“Often, in our society, the masculine strength is celebrated. It’s a painful way to exist.”
While filming Marvel’s “The Eternals,” she wanted male superheroes to be in touch with their feminine side. Here’s why Oscar winner Chloé Zhao thinks the female gaze is important for women ... And men.
While filming Marvel’s “The Eternals,” she wanted male superheroes to be in touch with their feminine side. Here’s why Oscar winner Chloé Zhao thinks the female gaze is important for women ... And men.
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00:00For me, there's a yin and a yang in each of us, feminine and masculine strength.
00:05And I think often in our society, in our industry, the masculine strength is being celebrated.
00:12And that's a painful way to exist, both for women and men.
00:22I want people to feel things.
00:25You know, I have had male figures in my life who are closed up, and it's painful to watch.
00:32You know, as much as what we've suffered as women in the society, we are kind of being
00:41given permission to feel more.
00:43And that's a very powerful thing.
00:53I think the female gaze is important from a female director, and also from a male.
00:59You can have a female gaze from a male director as well, you know.
01:02I think I come from, I'm from China, you know, I come from growing up in the Taoist philosophy.
01:12That's a very big part of my culture.
01:14And the principle belief of Taoism is to find harmony between the yin and the yang.
01:20So I find in my films, whether it's a young teenager on the Lakota reservation or a young
01:25cowboy or a woman who's lost everything, who is hardened up, or Superman, you know, the
01:34most powerful male figure, I always try to find a way to give them a chance to be in
01:42touch with their feminine side.
01:45And I think only that, only if we do that, we not only portray our women characters in
01:53a way that celebrates feminine strength, but also allow our male characters to access their
01:57softer side.
01:59I think that's the true female gaze, whether that come from a female director or a male
02:03director.
02:15You have a male superhero cry in this film.
02:31Can you tell me a little bit what the thought process was around that?
02:34I got asked similar questions when I had a cowboy cry in my, in my second film.
02:41And you know, Icarus is a bit of an archetype, you know, that come from the idea of the Übermensch,
02:48the strong man, the Superman.
02:51We've seen many different modern interpretations of that.
02:55And there has been a desire from the very beginning when I came to read the treatment
03:00that Marvel Studios made.
03:02This story is what they wrote, because I think there's a desire to look at some of the fundamental
03:10principles that this genre is born out of and try to challenge them.
03:16I do believe we're at the edge of a revisionist period for this genre.
03:22And that desire isn't just coming from the audiences, it's from the studios as well.
03:35I always imagined the Eternals as soldiers at the beginning.
03:38You know, they come to a place on a mission, and then they don't, they can't go home.
03:43And what happens to all 10 of them?
03:46And some of them fall in love with the natives, with a native inhabitant, and want to be a
03:52part of them, you know, and understand the beauty of their land, and others doesn't really
03:57fit in.
03:58I will say a big part of, again, coming from a Buddhist tradition, the Taoist tradition,
04:03is the idea of, I go back to the idea of harmony, you know, because to colonize, to expand is
04:13a masculine act, you know, and we, that happens, that's just a part of us as Homo sapiens,
04:19we do that to survive.
04:20But how can we, while doing that, still find a way to counter that?
04:26It's the way how we treat our planet, for example, and yes, we need to advance as a
04:31civilization, but how do we counter that?
04:33How do we look at the feminine side, the mother side of the equation, and to say, we need
04:38a balance?