Lifestyle
Tiana’s Bayou Adventure's joyous debut proves it was time for stale Splash Mountain to go
As we dip into the bayou, the scene before us feels a tad mystical, all glowing fireflies with hues of blue and purple seeping through the trees. While there’s a comfortably paced current carrying our log-carved vessels through the fantasy wetlands, what’s ultimately propelling us forward is the sound of music. In the distance we hear trails of zydeco, and as we come around a bend we’re greeted by an outsize, gregarious alligator, his welcoming green arms swinging to the tune.
“This zydeco band … can play!” says the gator, adding an excitedly drawn-out “hallelujah” for emphasis.
This is Louis, the friendly trumpet-blasting gator from Walt Disney Animation’s 2009 film “The Princess and the Frog.” Joining him is Princess Tiana, the entrepreneur turned musical archaeologist, dressed here in a regal but loose adventurer’s outfit. We can marvel at how human Tiana looks, with a carefully sculpted warm face and natural hair, or join in the festivities and smile at the band of critters — pay close attention to the rabbit playing a license plate as a washboard — swaying before us as we float by. Humor and friendliness abound in this invitingly good-natured attraction.
Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, the Walt Disney Co.’s replacement for its Splash Mountain log flume ride that was first announced in 2020, is at last ready for its closeup.
Princess Tiana is joined by a band of critters as she sings a song on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.
(Olga Thompson / Disney)
The attraction opens here at Walt Disney World at the end of this month, but it’s currently in previews. A mostly exact replica is coming to Disneyland later this year. Consider it a drastic tonal shift from Splash Mountain, as the themes of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure center around the communal power of music and food, focusing on how a song can bring together people from all walks of life. If Splash Mountain had the illusion of peril and danger — a rabbit being hunted by a fox and a bear — Tiana’s argues that a thrill ride, one complete with a 50-foot, soak-inducing drop, can be a jovial, celebratory affair.
Like any ambitious creative agency, Walt Disney Imagineering, the highly secretive arm of the company responsible for its theme park attractions, doesn’t always get it 100% right. But the company has arguably never miscalculated as much as it did with the creation of Splash Mountain, which opened first at Disneyland in 1989. Though the ride focused on animal vignettes and became one of the park’s most popular destinations, it could never quite shake its association with the 1946 film “Song of the South,” a work long decried as racist for its idyllic and romanticized view of slavery.
In 2020, amid a moment of cultural reassessment and nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd, Splash Mountain came to be seen as a blight. Disney, citing the need to embrace an “inclusive” concept, announced that the ride would be rethemed to “The Princess and the Frog,” a film that starred its first Black princess.
It took 35 years, but the Walt Disney Co. has at long last rid itself of an attraction that was anchored to an embarrassing part of its past. With the launch of Tiana’s, Disney has chosen to give us a princess-based ride not driven by a head-in-the-clouds fairy tale but one that is instead framed as an American success story, as Tiana, now a restaurant owner, is expanding her empire with a food co-op.
This is a ride for our times, an attraction that argues that Walt Disney World and Disneyland, two of the most visited places on the planet, can not just reflect our culture or parrot back what we’ve seen on film and television but show us better, more cooperative versions of ourselves. While based on “The Princess and the Frog” and featuring reinterpretations of a number of its jazzy songs, this ride doesn’t go the obvious route of repurposing known scenes or villains from the film. Tiana’s instead opts for a more abstract, uplifting perspective.
It was a creative risk, and one that has inspired a fiery social media debate, at least if the more than 8,000 comments on Disney’s YouTube page are to be believed. But it’s also one that largely works. I’ve ridden the attraction twice this week, and here are my three main takeaways.
The exterior of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure at Florida’s Walt Disney World, which is designed to represent a salt mine as part of Tiana’s food co-op operation.
(Olga Thompson / Disney)
A thrill ride doesn’t need to be tense
The genius of Splash Mountain, in my mind, has always been the track layout. Its narrative, which followed Br’er Rabbit and his attempts to live a life of bliss while eluding Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear, never really emotionally connected with me.
It’s relatively loose, as Br’er Rabbit was hunted simply for being a rabbit, and his attempts at adventure and exploration eventually resulted in him being bullied back home, albeit via a rousing finale that appeared to recenter Br’er Rabbit’s priorities around friends and family. And while there could be critters on all sides of us to distract our attention, what brought me back was the design of the flume, which took unexpected turns that seemed to hide its drops from view.
But in the moments leading to Splash Mountain’s five-story drop, Br’er Rabbit appeared to be in danger. Ominous vultures warned us of what was ahead and the soundtrack turned foreboding. It created a taut moment before we were launched into the briar patch below and Br’er Rabbit could hop to safety.
Tiana’s opts for a significantly different vibe. Mama Odie, the magic-wielding swampland elder from “The Princess and the Frog,” appears to whisk us to a Mardi Gras celebration as the upbeat and bouncy “Dig a Little Deeper,” a song about learning to be true to one’s self, plays around us. We go up the lift swaying, and the hope is that we go down it swinging, in the musical sense of the word. In theme and amusement park design, it’s generally been believed that such thrill-inducing moments need to instill a sense of fear. See, even, the skeleton pirate warning us before a dip in Pirates of the Caribbean.
But Disney in recent years has been attempting to reinterpret how a ride system can be used. When reimagining the fraught elevator drops of The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror into Guardians of the Galaxy: Mission Breakout at Disney California Adventure, for instance, the sudden lifts and nosedives were played more for laughs to match the zaniness of the franchise. Likewise here, Tiana’s tale is framed as a story of strength, positivity and perseverance, and Imagineers, even in this ride’s most thrilling moment, aim to heighten those traits rather than interject any more trauma into Tiana’s life.
Charita Carter and Carmen Smith, the two core Imagineers who led the project, spoke with me about toying with people’s ride expectations and opting to avoid any sense of danger in the attraction, which is set about one year after the events of the film.
“One of the things that we thought about was that this particular flume configuration has always been a rite-of-passage type attraction for young kids,” Carter says. “And when you think about Tiana and everything that she brings to the table, when she’s inviting and welcoming and wanting everyone to participate, we thought by celebrating [the drop] and making it a fun challenge, we were opening it up to a wider audience.”
Adds Smith, “When I think about the dip drop, with most people there’s a lot of apprehension, and we wanted people to feel a sense of celebration. When you’re on the ride and you’re greeted by all these incredible musicians, you’re in a very different state. What this dip drop does is say, ‘We’re on our way to this party, and we’re going to get there as fast as we can.’ It is a rite of passage, but you’re going to this moment, to this place, to be at a party.”
Emotionally, after riding through a cavern featuring a frog-led band with a firefly chorus, all creating a rousing, sing-along take on “Dig a Little Deeper,” the mood is one of pure uplift. If you’re taken with the music, the drop is one to be greeted with open arms.
All new critters were designed for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, including this musical frog.
(Olga Thompson / Disney)
Atmosphere matters more than plot
Splash Mountain, to be sure, was beloved, in large part due to its bevy of animatronic animals — a tally said to have topped 100 at Disneyland, many of which were rescued from the 1970s-era America Sings attraction. At the time, it was noble and efficient, a way to preserve Disneyland’s history while giving many of its historic audio-animatronics a new home.
In turn, Splash Mountain had plenty of details — possums, bees, turtles, owls and more, many of them caught in mischief — to entice us. Once inside the mountain, there was action on nearly all sides of us, including above. Animals sang, played instruments and avoided the rain by sitting under psychedelic mushrooms. Splash Mountain had a dedication to old-fashioned Disney craft, one that put an emphasis on feeding us dioramas rather than a plot.
Tiana’s takes an even lighter touch to theme park narrative design, as the story push is simply going on a journey in search of bayou musicians. Tiana’s features all new animatronics — 19 original critters and 48 animatronics in total, according to Disney. That figure includes multiple renditions of Tiana and her friends, including, in the finale, Charlotte La Bouff, Prince Naveen and others. They are all a joy. Louis, for instance, is striking, a technological creation that looks cartoonishly plump and pillowy rather than reptilian and scaly, a hand-drawn design now a tactile, real-world presence.
Ardent defenders of Splash Mountain will argue the animatronic number is significantly lower, and therefore the spacious show building feels less populated. That wasn’t my sense, in large part because the new critters are framed as relatively big set pieces. As we traverse the flume, any stretches without a major show scene become a chance to luxuriate in the wilderness atmosphere, watch the digital fireflies sway as they lead us on the journey or take in the joyous, jazz-leaning pop. The twilight nature of the lighting creates a fantastical atmosphere that makes this water ride feel somewhat cozy.
Additionally, the advancement in animatronic technology ensures that Tiana’s requires multiple rides before you spot all the details. The zydeco band is a delight, with details in not just what instrument an animal plays but how they play it. A beaver’s tail creates a rhythm on the deck and an opossum has a bass fashioned out of a gourd.
Things get weirder and more delightful with a bobcat and bear band, where instruments are fashioned out of logs and vegetation, and later some Afro-Cuban frogs jamming out with acorns. Here, story-wise, we’ve been shrunk down to the size of a frog by Mama Odie, and while placing guests in oversize environments to make them feel small is a bit of a theme park cliché, I’ll let it slide because the human-sized flowers and mushrooms enclose us as if we’re in a snug nightclub.
There are hidden tales throughout, including nods to how humans are affecting the natural environment. See, for instance, an otter whose fiddle looks composed of a paint thinner can and bottle caps. And that says nothing of the in-story radio in the ride’s queue, which features new, vintage-style arrangements of music from New Orleans.
Tiana’s is completely vibrant in its approach to sound. “That’s what New Orleans brings to the world,” Carter says. As various musical styles ebb and flow into one another, this fictional bayou feels fully alive.
The magic-wielding Mama Odie sends guests off to experience a 50-foot drop on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.
(Olga Thompson / Disney)
Theme park stories matter
Any change to a Disney theme park brings with it complaints. These spaces represent American myths and stories, shared among generations. A Disney park is not just a collection of intellectual property, even if it is sometimes treated as such by its corporate handlers. There’s simply too much history in these spaces, and lands such as New Orleans Square at Disneyland, the bulk of Epcot’s internationally focused World Showcase or Animal Kingdom’s representations of Africa and Asia help connect these tales to our lives outside the park gates.
Individual attractions, too, are representative of the era in which they were born, but unlike a film or a television series, a theme park is a living space. To expect the narratives of an attraction to remain fixed in time is to be wedded to a form of sentimentality. We visit theme parks to share and partake in stories, because stories are how we make sense of the day and our lives, and those stories should adapt to our changing culture.
Splash Mountain, of course, isn’t the first time Disney has tinkered with an attraction due to outdated cultural representations. Pirates of the Caribbean has received multiple updates, most recently one that removed a bridal auction scene in which women were relegated to property. Disneyland, which soon will turn 70, ultimately serves as a reflection of American pop culture, referencing our history with nostalgia while consistently challenging itself to reflect modern views.
And the culture eventually would catch up to Splash Mountain.
Times articles from the late 1980s cited Disney representatives already trying to justify the attraction, noting that it would skirt controversy by focusing solely on animated scenes and would avoid any references to the Reconstruction-era South. But even at the time of the ride’s opening, “Song of the South” was in the Disney vault, kept out of movie theaters and, eventually, off of streaming platforms.
But what was once a tale of a bullied cartoon rabbit is now a ride that serves as an ode to community, to a culture and to a region. Smith says she had long dreamed of bringing Tiana into Disney’s theme parks via a ride, and in 2019 began to fine-tune a potential story with then-Imagineering creative executive Bob Weis.
“I looked at it as an opportunity to tell a story that I think every young girl, young boy, mom and dad, and their parents could enjoy,” Smith says.
“For us,” Smith continues, “it is a love letter to all of our audiences. We see you. We hear you. We want you to be with us. This character is so worldly. Tiana is a princess, but yet she’s an entrepreneur. She’s a doer. She’s a dreamer. She’s all these things. We just felt what a great opportunity this was to give people a celebration.”
It is, essentially, the first thrill ride designed to feel entirely like a party. One could call it a splashing success.
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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