When Chloé Zhao was making her latest film, Hamnet, she was going through "what they might call a midlife crisis". Before and during, she experienced "waves and waves and waves of loss and grief", including the end of her relationship with her long-term partner and collaborator, the British cinematographer Joshua James Richards. "When you arrive halfway through your life, sometimes the foundations start to come apart — and that’s a good thing," she says now. "I think, from a Jungian perspective, you spend the first half of life trying to build an ego and then the second half trying to deconstruct it, so who you are can come through. That’s what was happening to me."
Hamnet is a story about grief. It’s based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel about the short life of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, who died aged 11 (his twin, Judith, survived). The book suggests he was killed by the plague, and is told non-chronologically from the perspectives of the boy, Shakespeare (known as "husband" or "father") and Hamnet’s mother, here named Agnes.
Zhao’s film takes a linear approach, foregrounding Jessie Buckley’s witchy, feral Agnes and Paul Mescal’s tortured, silent Shakespeare, and expanding its scope to take in the making of Hamlet, which was written a few years after Hamnet’s death. Part love story, part tragedy, part portrait of the artist, it examines how a family comes together — and how it can be taken apart. It is an intimate film, shot in damp English fields, full of potent symbolism — birds, dirt, blood — and grounded by Buckley and Mescal’s performances.
In 2021, Zhao became the second woman, and first woman of colour, to receive the Academy Award for best director for her 2020 film Nomadland, which also won best picture, and best actress for Frances McDormand. With Hamnet, Oscar buzz surrounds Zhao and her cast once more.
At first, Zhao was reluctant to take on a project about motherhood. "I was hesitant because I’m not a mother, but also because the mother figure has always been a sensitive topic for me. I have quite a deep mother wound," she says. "Unfortunately, what we do for a living is to open up those wounds ... This film came to me a little bit before I was ready."
She met Buckley and Mescal at the Telluride film festival in Colorado, and Mescal urged her to read the book. "It could be mainly focused on that: the loss of a child, and motherhood," Zhao says. "But the book is existential. It’s about love. It’s about death. It’s about metamorphosis."
Mescal and Buckley signed on to the project before the script, co-written by Zhao and O’Farrell, had been developed. Buckley tells me Zhao "immediately felt familiar. We swim in similar waters. We both are looking to discover something from the shadows ... We were speaking the same language."
In November 2023, five months before Zhao started working on the script, she and Buckley met in New York for a "dream work" session. These workshops, which many of the actors in the film participated in at different stages, were led by coach Kim Gillingham and designed to help artists "drop into the collective unconscious": Zhao would then incorporate elements that emerged from their dreams into the script. "It was a very, very powerful session," Zhao says of her and Buckley’s workshop. "I feel like she and I are still unpacking that one session now."
Buckley describes the process as "a whole soup of instincts, private explorations, dreams, unknowables ... Chloé created a safe and fluid space to allow whatever was asking to come through to come through." It was: "Something very alive. Not in the head. A state of ‘being’, not acting. It’s a risk to work and be seen in that place. I don’t know if I would have gone where I did if it wasn’t for her."
Emily Watson, who plays Shakespeare’s mother, subsequently tells me: "I’m always nervous of discussing the inner workings of acting. It sounds so ludicrous to an outsider — it’s like showing somebody your underwear." But she explains that, as part of her own dream work process, she was asked to write a letter to her inner self about her character, just before she went to sleep. That night, she says: "I put my head on the pillow [and] literally, in about 10 minutes, I had five very vivid dreams — one about the movie."
In January 2024, Zhao returned to New York to see Buckley again. "I had some personal issues, and [she] just happened to be there to catch me. It was like a tsunami of emotion hit me," Zhao says, as if her body couldn’t "handle the amount of energy bubbling up after what Jessie and I experienced in New York".
Zhao told her team she would not be flying back to Los Angeles. She would take the train. The journey would take four days and she would have little phone reception. During that time, as images from her and Buckley’s dream work surfaced in her mind, she wrote most of the script, sending voice notes back and forth with O’Farrell whenever there was signal. "It was so intense," she says. "Hamnet, the way it came to me, was biological ... That doesn’t mean it’s not painful, of course. Kind of like giving birth, you know?" — The Observer
