Oscar Directors: How the Nominees Drew on Personal Experiences for Their Tales of Survival
![Red-tinted collage of 2021 Oscar nominees](https://static.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/13fea_PB-directing_W_main-H-2021-1618006312-928x523.jpg)
Lee Isaac Chung (‘Minari’), Emerald Fennell (‘Promising Young Woman’), David Fincher (‘Mank’), Thomas Vinterberg (‘Another Round’) and Chloé Zhao (‘Nomadland’) used their experiences and memories in their films.
Nomadland: Chloé Zhao
For some directors, their nominated films represent culmination of their oeuvres. Nomadland‘s Chloé Zhao, who grew up in mainland China, has devoted her career to exposing the beauty and bleakness of the American heartland. Her 2015 debut drama, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, and juggernaut 2017 indie Western The Rider both depict the struggles of real-life Lakota Sioux youth living in the Badlands of South Dakota. She continues this documentary-style fictional storytelling in Searchlight’s Nomadland, which focuses on Fern (Frances McDormand), an older wage worker who roams the American West in a customized van while seeking seasonal gigs. Zhao adapted her screenplay from a nonfiction book about this true-to-life post-recession subculture of retirement-age Americans who don’t have the luxury of leaving the workforce. Nomadland is a lyrical neo-Western that explores themes of scarcity and independence, but above all, it details what it takes to endure such a demanding lifestyle.
![Nomadland star Frances McDormand and cinematographer Joshua James Richards with Zhao.](https://static.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/114_IMG_0129-EMBED-2021-1618006759-compressed.jpg)
Promising Young Woman: Emerald Fennell
Fennell’s career-spanning themes of life-or-death feminism persist in her daring feature debut, Promising Young Woman. The British multihyphenate has acted in a number of staid, female-forward period dramas like The Crown and Call the Midwife, but her boldest work has been the darkly comic and violent stories she’s written herself. In 2018, she took over for Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the second-season showrunner on the hit BBC thriller Killing Eve, about the erotic, bloodthirsty dynamic between an assassin and the female MI5 agent hunting her. That same year, her short film Careful How You Go premiered at Sundance, telling the story of three women who indulge their inherent cruelty through random acts of mischief. In Focus’ hyperreal black comedy Promising Young Woman, Fennell further delves into chaos and carnage by dissecting the #MeToo movement. Carey Mulligan stars as Cassie, a medical school dropout who spends years pursuing revenge against all those complicit in the rape and eventual suicide of her best friend.
Nomadland‘s Fern and Promising Young Woman‘s Cassie each fight to navigate their harsh worlds after experiencing shattering trauma.
While Zhao and Fennell have crafted complex survivalist stories informed by their activism and sociopolitical interests, fellow directing nominees Thomas Vinterberg (Another Round), Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) and David Fincher (Mank) each draw from their personal lives to tell intimate stories about men on the precipice of losing their families and careers.
In the Danish dramedy Another Round, Mads Mikkelsen plays a demoralized high school teacher who at first improves — but then nearly destroys — his relationships when he and his friends dabble in constant drunkenness to boost their self-confidence. Vinterberg initially envisioned a more overtly comic tone for the film, including more intergenerational conflict in the school setting. At the beginning of the shoot, however, his teenage daughter, Ida, died in a car accident. After a period of mourning, he eventually returned to the film to honor Ida, and the completed version of the film is a delicate, spirited and heart-wrenching examination of modern masculinity. Another Round‘s final scene is its most memorable: During a waterfront celebration, Mikkelsen’s boozed-up Martin suddenly explodes into liberated dance as a crowd of students cheers him on. It’s both exuberant and aching, evoking Vinterberg’s persistence in the face of tragedy.
![Mads Mikkelsen and Vinterberg on the set of Another Round, which is also nominated for international film.](https://static.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/003_Druk_bagom_Photo-by-Henrik-Ohsten2-EMBED-2021-1618006750-compressed.jpg)
![Steven Yeun and Will Patton with Minari director Chung.](https://static.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/MINARI_00190-EMBED-2021-1618006767-compressed.jpg)
Mank is personal for Fincher, who directed the Netflix film based on a decades-long project originally conceived by his father Jack. The black-and-white homage to 1930s Hollywood stars Gary Oldman as scandalous scriptwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, a raconteur alcoholic who systematically destroys his relationships to craft the famous and infamous Citizen Kane screenplay. Fincher spent years working on Mank‘s story outline with his now-deceased dad, starting in the 1980s, until they had whittled down the historical components into a grand portrait of a truth-teller who is eventually squeezed out of his profession.
Minari and Mank question what it takes to persevere for the sake of a dream, and whether the legacy is worth all the suffering,