Why ‘Hamnet’ Director Chloé Zhao Had to Throw Away the Ending: “Sh**, We Don’t Have a Movie”

The story of the making of Hamnet is one of agony and ecstasy. Reading Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, an imagined but meticulously researched retelling of the death of a child that precipitated the writing of Hamletis like touching the void. (It is either, depending on whom you ask, a life-affirming dose of the full spectrum of human emotions or an exercise in utter masochism.) It’s a book about art imitating life, and the process of adapting the work for the screen was full of life that imitated art.

In January of last year, Chloé Zhao was visiting New York when she experienced an intense personal crisis; she decided to take respite (or a twisted version of it) on a cross-country Amtrak train back to LA There was almost no cellphone reception, and it was impossible to sleep, but that’s exactly what she was looking for. “I felt I needed to purge out whatever volcanic thing was inside me,” she says. The Oscar-winning filmmaker wrote and wrote, and by the time Zhao arrived at Union Station, she was so drowsy she almost fainted while waiting for her Uber. But, she had 90 pages of a screenplay that became Hamnet.

***

When Hamnet landed in bookstores in 2020, producer Liza Marshall already had plans to adapt it for the big screen. She’d read it months earlier, delighting in the way it told a familiar story — that of Shakespeare’s early life — from the totally unfamiliar female perspective of his wife, Agnes.

“Agnes has been written out of history, and in Maggie’s version she doesn’t even name William,” Marshall says. “He’s just ‘the Latin tutor.’ ”

As soon as she secured the rights, Marshall targeted Zhao. She’d heard the director was looking for a project about a witchy woman, and the Agnes in O’Farrell’s novel is a healer who draws from the natural and, often, the mystical. O’Farrell was pleased, too, as she wanted someone who would resist the urges to make the period drama too pristine, or to center Shakespeare.

Zhao was fresh off Marvel’s Eternals and quite interested, but she had two potentially deal-breaking conditions. The first was that O’Farrell agreed to co-write the script. “I thought: ‘God, no,'” says O’Farrell. She was a fan of Zhao’s, but was eager to move on to her next novel. Her first meeting with the director changed her mind, and she soon found herself swapping voice notes across continents (the author lives in Scotland). “I would wake up in the morning and look at my phone and there would be 12 messages, some of which were a minute long, and the longest ever was 58,” O’Farrell says of Zhao’s voiced thoughts. “I would transcribe them; it was her way of working out how she feels about certain things while she talks.”

Zhao’s second demand: She only wanted to write the film for Jessie Buckley. The two met for the first time at the 2022 Telluride Film Festival, while the actress was promoting Women Talkingand they connected immediately. “I’m never looking for the actor, I’m looking for the humanity underneath the acting,” the filmmaker says. “Fearlessness, and a lack of vanity, and a person willing to take off their mask. Plus, when I went to Jessie’s house, she has a kitchen just like Agnes’.” Buckley met Zhao for breakfast on the director’s next trip to LA, and didn’t realize until afterwards, when her agents sent her the book, that she was being considered for the role. “It’s one of the only books that I’ve stayed up all night to read,” Buckley says. “It was like oxygen.” The actress was drawn to the idea of ​​doing a period piece with the Zhao touch — deeply felt, raw and a bit messy.

While Zhao was courting Buckley, she was also courting Paul Mescal. He’d been at Telluride, too, and the two actors were already friendly from their time filming Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter. Zhao asked for a meeting — to Mescal’s slight dismay.

“I never want to meet with the directors I admire, and I’m always secretly hoping it will fall through,” he says. “Meetings can feel transactional, and you’re in this desperate situation where you want them to like you, while you already like them. But when I met Chloé, I was sitting looking out at the river, and she said, ‘Oh, that face makes sense for Shakespeare.’ And I was like, ‘Oh good, we’re talking about the project, so I don’t have to think about what I’m going to say next.’ ” Mescal, having already read and loved the novel, was in with one caveat: That Shakespeare be a man of feeling, rather than thinking. “We assume he’s an academic, but I think he’s more animalistic,” he says.

***

By the time Zhao delivered the final script, the production was on a fast trajectory because Mescal had a hard time starting his press for Gladiator II. She built out the rest of the cast with British acting heavyweights: Emily Watson, who plays Will’s mother, has a history of performing with the real Royal Shakespeare Company; Joe Alwyn, as a friend of Zhao’s, was eager to be part of the film even in a more limited role as Agnes’ brother; as Hamnet, they cast Jacobi Jupe, younger brother of acclaimed 20-year-old actor Noah Jupe.

The team — also led by cinematographer Lucasz Zal, who previously worked with Buckley on I’m Thinking of Ending Thingsand production designer Fiona Crombie — aimed to shoot on location as much as possible to create the feeling that they were an intimate community of creatives. “It became clear during preproduction that that wasn’t going to work,” says Crombie. The existing homes from the era of the Bard were under the UK’s strict historical protections, and the real-life Globe Theatre, the site of the film’s highly charged denouement, costs about 60,000 pounds per day for a full buyout. They decided to shoot three weeks of exteriors in Wales, where, on a scouting walk, they found the perfect tree — complete with a symbolic black hole — for Agnes’ first birth scene. (Crombie later dressed the forest herself, adding roots and ferns.)

Crombie and her team built the rest of the sets on a backlot outside London, using the Tudor architecture that was prominent during the late 1500s to convey what it felt like for Shakespeare to try to make art in their small, rural town and later for Agnes to live alongside the ghost of her late son. “It’s made of boxes,” Crombie says. “Boxing her in, boxing him in. They’re contained by the heaviness of this architecture, and it’s a complete contrast to the beautiful, open, green forest.” She filled the set with props that were sourced from vintage markets in France and newly created artifacts (like hinges created on-site by a blacksmith).

They built their own Globe Theater from scratch at 75 percent scale of the original to allow for a more intimate feeling on camera. Within the spaces, Zal filmed in an almost documentary-like style: They built compositions and used simple, steady camerawork wherever possible. “My job was just to capture the moments between Agnes and Will, or the weather, the wind in the trees. The actors had the ideas, and we just followed them with the camera,” says the cinematographer.

One of Zhao’s hallmarks is a distaste for the more traditional forms of preparation. She prefers not to discuss scenes in depth before filming, and she considers the script to be more of a loose architecture. “What’s written on the page is just there to look good for the studio,” she says with a laugh. “I know that I’m not going to do it. You have to keep things open for something miraculous to happen.” She doesn’t like actors to do character work, either. After Buckley and Mescal both signed on, they found themselves in New York at the same time filming other projects (The Bride and The History of Soundrespectively). “The beginning of our prep work was going to this place called Joy, in the East Village, and dancing to ABBA, which is really essential to the relationship,” says Buckley. Adds Mescal: “It was actually show tunes night, and they finished out with ABBA.”

Where some might see chaos, her actors saw openness and opportunity. “I would send Chloé my fever-writing, or a picture, and they would become scenes,” says Buckley. The night before they were set to shoot the scene where Will goes back to London in the wake of Hamnet’s death, she was thinking (and journaling) about birth and loss.

She imagined Agnes’ skin as a fragile shell, and the next day that Agnes should be peeling eggs during the scene. Mescal felt that there was something missing in Will’s return to London, and pitched an idea that became the rehearsal scene, where we see Will admonishing his Hamlet for botching the “I am myself indifferent honest” line. “It’s communicating artistic control, not because he’s a control freak but because what he’s saying is so personal that it matters that much to him,” he says. “Can you imagine your son has just died, and you’ve written about him, and an actor comes in and doesn’t know the lines? You would fucking hate people. That’s a highly charged scene, and I loved how it felt.”

***

Hamnet is, at its heart, a book about grief. O’Farrell writes, to a devastating degree, about the ways that Hamnet’s death threatens to mark Agnes permanently: as a guilty party (she failed to keep her son safe from the plague) and a broken woman (her marriage begins to disintegrate under the weight of loss). It’s an incredibly interior novel, and we follow Agnes’ thoughts all the way to London’s Globe Theatre, where, much to her dismay, her husband is staging a play named after their son. As she watches the tragedy unfold onstage, she sees that Will has not run away from his grief, but has written himself — and Hamnet — a new ending, a way to bring his memory to the masses each night. To convey this cinematically is, to put it lightly, almost impossible.

By the time the Hamnet crew made it to the final week of filming, everyone was struggling. Zhao, true to form, had only a loose outline for the last scene: Hamlet dies onstage, Agnes looks around at everyone, and then a couple of “nice lines” to describe the feeling she’s having. “But when we shot it, on the fifth to last day, I went, ‘Shit,’” says Zhao. “‘We don’t have a movie.’ ”

Buckley felt lost, too. “I was thinking, ‘I hate myself, and everybody can see that I’m lost,'” she says. Mescal had one of the only major disagreements he’s ever had on set. “Chloé said in passing that at the end of the movie, the relationship was over and that’s OK. I was like, ‘That’s not the film I’ve been making,'” he says. “I was in a blind panic.”

Enter “On the Nature of Daylight.” The musical composition, written by Max Richter, has been used in everything from Arrival that Shutter Island that The Last of Usto the point where it’s almost compulsory. But Richter himself was scoring the film — he describes the score as the “amniotic fluid” that holds the family’s story — and his work was heavy on Buckley’s mind.

While listening to the song on her drive home that night, she had a revelation. “I recognized that Agnes is trying to hold this pain on her own, and it’s impossible,” she says. “There’s this weird thing on sets sometimes, where actors and extras must be kept separate. And I thought, ‘I need to surrender to the 300 people that are around me in the scene.’ ” The next morning, she texted Zhao a link to the “This Bitter Earth” rendition of Richter’s instrumental used in Shutter Island.

“I was ending a very important relationship at the same time, and I was in the car on the way to work feeling the pain of separation,” says Zhao. “I played the song, which I’d never heard, and suddenly I was reaching for the window of the car. I realized, I myself needed strength from the world around me to survive my breakup, and the ending just came to me shot by shot.” The director arrived at the soundstage and announced that they were going to reshoot the entire ending. She wrote the version we see in the film, which culminates in the entire audience reaching out to Hamlet onstage.

“Chloé had me go off and cut down Hamlet,” says O’Farrell. “I had to edit Shakespeare. I felt sick. I thought, ‘I should say a Hail Mary before I do this.’ “Crombie’s team realized the stage, as built, was too high to allow for Buckley and the extras to reach each other effectively, so they brought in an army of wheelbarrows and started frantically pouring soil to raise up the floor. Zal decided to operate the camera himself for the final shot. “You can see the whole world on her face,” he says.

The company felt immediate catharsis within the new ending. They filmed over four more days, playing “On the Nature of Daylight” on repeat the entire time. When they wrapped, Zhao blasted Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and all 300 people broke out into song and dance. When the music stopped, they found themselves profoundly changed. “This experience of making the movie made me feel like I could have children,” says Zhao. “I think we can forget that women’s intuition, and our wisdom, are so powerful. It’s something I’m really considering now.”

Buckley had one last day of filming pickup shots by herself (“It was horrible, everyone was gone and I just cried my eyes out in every room of the house and none of it was usable,” she says with a laugh). She had spent the entire production struggling with the weight of her own desire to become a mother, and there had been moments — like wearing the prosthetic belly — that were quite painful. “I wanted it so badly, and it wasn’t happening, and the enormity of wanting that while making this movie was so much,” she says. When she returned to London, she went on a long walk with Mescal along Regent’s Canal, processing her emotions. A week later, she was pregnant.

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.