Maggie O'Farrell and Chloe Zhao Discuss Adapting Hamnet for the Big Screen
In December, on the day of the Dublin premiere of Hamnet, I took a trip over to the IFI to see a conversation between author Maggie O'Farrell and director Chloe Zhao talking about adapting O'Farrell's novel for the big screen. This is somewhat unique because they didn't show us the movie, and it wasn't out yet, so aside from a few film executives in the audience, no one had seen it yet. Still, it was an interesting conversation about the film as well as the process of taking a beloved book and translating it to a new medium.
Now that the movie has been out for a while, I thought I would share my notes from the talk with everyone. Particularly, I finally typed them up for Zoie because she loved the movie so much.
Maggie O'Farrell was introduced to Shakespeare at age 11, after which, she learned a new play in school every year. Shakespeare made her "feel really grown up" when she started to understand the plays with more depth. Hamlet first came into her life at 16, and her teacher offhandedly mentioned the existence of Hamnet, Shakespeare's son who died at the age of 11. O'Farrell remembers this feeling significant, even then, though she would not go on to write the book about this child for many, many years.Hamnet was an idea she kept "circling around" through continued research, but she kept putting the project down. Part of this came from a superstition about writing the novel before her own son got to age 12. This was intensified because she'd realized that she had the same grouping of sons and daughters as Shakespeare did. The parallels were too close to dive into the story early in her career. Hamnet was her eighth novel for adults.
Chloe Zhao started her career wanting to be a manga artist. She drifted through writing, photography, and other creative arts. She landed on aspiring to be a film director because you "don't have to be a master of anything." Directing requires you to be good at a lot, but the central focus of the director is making an ecosystem of masters.
Zhao was driving through the desert when she got the call about Hamnet. She had horrible reception. "I was in the desert! I was just trying to survive," Zhao recalled. She couldn't fully understand why they wanted her for this Shakespeare project. She wasn't entirely convinced.
"I don't do generals cause I can't say no to people," Zhao joked, but Paul Mescal wanted to meet with her. She googled him and looked at pictures, and when she saw his face, she decided that she needed to meet him after all. Watching him talk at this meeting, she felt like he was a young Will Shakespeare, the project pitched to her on this roadtrip coming back into the forefront of her mind. He also sang the praises of the novel. Suddenly, she could see the project taking shape. It turns out that Mescal knew all along that Zhao had been approached to adapt the film, so he orchestrated the seemingly chance meeting to make his appeal to play Will Shakespeare.
O'Farrell had the answer as to why Zhao was tapped the helm the adaption. She knew that Zhao wouldn't be precious about the Shakespeare connection, sometimes a difficult task for those deeply invested in the Bard. She also knew that Zhao wouldn't make it into a typical costume drama. The twist, however, was that Zhao came back saying that she wanted to write the script with O'Farrell. At first, O'Farrell was resistant to the idea, but on a Zoom call with Zhao during which she intended to decline the job, O'Farrell felt like she fell under "a spell" and agreed to do a first pass on the script.
"Maggie and I have different skills... but we come from the same place," Zhao said of writing the script together. O'Farrell took the first pass at the script, then Zhao did a second pass, but after that point, the two worked off the same draft.
O'Farrell went in understanding that films shouldn't be a perfect replica of the novel. "That would be wrong," she said. The book takes nine hours to read, so everything it contains can't fit into the allotted space of a film. While the book was O'Farrell's baby, she astutely likened the film to being a niece or nephew giving her the necessary creative distance to work on the script.
Zhao came in with a clear idea of what to keep from the novel and the instinct to relay the events out of chronological order. She saw taking apart the book and reconstructing it into a film like looking at an hour glass. The idea is to narrow the book down as much as possible and then build it back up on the screen to piece together the emotions and other aspects that were stripped out for the purposes of writing a screenplay. The entire book can be present on the screen in ways that the screenplay itself can't contain.
While Mescal wiggled his way into the role of William Shakespeare, Jessie Buckley was equally destined to be Agnes. Zhao said she "has some connection with something a lot older than her," something like a connection to the ancestors. "Those windows have to be open," she said as to the windows of the soul that actors often shut down for privacy or safety at various times. These windows are hard to have open on a film set, but it was imperative to Agnes's character to find someone who could maintain this closeness tot the world. Zhao made many of her artistic choices based off of body intuition, further driving home the importance of this connectedness. "How do we put the whole spectrum of human emotions into one frame?" became the guiding question of the film.
There's a key to art creation that exists "if you can handle the tension of the duality," Zhao maintains. Part of that comes through in the "to be or not to be" of it all. An artist needs to be in this space of gray area, but we often run to the poles of extremes because seeing things in black and white is easier.
On set, O'Farrell was taken with the costume department, how they would create these beautiful hand-stitched costumes and then beat them to make them look lived in. They gave the falconer gloves to the dogs and let them chew the leather to age them. Will's costume is dyed with the same ink that Shakespeare would've used to write. Zhao found herself fascinated with capturing how nature comes into their home. "You can't quite tell where the edges are."
The movie culminates with Hamlet being performed for the first time in the Globe. Zhao put Mescal and O'Farrell to the task of rehearsing the Shakespeare actors who the staged performance since the two are deeply invested in Shakespeare whereas she can't get past the archaic language. Mescal advised her not to take the "Hamlet for dummies" approach. This way, she could experience the performance of Hamlet with the blank slate that Agnes experiences the play for the first time. He maintained that if they performed it right, she would be able to feel it in a way that transcends the language. O'Farrell did fill Zhao in on the essentials, turning in a "school essay" style piece on the connections between the play Hamlet and Shakespeare's life.
Dealing with grief loomed heavy over the project. Zhao felt an anxiety about finding Agnes's "language of memory" in the work. There was a deep understanding that grief comes from our immense capacity to love. It wouldn't hurt so badly if we didn't love so much.
In order to lighten the mood, the cast partook in surprise dance breaks or a "dance take" where music would start mid-scene and they would have to stop acting and dance their way our of the scene. This once happened during a heavily emotional scene for Mescal where Jacobi, who played Hamnet, was lying under the death shroud. When the music started, Jacobi rose up with the opening note like a zombie.
To close the conversation, the two reflected on the experience of bringing the film into the world. At the time of the talk, the Golden Globes was looming. O'Farrell was worried about walking in a floor length gown and was excited to sort through her goodie bags. Zhao admitted that even very zen people morph when put in highly competitive environments like that of the awards shortlist.
In reflecting what this movie hopefully offered to the viewers, they spoke about how art makes it so "we don't have to hold all of these things ourselves." O'Farrell cried watching the film in the theater even though she thought she knew the story too well to elicit emotion anymore. She found the "collective experience mirrors what's happening on screen for the last twenty minutes or so." The process of bringing the book to the screen has been a deeply moving one for O'Farrell who, even on set, watching the scenes unfold on the monitor had many moments of thinking, "Wow, I wrote that." To further drive home to point of what a tear jerker it is, she said, "I'm not saying my son has no heart—he does‚but he is 22. The son who had the twelfth birthday. He cried despite it."
The impact of viewing it in the theater led to a brief appeal to continue seeing movies in theaters or going out of your way to create communal experiences even with streaming, gathering friends and viewing as a collective if the theater isn't accessible. "The threat of the communal experience being taken away... they can divide us and control us," Zhao said.
At the close, O'Farrell spoke about the inspiration for her new novel out this year, Land. It's the story of her great great grandfather based on a family rumor that he worked on revisions of the maps of Ireland in 1850. But map makers weren't allowed to sign their work, so what he did, exactly, was difficult to track across time.
At the conclusion of the talk, which did not include a screening of the film despite this being prior to the movie's theatrical release, the moderator quipped, "Thank you all for coming when almost no one has seen the film."
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