or even if you manage a large household, if you operate under the Auteur theory of your own life, you are going to burn out so fast.

9:07Oh, immediately. You will constantly feel the pressure to know how to do everyone's job better than they do. But if you view yourself as managing an ecosystem, your only job is to create the right environment for other people's specific talents to flourish. It just completely removes the ego from leadership. It absolutely neutralizes the ego. And I would argue it is precisely this lack of ego, this ecosystem first mentality that allowed her to scale up so drastically in her career. Because she wasn't trying to do everything herself. Exactly. If you are not her who relies on micromanaging every single detail of a 20 person indie crew, you will completely collapse when a studio hands you a project with a crew of 2,000 people. But if your fundamental philosophy is ecosystem management, scaling up just means you are managing a larger forest. Which brings us perfectly to the ultimate test of our management philosophy, right? Her collision with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yes. The big one. Let's talk about the transition from indie darlings

10:07to the absolute corporate behemoth of Blockbuster filmmaking. The variety piece notes that superhero movies have experienced a pretty significant waning in popularity since the pandemic. Yeah, the bubble definitely burst a bit. Right. We aren't in the 2018 era where every single Marvel movie automatically crossed a billion dollars on opening weekend. And Zao stepped right into the middle of the shifting landscape with her 2021 Marvel adaptation, Itternals. We have to establish the sheer scale of Itternals to really understand the stakes here. This wasn't a contained, you know, street level superhero origin story. No, it was massive. It was an attempt to weave a sprawling mythology spanning thousands of years, featuring an immortal alien race sent to protect Earth. You have an ensemble cast that includes Angelina Jolie Samahaik, Richard Madden, Gemmachan, Kumail Nanjiani, and Brian Tyre Henry. Just a stacked cast completely. And the budget was north of $200 million. And the financial reality is that it grossed around 400 million globally, which I mean,

11:09it sounds like a massive amount of money to anyone outside the industry. $400 million is a lot of cash. It is, but context matters. Right, because with marketing costs and the cut that the theaters take, a $200 million budget needs to make closer to $600 million, just to break even. So it was widely considered a financial disappointment. And this specific financial vulnerability opens the door to a much larger and, frankly, more vicious cultural debate about the value of these movies. Right. You're referring to the Martin Scorsese critique. Exactly. Scorsese famously went on the record comparing Marvel movies to theme parks. Yes, that caused quite a stir. He essentially argued they shouldn't even be called cinema. He said they are audiovisual rollercoaster rides designed for cheap transient thrills, devoid of genuine emotional or psychological stakes. It is the ultimate gatekeeping statement. Completely. It's drawing a thick red line in the sand between high art and popcorn entertainment.

12:09And given that Zao was sitting at Venice, the literal capital of high art, talking about a film that fell short financially and was dismissed by living legends like Scorsese, you might expect her to just distance herself from eternal. You'd expect an apology to her almost. Right. Just a paycheck. I'm back to real art now. But she does the exact opposite. She mounts this incredibly passionate defense of the blockbuster. And her defense leverages her origin story so perfectly. Remember her initial love of manga that we talked about earlier? So that frustrated artist. Yes. She told the Venice audience that she views Western comic books as the exact equivalent of the manga she grew up with. She said, I live in the West, and that's what I had access to. She completely refuses to accept the hierarchical premise that a comic book is inherently lower art than, say, a classic novel. Her exact quote from the masterclass on this is fantastic. She says, and I have it right here. She says, I do feel it's important to not write off stories because we don't consider them high art.

13:10The 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. The word containers is the operative mechanism here. This is deeply rooted in narrative psychology. OK, unpack that for me. What does she mean by containers? When Scorsese looks at a Marvel movie, he sees the superficial mechanics of a theme park ride, a loud noise, a flashing light, a sudden drop. It is a physical reaction, but it leaves you exactly where you started when you get off the ride. It's just stimulation. Right. But when Zal looks at a Marvel movie, she sees a structural container. It's much like the Ancient Greek amphitheatre, the amphitheatre was a physical container where society gathered to project their collective anxieties onto figures that were larger than life. OK, I have to push back here, or at least play devil's advocate for the Scorsese camp for a second. Sure, go ahead. Scorsese is looking at a corporate product. I mean, it turnedels was engineered in a Disney boardroom

14:11to sell action figures, to launch Disney plus spin-offs, and to boost quarterly earnings. How can Zal equate a boardroom manufactured to IP with the ancient myths that organically evolved over centuries around campfires? Isn't that just justifying a cash grab with lofty academic language? Well, that is a highly cynical view of modern production, but let's actually test that theory by looking at how archetypes function within these corporate products. OK, let's test it. A myth doesn't have to be organic to be effective. It just has to utilize the right psychological architecture. Consider Joseph Campbell, Hero's Journey, or Union archetypes. We have always created gods and monsters to personify forces that are too terrifying or complex to deal with directly. Right, like we didn't understand the weather so we invented Zeus. Exactly. The Greeks used aries to process the chaos of war. Today, we have anxieties about artificial intelligence, global pandemics, and nuclear annihilation. An alien superhero who struggles with the burden

15:12of protecting humanity, who has to wait duty against personal love, that is a modern archetype. I see what you're saying. The sheer scale of the superhero allows us to examine our own human problems at a safe distance. Precisely. If you watch a gritty, highly realistic indie drama about a mother abandoning her child, the psychological proximity might be too painful. It's too close to home. Right. It might trigger your own immediate trauma. You just shut down and stop engaging with the story. But if you watch an immortal alien grapple with the choice of saving a planet versus saving their family, the fantastical elements act as a buffer. Like a Trojan horse for emotion. Exactly. The massive CGI heavy container gives you subconscious the safety and the distance to process those exact same themes of duty and abandonment without being completely overwhelmed. The explosions and the capes are just the wrapping paper around a very raw human psychological exercise. This is exactly what I want the listener to examine in their own life right now. Think about the last time you went to the theater

16:13to watch a loud chaotic blockbuster that all the critics dismissed as just dumb fun. You might have bought a giant popcorn and told yourself you were just turning your brain off for two hours. We all do that. Right. But based on Zal's theory, you weren't turning your brain off at all. You were actually engaging in a massive communal ritual. You were using that chaotic oversized container to subconsciously organize and process the chaos of your own weak, your own relationships, your own fears. It's therapeutic in a way. It really is. And when you reframe it that way, a $200 million movie about space gods isn't intellectually inferior to a quiet indie drama. It is just a different size container doing the exact same heavy lifting. And if you accept that premise that the container size doesn't dictate its value, you finally have the key to understanding what the Venice moderator saw as a baffling contradiction in her career. Yes, the whiplash. Because if you look at her filmography strictly on paper, it seems utterly incoherent. It really does give you absolute whiplash.

17:14Total whiplash. I mean, let's just walk through the timeline for a second. In 2020, she directs No Mad Land. This is a quiet, sweeping, deeply naturalistic drama. Francis McDormand plays a widow who loses everything in the 2008 recession, packs her life into a van, and basically travels the American West taking seasonal jobs. Very grounded, very raw. Super raw. It costs very little to make. It wins the gold line at Venice. And it makes Zao only the second woman in history to win best picture at the Oscars. It is the textbook definition of prestigious grounded art. Then, immediately after sweeping the Oscars, she releases a turnels. Right. We go from a marginalized woman scraping by an abandoned Nevada to immortal, laser-eyed aliens fighting CGI beasts across millennia. The jump in budget and scale is just astronomical. It's hard to even comprehend the shift, and she doesn't stop there. Jump forward to 2025, and she directs Hamden. Right, another massive pivot. Now she's doing a period piece, tear-jerker. It's an adaptation that fictionalizes the family life

18:16of William Shakespeare, specifically focusing on his wife Agnes, played by Jesse Buckley. It deals with the tragedy of the Bubonic plague. It scores eight Oscar nods and wins one for Buckley. So she's all over the map. Exactly. So you have an Indian-Nihwesterne, a cosmic superhero tent pole, and a 16th century plague drama. The moderator at Venice looks at this spread, and essentially asks her to explain this massive contrast. Which is completely a trap. Oh, it's totally a trap. The implication is, who are you really? Did you sell out for Marvel or are you the Indie Darling? The moderator assumes that because the external containers look so radically different, the internal mechanics must be different as well. But Zao just completely refuses the premise. Her rebuttal is brilliant. It really is. And it's almost comedic in its brevity. She just looks at them and says, what contrast? It lids people in nature with animals who have complicated relationships with them. When I first read that quote in the variety report, I laughed out loud because it sounds so reductive. Like she's brushing off the question.

19:17I immediately thought of a food analogy, actually. And let's hear it. It feels like someone claiming that a meticulously crafted $300 Wagyu beef tasting menu at a Michelin star restaurant and a $2 greasy smash burger from a drive-thru are exactly the same thing just because they both involve chewing calories. Right. On the surface, it sounds ridiculous. Yeah. The ingredients in the scaler are so vastly different that comparing them feels absurd. But if we dig into the mechanism of that analogy, I actually have to backtrack. How so? If we look at the chemistry of cooking meat, the mayorate reaction, the literal browning of the amino acids that creates the flavor, is the exact same chemical process on a $300 stake as it is on a $2 burger. The core reaction is identical. That is a brilliant way to look at it. Thanks. So my question to you is, if Zao isn't just being glib, what is her cinematic mayorate reaction? What is the identical core process running through all three of those drastically different films? Her mailed reaction, her unified theory of storytelling,

20:20if you will, is the visual and thematic representation of humanity being dwarfed by an indifferent ecosystem. OK. See more about that. If you strip away the million dollar CGI budgets, and you strip away the Elizabethan corsets, and you strip away the modern RVs, the core visual and emotional thesis remains unbroken in all her work. Let's break that down for each film to see if it actually holds up. OK. Take Noom Badland. Francis McDormand's character is a tiny, fragile organism dwarfed by the massive, uncaring landscape of the American West. And she's also dwarfed by the equally uncaring machinery of modern capitalism. Right. Amazon warehouses and massive snowstorms. Exactly. She is struggling to survive in a physical and economic ecosystem that does not care if she lives or dies. Now, scale up to eternals. You have these immortal beings, but they are still dwarfed by the vast, uncaring cosmos. They seem powerful, but they aren't in charge. Right. They are pawns to celestials, literal space gods, and they are struggling to understand their purpose

21:22within the timeline of Earth's ecosystem. The scale changed from a Nevada desert to the Milky Way. But the feeling of being dwarfed is identical. And Hamnet is a fifth there, too. Absolutely. And Hamnet, it is a domestic family, dwarfed by the microscopic but unstoppable forces of nature. The bubonic plague, disease, and the tidal wave of human grief. They are powerless against the biological ecosystem of the 1500s. Wow. OK. So she really wasn't joking. Not at all. Zao is entirely serious when she says there is no contrast. A true storyteller doesn't change their core obsession just because a studio gave them a larger checkbook. They only changed the wardrobe and the production design. She's consistently managing an ecosystem on set to tell stories about characters struggling to manage their own ecosystems on screen. Exactly. It's ecosystems all the way down. It is incredibly rare to find a director who can maintain that thematic purity across such wild shifts in genre. It proves that the high art versus popcorn divide is mostly about the wrapping paper, not the gift inside.

22:24It's all about the container. Right. But this intense dedication to building these ecosystems, to manufacturing these massive containers for the rest of us to process our lives, brings us to the most jarring moment of the Venice Masterclass. Yeah. It was a very stark tonal shift at the very end. Completely. I mean, we have spent this entire deep dive tracing her absolute triumph. She has conquered Indy Cinema. She has conquered the Blockbuster Machine. She has Oscars. She is being celebrated in Italy by the most elite critics in the world. She is objectively won the game of Hollywood. Right. But at the very end of this Masterclass, despite all the external markers of having made it, she makes an incredibly vulnerable, almost desperate confession to the room. It was really striking to read. She admits to being in the grip of a profound, existential crisis. She tells the audience, and this is word for word, she says, 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.

23:24It is a devastatingly honest admission. And we have to analyze the profound paradox of her specific situation here. It's incredibly tragic in a way. It is. She has dedicated her entire adult life, her formidable creative intellect, to building these beautiful, complex containers, whether it's the Badlands of South Dakota or the far reaches of space, so that we, the audience, can sit in the dark and process the complexities of human existence. She's doing a public service, really. But the transactional cost of her building those containers is that she is perpetually trapped behind a monitor. The camera lens, the editing base screen, the massive iMac screen. The screens are everywhere. Yes. The very tools she uses to connect with humanity on a global scale have become physical and psychological barriers, preventing her from participating in humanity firsthand. She is mediating reality for us. But in doing so, her own reality is entirely mediated. Like, she isn't feeling the wind in the desert. She's looking at a monitor to ensure the wind looks good

24:24on the actor's face. Precisely. And this is why it expands far beyond a niche filmmaker problem and touches on a universal human condition that affects every single person listening to this right now. The screens that we believed would connect us to the world are fundamentally separating us from it. I really want you, the listener, to pause and map this onto your own daily habits. Because you aren't directing $200 million movies, obviously. But you are absolutely carrying a high definition screen in your pocket everywhere you go. We all are. It's glued to us. Right. Think about the last time you were in incredible concert or your kids' school play or standing in front of a breathtaking view on vacation. What was your immediate involuntary instinct? Was it to just stand there and feel it? Probably not. No, probably not. It was probably to pull out your phone, open the camera app, and try to capture it. We have this desperate urge to put a frame around our experiences, to build a tiny digital container for our memories. So we can process them later or share them online.

25:25The irony being that the moment you look at the concert, through your phone screen to make sure it's in focus, you are no longer actually at the concert. You're checked out. You are in a localized editing day. You have removed yourself from the physical ecosystem of the crowd and the music, and you have become an observer of your own life. It's the tragedy of the observer. You can either live the myth or you can record the myth. But the human brain struggles immensely to do both at the exact same time. They are mutually exclusive states of being. Right. And if an Oscar-winning director, someone who's literal professional calling is to capture life on a screen, is feeling this acute painful crisis of disconnection from reality, what does that mean for the rest of us who are just doing it for free every single hour of the day? To fully grasp the weight of her crisis, we really have to bring this entire conversation full circle back to the beginning of her story. Back to the bar. Exactly. Think back to her days as a bartender. When she was 28 pouring drinks, feeling what she called lost.

26:28She lacked a clear career trajectory. She lacked money. She lacked industry respect. But she was deeply undeniably embedded in unmediated reality. She was right in the thick of it. She was looking directly into people's eyes across the bar, not looking at them through a viewfinder. She was living in the messy, unfiltered ecosystem of human connections. She was a participant, not a manager. Exactly. And now she has achieved everything society tells us we should want. She is found by every metric of success. Yet, sitting on that stage in Venice, she is essentially mourning the loss of that bartender's connection to the physical world. Wow. She has realized that you cannot fully experience the warmth, the danger, and the beauty of the ecosystem. If you are always hovering in a helicopter above it, trying to get the perfect wide shot. It really puts our entire modern relationship with media under a microscope. I mean, we started this deep dive exploring a young woman whose drives to tell stories couldn't be stopped by a lack of drawing skills. We watched her completely pivot to a new medium.

27:30Right. And in doing so, fundamentally redefining what a director is, moving away from the dictatorial attour to the manager of a massive creative ecosystem. And we examine how she systematically dismantled the elitist barriers between high art and popcorn cinema by defending comic book movies as modern mythology. She proved that whether a story costs $200 million or $2 million, it's true architectural value lies in acting as a psychological container for us to process our shared human anxieties. She demonstrated that a masterful storyteller's core obsession, the human struggle against an indifferent landscape, translates seamlessly from the quiet American West to the cosmic battles of immortal gods. But her journey lands on this incredibly profound note of caution. It really is a warning. It is a warning about the very tools we use to consume these myths. The realization that the screens we rely on to deliver these essential life processing containers are slowly systematically isolating us from the very reality we are trying to understand.

28:32The container has walled us in. The tool of connection has become the instrument of isolation. It forces us to ask what the limit of mediated reality is before we completely lose touch with the physical world. Which leaves us with a final lingering question to turn over in your own mind today. And it extends far beyond Chloe Zhao or the Venice Film Festival. It affects all of us. It does. Think about the long historical evolution of how humanity shares its stories. Our containers for processing life have constantly evolved over time. We started organically sharing spoken myths around a physical crackling campfire. Right. Pure physical connection. And technology evolved and we moved to ink on paper to mass-produced comic books and eventually to these massive glowing cinematic screens. But if those screens, as one of our greatest living directors warns, are now causing a collective existential crisis of disconnection, if they're actively making us feel like we are missing our own lives, what will the next evolutionary container for our shared myths look like?

29:33That is the million dollar quotient. Will the future of storytelling require us to invent an entirely new medium? Or will it require us to finally turn the screens off entirely? Step out from behind the camera and return to the physical ecosystems we've been neglecting. It's definitely something to seriously chew on the next time you instinctively reach into your pocket to capture a beautiful moment instead of simply allowing yourself to live it.