It was a February day so overcast that noon looked like dusk, and Frances McDormand felt a little rattled.

Instead, he reached Frances McDormand, a 63-year-old woman who chats up everybody she comes across in her small town, doesn’t like to think of herself as famous, and has won two Oscars.

Since she rarely grants interviews, most people only see the real McDormand blazing an iconoclastic streak through televised awards shows, where she is barefaced instead of Botoxed and once wore her own jean jacket in lieu of borrowed couture.

(In Hollywood, this mild noncompliance is tantamount to a declaration of war.) McDormand is highly skeptical of any ceremony where actors are done up like glamorous gladiators, and when her husband, the filmmaker Joel Coen, was once asked to produce the Oscars alongside his brother, Ethan, McDormand suggested they set the telecast at Coney Island, which would have forced Hollywood glitterati to mingle with the freak show.

“Nomadland” would eventually require more from this private star than she is used to giving, but when McDormand first met with Zhao in early 2018, she was mostly curious what the up-and-coming director would think of her: “I was like, ‘Man, I just want to be relevant.

“Someone like Frances McDormand who is just so authentically herself, who has not tried to erase those lines on her face or cover that up to fit into the industry — to me, she’ll be relevant forever.”.

“It’s very interesting, the layers of it,” Zhao said.

“Chloé tapped into the truth of it,” McDormand said, “which was at different points of my life, I’ve said to my husband, ‘I can’t take this anymore, I’m dropping out.’”.

Many of the people McDormand interacts with in the film had no idea she was a famous actress — they figured she was just another nomad, and spoke to her like a normal person in exactly the way that she craves.

In some ways, all that verisimilitude could be grueling, too — McDormand was surprised at how exhausted she would feel after long days of simply being present in front of the camera, reacting to the stories real people unspooled.

Zhao also asked McDormand to put in actual hours at Fern’s odd jobs, like harvesting beets in Nebraska or working at a warehouse in California?

“I like to think that we have captured a great performance,” she said, “but also, an essence of Fran as well.”.

Details both large and small have been pulled directly from McDormand’s real life: Fern proudly shows off a set of plates that McDormand’s father bought her as a college graduation gift, and Zhao cast one of the actress’s oldest friends as Fern’s sister so the recriminations they air in the film could have a real weight.

“I have to believe that it’s not just a documentary of me,” McDormand said.

“I made a very conscious effort not to do press and publicity for 10 years in what other people would think would be a very dangerous moment in a female actor’s career, but it paid off for exactly the reasons I wanted it to,” she said.

We traipsed back through town, and as we walked up a hill covered in overgrowth and eucalyptus trees, McDormand drew one final line: “So I’m going to pass my house, and then I’m going to leave you,” she said

Before we parted ways, I asked McDormand how she felt after making “Nomadland.” I thought she scoffed at me, but she was laughing at the very idea