Lifestyle
The transformative joys (and pains) of painting your own house
There are 38 walls in my house, including the ceilings. Of those, 14 are fully painted, 10 are in varying stages of completion, seven are covered in paint swatches and two are haphazardly skim-coated. The remaining five are as nature (the previous homeowners) made them, for now. I am now used to living in a kind of aesthetic limbo. I work beside a stack of gallon cans, paint trays and crumpled canvas drop cloths, below a half-painted ceiling. I no longer notice the flashes of lime green tape caressing door frames, encircling bathroom floors and smothering naked outlets. For the last six months, I’ve gone to sleep each night confronted with the same impossible choice swatched on the wall: Should the bedroom be Farrow & Ball’s Breakfast Room Green, Behr’s Roof Top Garden or Backdrop’s Lawn Party?
This purgatory is entirely of my own design — there are no professionals involved. Professionals get the job done. They make decisions, they bring their own rollers, they already own ladders. I self-impose and prolong these chaotic experiments because collectively, they form a promise: that one day I’ll be able to live happily in the house I’ve always wanted.
It’s hard to believe it’s already been two years. My relationship with my house is intense, tumultuous. Driven by a dark kineticism, it vacillates between contempt and gratitude at a velocity that catches my husband, my therapist, even me off-guard. It helps to start at the beginning.
I don’t remember how many houses we saw before the one that eventually became ours, but it was a lot. We started house hunting a little too late, just as interest rates started to claw their way back from historic lows. L.A.’s open houses were thick with the resulting panic, generated by throngs of millennial couples, looking-glass versions of ourselves, all desperate to get ahead of the curve.
At a viewing for a “developer’s dream” in Alhambra (complete with black mold blooming on the walls), I watched a fellow buyer-to-be grab onto the arm of the selling agent as she shouted to the rest of us that she wanted this house, that she would buy it today and that she would pay for it in cash. The market sensed our desperation. Prices rose quickly. Listings sold for tens of thousands over asking. Then hundreds of thousands.
On Redfin, a listing that attracts significant traffic is given the designation of a “Hot Home.” The first Hot Homes we found were architecturally significant with character and updated kitchens. Soon, they were simple, but solid, with more than one bathroom. Then came the quick flips with baggage, bisected by easements or on shaky foundations. Eventually, even the gnarliest tear-downs were in high demand. So when we met our house, we were immediately taken by its lack of homeowner-installed balconies, exposed wiring and sodden floors. There were no sewage problems, no five-foot-tall bathrooms, no wild animals living inside. It might not have been Hot, sure, but it was a Home. Beautification, we agreed, could come later. When our offer was accepted, we felt so lucky that we started counting our blessings and stopped running the numbers. And house stuff, it turns out, is very, very expensive.
The urge to paint is primitive and innate. Cavemen, famously, liked to doodle on the walls with pigments ground from charred wood, stone, bone and minerals, bound with plant sap and animal fat.
Faced with bloated mortgage payments locked in at an inarguably mid-interest rate, I turned to DIY. I forced myself to watch excruciatingly paced episodes of “This Old House.” I bought a voltage tester. I took a woodshop class, giddy with visions of Donald Judd-inspired furniture and dovetailed cabinets (I made a cutting board). But dabblings in more advanced forms of home improvement have been unequivocal failures. The enormous hole I cut in a load-bearing wall in a Gordon Matta-Clark-informed burst of inspiration required extensive professional intervention. A bathroom I decided to “redo” has sat undone for more than a year. I’ve learned that a lack of experience and ADHD, combined with the consumption of time-lapsed home renovation videos on social media, is an intoxicating and dangerous cocktail I’m better off without.
If you’re relatively able-bodied and OK with doing a bad job (which I always am), painting is pretty easy. And its transformative powers are overwhelmingly effective.
But paint. Paint is my friend. Unlike electrical work or cabinet construction, paint is statistically less likely to kill, injure or dismember you. Its essential tools are inexpensive and intuitive. If you’re relatively able-bodied and OK with doing a bad job (which I always am), painting is pretty easy. And its transformative powers are overwhelmingly effective.
I’m not alone in this belief. The urge to paint is primitive and innate. Cavemen, famously, liked to doodle on the walls with pigments ground from charred wood, stone, bone and minerals, bound with plant sap and animal fat. In honor of my ancestors, I eschew steps like sanding and priming. Choosing, almost every time, to paint first and ask forgiveness later. “Color good,” I reassure myself as I apply a coat of Backdrop’s reddish-purple Lobby Scene to a perfectly serviceable Ikea cabinet, boring bad.
Remembering the 16th and 17th century artisans commissioned to adorn the walls of wealthy Europeans’ homes with murals and trompe-l’oeil, I encourage my friends’ 4-year-old to draw on the living room wall. We were planning to paint over it until more urgent, enticing walls cut ahead in the queue. Her portrait of our dog, while anachronistic to the period, is still on view.
My practice isn’t always joyful. As I get down on my hands and knees to scrape paint drips off the floor, the results of my husband’s exuberant roller work, I empathize with the Puritans who looked down upon those who would dare paint their walls. “Heretics!,” they cried. Centuries later, my voice joins their chorus: “Drop cloths!”
There are 38 walls in my house, including the ceilings. Of those, 14 are fully painted, 10 are in varying stages of completion, seven are covered in paint swatches and two are haphazardly skim-coated.
How old were you when you were asked for the very first time what your favorite color was? And how many times over the years has that answer changed, surprising even yourself? The paint and coatings market, built on our endlessly varied and forever shifting color preferences, is robust, with a reported market size of $206 billion in 2023. It might not surprise you to know that paint’s business started to really pick up swiftly around 2021, the year U.S. homeownership rates hit a 9-year high. We were one year into a global pandemic, and the nonessential among us were grateful for our health but sick of our surroundings. Snarled supply chains and crowded ports meant massive delays for furniture and furnishings. So we turned to paint.
The paint mass market has no shortage of options available: Behr, the pitiless paint god at whose Home Depot altar I am often forced to worship, boasts nearly 4,000 colors, and selecting one is just the beginning. “Do you want Behr Premium Plus®, Behr Scuff Defense®, Behr Marquee®, Behr Dynasty®?” the Home Depot paint associate silently asks, pointing at an infographic laminated on the counter top. Flustered, I step out of line to Google “Behr prmeium.plus vs. detnasty reddit,” and gesture to the next person to go ahead. The other mainstream paint brands, Benjamin Moore (3,500 colors) and Sherwin-Williams (1,700), offer similar experiences.
Our home’s previous owners painted every wall a cool, semi-glossed gray with greenish undertones. Under the piercing, cool white LED flush mounts installed every few feet, the effect was undeniably institutional. Paint was the obvious first step.
There was a time when I reveled in the sheer volume of the spectrum. Our home’s previous owners painted every wall a cool, semi-glossed gray with greenish undertones. Under the piercing, cool white LED flush mounts installed every few feet, the effect was undeniably institutional. Paint was the obvious first step. I drove happily to Home Depot, to Lowe’s, to Ace Hardware and picked free samples from the rainbow walls like flowers. Then came a bloody, months-long campaign to find a warm, non-white neutral for my office. It took eight samples and six trips to two hardware stores before I found it: Benjamin Moore’s Gentle Cream. But I was exhausted, spent, color-sick.
There are easier, softer, pricier ways. Backdrop Home (82 colors), Farrow & Ball (152 colors) and Little Greene (196 colors) way. Backdrop Home, in particular, has zeroed in with shameful, heat-seeking precision on aesthetically obsessed millennials who crave curves and architectural significance but can’t afford the homes that have them. Silverlake Dad is a slate blue-gray. Barragán-Cito, a bright pink, will speak to anyone who shelled out an extra $25 to take their own photos at the architect’s Mexico City home tour. The brand’s earnestness feels very L.A., which makes sense: When Backdrop co-founder Natalie Ebel and her family moved to Silver Lake post-pandemic, they brought the brand’s operations and production with them.
Ebel says L.A. is “adventurous with color … It’s a lot easier to play with color when you’re surrounded by color. And maybe it’s the size of the homes. In L.A., you have more real estate, you have more space and you’re open more to experimentation with the light, the windows, the sun.”
I was once skeptical of the Backdrops, the Farrow & Balls, dismissing them as the refuge of the less creative who weren’t capable of conceiving their own Color of the Year. But faced with so many walls still to go, I’ve found myself finally softening, succumbing.
My house and I are birth-year twins, 1990 babies, Year of the Horse. When you get down to it, my house is very much a classic L.A. house — two boxy stories stacked atop a wide garage, straddling a hillside. It stands shoulder-to-shoulder with four identical siblings. I never know how to describe it, but you’d know it if you saw it. “Oh, it’s one of those,” a friend said, walking up to the door for the first time. “Why didn’t you just say so?”
It wasn’t the house I imagined myself living in. My dream house (think Jeff Shelton’s biomorphic surrealist creations) doesn’t exist in L.A. nature, at least not in my budget. Last year, according to the National Assn. of Homeowners, 32% were first-time buyers, with a median age of 35. In other words: millennials. Millennials, like me, were buying properties they could barely afford and, as supply shrank, perhaps didn’t particularly like. Our houses just didn’t feel like us.
Maybe paint is the cheapest, easiest, fastest way to make our houses as unique as we think we are. It felt like a hypothesis worth testing. Over the last two years, I’ve drenched the bathroom in glossy navy, bisected an office with teal and mustard, painted the stairwell a bright, matte powdery pink. I’ve resurrected kitchen cabinets with a deep blue and spray-painted the corresponding pulls bright red. I painted the fireplace a truly heinous shade of green called simply Frog, only to re-paint it Frosted Sage, only to skimcoat over both (it currently stands naked and anxious, waiting for its next outfit change).
Alyssa Coscarelli’s Los Angeles home, painted with Backdrop colors.
Painting has almost become one of our love languages: part quality time, part acts of service. The house, we know, appreciates the physical touch.
I paint when I’m bored, when I’m excited, when I’m sad, when I’m anxious. I leave the tarps and paint trays out — perpetual invitations to explore. I’ve welcomed my husband home with a fresh wall of swatches; he’s surprised me by finishing walls I’d been forced to abandon during the workday. Painting has almost become one of our love languages: part quality time, part acts of service. The house, we know, appreciates the physical touch.
“I have a question,” a friend recently asked. “Do you think you’ll ever be done painting?” I considered it for a moment, but knew the answer was no. On the one hand, I’m fighting an unwinnable battle against awkward architecture armed only with pigmented latex, and stopping now would be surrender. But it’s not just this house — any house I live in would be one I needed to paint. Priming, painting, re-painting, I feel something shift and open. With every wall, every stroke of the roller, every roll of tape, the more I love my canvas. The more it feels like home.
Liz Raiss is a writer, editor and furniture enthusiast based in Los Angeles. She runs the (formerly anonymous) Instagram account @design.out.of.reach.
Understanding one of the world’s oldest civilizations can’t be achieved through a single film or book. But recent works of literature, journalism, music and film by Iranians are a powerful starting point. Clockwise from top left: The Seed of the Sacred Fig, For The Sun After Long Nights, Cutting Through Rocks, It Was Just an Accident, Martyr!, and Kayhan Kalhor.
NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR
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NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR
Few Americans have had the opportunity to visit or explore Iran, an ethnically diverse nation of over 90 million people which has been effectively shut off from the United States since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Now, with a U.S. and Israeli-led war on Iran underway, the ideas, feelings and opinions of Iranians may feel less accessible. However, some recent books, films and music made by artists and journalists in Iran and from the Iranian diaspora can help illuminate this ancient culture and its contemporary politics.
These suggestions are just a starting point, of course — with an emphasis on recent works made by Iranians themselves, rather than by outsiders looking in.
Books
For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising, by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy
There are quite a few excellent titles that deconstruct the history of Iran from ancient times through the rule of the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Iranian Revolution. But there are far fewer books that help us understand the Iran of 2026 and the people who live there now. One standout is the National Book Award-nominated For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising by journalists Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, which chronicles — almost in real time — the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that began in 2022, during which Jamalpour was working secretly as a journalist in Tehran. In 2024-25, Jamalpour (who is now living in exile in the U.S.) and I spent a year together at the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace fellowship for journalists; her insights into contemporary Iran are among the best.
Gold, by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori
If Americans are familiar with Persian poetry at all, it may well be through popular “translations” of the 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi done by the late American poet Coleman Barks, who neither read nor spoke the Persian language and detached the works of Molana (“our master”), as Iranians call him, of references to Islam. (Instead, Barks “interpreted” preexisting English translations.)
In 2022, Iranian-American poet, performance artist and singer Haleh Liza Gafori offered the first volume of a corrective, in the form of fresh Rumi translations that are at once accessible, deeply contemplative and immediate. A second volume, Water, followed last year.
Martyr!: A Novel, by Kaveh Akbar
This 2024 debut novel by Kaveh Akbar, the poetry editor at The Nation, is an unflinching tour-de-force bursting with wit and insight into the complications of diaspora, the nature of identity in a post-War on Terror world and the inter-generational impact of the 1979 Revolution on Iranians. The protagonist, the Iran-born but American-raised Cyrus Shams, has struggled with addiction, depression and insomnia his whole life, and is trying his best to make sense of a world at the “intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness.” As with so many other of the titles here, fiction and fact are woven together: the story centers around the true story of the U.S. downing an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war.
The Stationery Shop: A Novel, by Marjan Kamali
Marjan Kamali’s 2019 love story is the wistful tale of a young woman named Roya and an idealistic activist named Bahman, who meet cute in a Tehran store in the 1950s, but whose planned marriage falls apart due to turmoil both familial and political, as Iran’s democratically elected government falls in a U.S.-British lead coup that ends with the installation of the Shah. Roya flees to the U.S. for a fresh start, but the two reunite in 2013, wondering: what if life had spun out in a different direction?
Movies
Coup 53
This 2019 documentary directed by Iranian film maker Taghi Amirani and co-written by Walter Murch recounts Operation Ajax, in which the CIA and Britain’s MI6 engineered the removal of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, and installed a friendly ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in his place. (The Shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution.) As Fresh Air critic John Powers noted in his review, “What emerges first is the backstory of the coup, which like so much in the modern Middle East is predicated on oil. Shortly after the black gold was discovered in early 20th century Iran, a British oil company now known as BP locked up a sweetheart deal for its exploitation. Iran not only got a mere 16% of the oil money before British taxes, but the books were kept by the British — and the Iranians weren’t allowed to see them.”
YouTube
Cutting Through Rocks
Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s film Cutting Through Rocks is up for an Oscar this season after premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. This inspiring documentary follows Sara Shahverdi — a divorced, childless motorcyclist — as she campaigns to become the first woman elected to the city council of her remote village, and who dreams of teaching girls to ride and to end child marriage.
YouTube
It Was Just an Accident
The latest film from acclaimed director Jafar Panahi — who has officially been banned from making films in Iran — is 2025’s It Was Just an Accident. Panahi, who has been jailed multiple times for his work and was recently sentenced again in absentia, has said in interviews that his inspiration for this brutal – and shockingly funny – thriller was people he met while in prison: an auto mechanic named Vahid finds himself face-to-face with the man who he is fairly certain was his torturer in jail, and eventually assembles other victims to try to confirm his suspicions. Fresh Air critic Justin Chang called It Was Just an Accident “a blast of pure anti-authoritarian rage.”
YouTube
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
This 2024 thriller — shot in secret by director Mohammad Rasoulof — centers on a family whose father, Iman, is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran. But it soon becomes clear that his job has nothing to do with actually investigating. Iman, his wife, and two daughters come to suspect each other in our age of mass surveillance, as the city streets below erupt into the real-life Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
YouTube
Music
Kayhan Kalhor
One of the primary ambassadors of Persian classical music has been the composer and kamancheh (an Iranian bowed-instrument) virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor. Although music, like poetry, has been central to Iranian culture for centuries, all kinds of music were initially banned after the 1979 revolution. Since then, however, Iranian classical musicians have ridden many looping cycles of official condemnation, grudging tolerance, censorship and attempts at co-option by the regime.
Despite those difficulties, Kalhor has built a thriving career both inside Iran and abroad, including winning a Grammy Award as part of the Silkroad Ensemble and earning three nominations as a solo artist. Back in 2012, I invited him to our Tiny Desk to perform solo. “Didn’t know I could have goosebumps for 12 minutes straight,” a YouTube commenter recently wrote; I couldn’t put it any better.
YouTube
Saeid Shanbehzadeh
Among Iran’s 92 million people, about 40% of come from various ethnic minorities, including Azeris, Kurds and Armenians among many others. One of the most fascinating communities is the Afro-Iranians in the Iranian south, many of whose ancestors were brought to Iran as enslaved people from east Africa. Multi-instrumentalist and dancer Saeid Shanbehzadeh, who traces his ancestry to Zanzibar, celebrates that heritage with his band, and specializes in the Iranian bagpipe and percussion.
YouTube
The underground metal scene
Despite ongoing restrictions on music — including the continued ban on female singers performing in mixed-gender public settings — Iran is home to a thriving underground scene for metal and punk. Though it’s fictional, Farbod Ardebelli’s 2020 short drama Forbidden to See Us Scream in Tehran — which was secretly filmed in Tehran, with the director giving instructions remotely from the U.S. via WhatsApp — gives a flavor of that real-life scene and the dangers those artists face.
YouTube
Sen. Tillis To Kristi Noem
ICE Killings Are Like Dog You Killed
Published
Fireworks on Capitol Hill … Sen. Thom Tillis ripped into DHS Secretary Kristi Noem during a congressional hearing … comparing American citizens killed by immigration agents to a dog she killed.
Check out the video … the Republican Senator from North Carolina says Noem has shown terrible leadership and decision-making as Trump‘s DHS Secretary.
AP
Tillis says the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE and Border Patrol remind him of a passage from Noem’s book … where she recalls killing a dog she brought on a hunting trip.
Noem said the 14-month-old dog, Cricket, was misbehaving … so she led the dog to a gravel pit and shot her.
X/@DHSgov
Sen. Tillis told her straight up … “Those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment. Not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis. We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership. And you’ve demonstrated anything but that.”
In 2021, Zhao made history as the first woman of color to win the best director Oscar for her film Nomadland. Her Oscar-nominated drama Hamnet has made $70 million worldwide.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
It took a very special kind of spirit to make Hamnet, which is nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Chloé Zhao brought her uniquely sensitive, mind-body approach to directing the fictionalized story about how William Shakespeare was inspired to write his masterpiece Hamlet.
Zhao adapted the screenplay from a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and for directing the film, she’s now nominated for an Oscar. She could make history by becoming the first woman to win the best director award more than once.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, in setting an intention, a mood, a vibration for any event. Before Hamnet premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, she led the audience in a guided meditation and a breathing exercise.
Zhao also likes to loosen up, like she did at a screening of Hamnet in Los Angeles last month, when she got the audience to get up and dance with her to a Rihanna song.
She, her cast and crew had regular dance parties during the production of Hamnet. So for our NPR photo shoot and interview at a Beverly Hills hotel, I invited her to share some music from her playlist. She chose a track she described as “drones and tones.”
Our photographer captured her in her filmy white gown, peeking contemplatively from behind the filmy white curtains of a balcony at the Waldorf Astoria.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, and makes them a part of her filmmaking process.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
Then Zhao and I sat down to talk.
“I had a dream that we were doing this interview,” I told her. “And it started with a photo shoot, and there was a glass globe –”
“No way!” she gasped.
It so happens that on the desk next to us, was a small glass globe — perhaps a paperweight.
I told her that in my dream, she was looking through the globe at some projected images. “We were having fun and it was like we didn’t want it to stop,” I said.
“Oh, well, me and the globe and the lights on the wall: they’re all part of you,” Zhao said. “They’re your inner crystal ball, your inner Chloé.”
“Inner Chloé?” I asked. “What is the inner Chloé like?”
“I don’t know, you tell me,” she said. “Humbly, from my lineage and what I studied is that everything in a dream is a part of our own psyche.”
Dreams and symbols are very much a part of Zhao’s approach to filmmaking, which she describes as a magical and communal experience. She said it’s all part of her directing style.
Chloé Zhao used painting and dance to connect with actors on the set of her latest film Hamnet.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
“If you’re captain of any ship, you are not just giving instructions; people are also looking to you energetically as well,” she explained. “Whether it’s calmness, it’s groundedness, it’s feeling safe: then everyone else is going to tune to you.” Zhao says it has taken many years to get to this awareness. Her own journey began 43 years ago in Beijing, where she was born. She moved to the U.S. as a teen, and studied film at New York University where Spike Lee was one of her teachers. She continued honing her craft at the Sundance Institute labs — along with her friend Ryan Coogler and other indie filmmakers.
Over the years, Zhao’s film catalogue has been eclectic — from her indie debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me, set on a Lakota Sioux reservation, to the big-budget Marvel superhero movie Eternals. She got her first best director Oscar in 2021 for the best picture winner Nomadland. Next up is a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“A creative life,” she notes, “is not a linear experience for me.”
Zhao still lingers over the making of Hamnet, a very emotional story about the death of a child. During the production, Zhao says she used somatic and tantric exercises and rituals to open and close shooting days.
She also invited her lead actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley to help her set the mood on set. They danced, they painted, they meditated together.
“She created an atmosphere where everybody who chose to step in to tell this story was there for a reason that was deeply within them,” actress Jessie Buckley told me.
Buckley is a leading contender for this year’s best actress Oscar. She said that to prepare for her very intense role as William Shakespeare’s wife, Zhao asked her to write down her dreams “as a kind of access point, to gently stir the waters of where I was feeling.”
Buckley sent Zhao her writings, and also music she felt was “a tone and texture of that essence.”
That kind of became the ritual of how they worked together, Buckley said. “And not just the cast were moving together, but the crew were and the camera was really creating dynamics and a collective unconscious.”
Filmmaker and Hamnet producer Steven Spielberg calls Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
That was incredibly useful for creating Hamnet — a story about communal grief. Steven Spielberg, who co-produced the film, called Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
“In every glance, in every pause and every touch, in every tear, in every single moment of this film, every choice that Chloé made is evidence of her fearlessness,” Spielberg said when awarding Zhao a Directors Guild of America award. “In Hamnet, Chloé also shows us that there can be life after grief.”
Zhao says it took five years and a midlife crisis for her to develop the emotional tools she used to make Hamnet.
“I hope it could give people a two-hour little ceremony,” she told me. “And in the end, I hope that a point of contact can be made. That means that there’s a heart opening. But it will be painful, right? Because when your heart opens, you feel all the things you usually don’t feel. And then a catharsis can emerge.”
As our interview time came to a close, I told Zhao I have my own little ritual at the end of every interview; I record a few minutes of room tone, the ambient sound of the space we’re in. It’s for production purposes, to smooth out the audio.
Zhao knew just what I meant. She told me a story about her late friend Michael “Wolf” Snyder who was her sound recordist for Nomadland. “He said to me, ‘I don’t always need it, but just so you know, I am going to watch you. And when I tell that you are a little frazzled, I’m going to ask for a room tone … just to give you space.’” she recalled. “‘And if you feel like you need the silence space, you just look at me, nod. I’ll come ask for a room tone.’”
I closed our interview ceremony with that moment of silence, a moment of peace, for director Chloé Zhao.
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