On December 8th, Hamnet had its German premiere at Delphi Palast in Berlin. After the screening, Academy Award–winning director and co-writer Chloé Zhao joined lead actress Jessie Buckley for a Q&A. They spoke about making the film, the dynamic collaboration between them, and the search for an ending that could hold the story’s grief.
Chloé, after your multiple Oscar wins for Nomadland, you must have received hundreds of scripts. What drew you specifically to Hamnet?
Chloé: To put it simply, Agnes [the film’s central character]. I believe there’s an inner world within each one of us, and my own inner Agnes had never been seen. I never felt safe letting her come forward. I felt more like somebody escaping into her fantasies – unlike Agnes, who is secure in her body, connected to her lineage, and expresses it without any shame. She allows herself to be fully seen.
For a long time, that part of myself felt inaccessible. After a difficult midlife crisis, though, I was finally ready to try to embody her in my own life. And then Jessie – who is on a similar journey and feels like a sister to me – was willing to swim in that river with me. That gave me the confidence to believe I could do it.
Jessie, how did you and Chloé first connect for this project?
Jessie: I was at Telluride Film Festival with a film, and Chloé was there simply to watch films. I had long admired her work, but I also admired the woman she is in the world, at least as I perceived her. Even before I knew her, I remember thinking that her movies felt brave; Chloé’s worlds are very brave. They strip away any facade and try to reach potent places of humanity. Working with her had always felt like a dream to me, even before we met, and I never imagined she would even know who I was.
So when she came up to me and said, “Hey, I’m Chloé, do you want to go for a cable car ride?” I was completely taken aback. And when we first spoke, we weren’t really talking about the book [the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, on which the film is based. We were speaking a shared language – about journeys, about shadows, death, motherhood, and that dance between life and death that begins the moment we’re born into the world.
Only later did I realize that this shared language connected us to the book. And why do we feel like sisters? Probably because of that mutual understanding. I think we’re both strong women who often carry a projected image of toughness. But beneath that, there’s a deep need for tenderness; a desire for the most vulnerable parts of ourselves to be seen. What made us sisters, I think, was our willingness to let each other see and hold that tender part – to create a vessel where it could be contained and cared for.
How did you approach adapting the novel? Tell us about transforming the story for the screen – and finding that emotional ending.
Chloé: It was frightening for me in the days leading up to production, because we still didn’t have the ending. We were shooting what was on the page, and I remember Jessie wasn’t feeling it. I could tell she was thinking, we’ve come all the way to the Globe [Theatre]! Where is this taking us? I was feeling the same uncertainty, but I pretended everything was fine.
In retrospect, though, that uncertainty was essential. You go home thinking, you’re the worst. You should never show your face in a film again. And then one day it clicks: this is the Globe. It’s a place where humanity gathers.
For Agnes, what’s taken from her through the film has to be lost – and transformed – among strangers. That disorientation was essential. Eventually, we both realized that in this place [the Globe], there is no single person; there are hundreds. Like being in a cinema. There’s an unspoken surrender that happens when we gather like that. We all arrive with our own private journeys. A story can carry us – even transcend us – toward the feeling we arrived with, without fully knowing what we were seeking.
It’s hard to believe we discovered that while shooting. From the outside, it may look carefully mapped and planned, but that’s where I have to give credit to the department heads and the crew. The final shot mirrors the opening image, where Agnes lies beneath the giant tree and surrenders to a living, breathing force of nature – the forest. At the end, the theatre and its audience become that same living, breathing organism. The forest and civilization mirror each other. Everyone is moved because we all carry stories of grief, loss, hope, and despair.
At the Globe, we started with huge [camera] cranes inside the theatre, which limited how the audience could move and how freely we could respond. After two days, Łukasz [Żal], our incredible DP [director of photography], ran in and said, “Get rid of all the cranes!” We removed them and ended up shooting the entire final sequence with just two ladders. That decision changed everything. Even the backdrop became simpler. Our production designer [Fiona Crombie] had created multiple complex layers, but at a certain point, we asked, what is this really about? What matters most? The answer was the forest, and the black hole within it. Because the backdrop was so pared back, it let the footage breathe. It became an ecosystem, rather than a construction.