Chloé Zhao on “Hamnet,” Her Film About William Shakespeare’s Grief

0:02This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

0:13This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Chloe Zhao was only the second woman to win the Oscar for Best Director, and that was for her 2020 film Nomadland, which starred Frances McDormand as an itinerant worker. Chloe Zhao is 43, and she's had a varied career, ranging from low-budget contemporary westerns to making a Marvel film called Eternals, which is a supernatural epic with a colossal budget. Now Zhao has taken another distinct turn, to Hamnet, a story about the creative life and the family life of William Shakespeare. Based on a novel by Maggie O 'Farrell, Zhao's film is about Shakespeare as a young man grieving the loss of his only son.

0:58It stars Paul Mescal and Jesse Buckley. Chloe Zhao spoke with our staff writer Michael Shulman, who covers film and entertainment for The New Yorker. So how did this book and how did this project make its way to you? I was driving through New Mexico to Telleride Film Festival, and then that's when Amblin called me and told me about this project. Amblin meaning? Amblin, Spielberg's production company. And when they said it over the phone, you know, the reception, if you haven't been to the four corners not great um and so it's in and out and they're saying you know it's about um Shakespeare's wife and the death of their son and I just thought there's so many things in that sentence that I have no personal connection to so I said no and then a few hours later I met Paul Metzger for the first time I didn't know who he was because I had not seen normal people.

1:59His careers change a lot in a short amount of time. But I sat next to the creek with him and I just felt something about him. You know, there's something about him. There's a simmering discomfort in him like an animal, you know, like a steppenwolf just want to burst out. And that's why he creates. So the energy was really strong. And he's talking about, oh, I asked him, would you ever consider playing young Shakespeare? And he said, wait, are you talking about Hamnet? I love the book so much. You have to read the book. It's not what you think it is. Please read the book. So what about the book when you read it made you feel like you were the right person to do it?

2:45Were there details in the novel that really spoke to you? When I read the book, I thought the internal landscape was so beautifully described. That is my, that usually I have to really get to know, say, Brady from the writer. I have to get to know him for such a long period of time. Would I understand his internal landscape? So then I can externalize it on screen. So the audience isn't just relying on him verbally, right? But Maggie already done that work for all the characters. So I thought, that's my blueprint. And also there's a rhythm to the way she writes. It has a heartbeat to it that is very similar to mine.

3:32I found out later that her favorite filmmaker is Wong Kar-wai, which is the person whose work that made me want to make films many, many years ago. So there is that similarity as well. I mean, there's also an external landscape in the film that is so vivid. And you're a filmmaker who shoots the natural world beautifully. Anyone who's seen your first three features were all in or in part set in the American West and South Dakota specifically. Basically, Hamnet is set in Elizabethan, England, and you shot in Wales and Herfisher. I'm curious about what you got from that very different kind of natural landscape as you were thinking about the film.

4:27The natural world, the reason why it has been such a big part of every film I've done is because I can now in my 40s look back at my career and say the reason why that is is because I have always had a deep fear of death. And I think that drives my creativity. and when you're afraid to die, you are actually not able to live fully. And I know that deep inside. And now when the light goes off, you know, feng shuts off, I'm lying there, I know I'm not living my life fully. And it's because I'm so terrified. I don't feel safe in this world. And also my instinctual human self knows that when you go into nature, If you have a relationship with nature, then you develop a very embodied spirituality that is not relied on anyone else telling you, right?

5:27It's an embodied safety that you feel within oneness. And that you can only find in nature when you become one with your surroundings. That's all of our great prophets goes into nature to come back with the message for a reason. And so I just knew that's part of working on my own shit. to get myself into nature. And the second part to answer that question is that in my 30s, I was much more like a pioneer, like going west, going into finding treasures. I wanted to go as wide as possible, chasing horizon after horizon so I can come back with the treasures. The camera is insatiable. It wants to capture everything.

6:13And I want to move. I'm always on the move. And then in my 40s, after a midlife crisis, I realized that I can't keep running from myself. And in the forest, it's the opposite of the plains. And the forest is deeply feminine. And it makes you stay still. And when you stay still, you have nowhere to go but into the underworld and into yourself, where all your shadows are. So I knew in my 40s, this is the right place, right kind of nature for me to dive deep in.

6:54And when it comes to the forest in Wales, in terms of inspiration, when I first visited that forest with my cinematographer, Lukasz, we wanted to go to find a language for the film or just let the forest tell us what the film is about beyond what we read in the book. And I was in Kiev right before that. And I was with somebody who was making a documentary about a strip of forest in the front line. And when I left Kiev and went to Wales, and it was this beautiful spring forest that we were in, me and Lukács was there, and I was getting some images and footage from the front line. in Ukraine. And I will see these dark holes, black holes in the ground.

7:45And some of them, they're lime mines, holes. Sometimes they're dugouts. And then I walk around our forest and I will see these black holes that are natural made black holes. I had such a big emotional reaction to it. I start crying. I sat next to the void, this black void, because it's coming for all of us. Uh-huh. And also, it's in that void, the compost, new life comes. In this hole here and the one in that front line, new life will come. And there's hope. In Hamlet, he wrote, all living things must die, passing through nature to eternity. And to me, that eternity is love. And so then my Polish DP runs over and looks at the hall and goes, I understand this.

8:40We must film this hall. And then he filmed the hall, and we had Max Richter's Sleep Album playing. And then he started lifting up at some point the tripod, and then it went up to the sky. And then we just started, it went up and down, up and down. It was like, ah, this is what the film is about. Right. So nature, we consider nature an HOD. the department head, is constantly working with this.

9:09Director Chloe Zhao speaking with Michael Schulman. More in a moment.

9:27So one of your main characters is William Shakespeare. I know. The William Shakespeare, played beautifully by Paul Meskel. And, you know, this is not the witty, hyperverbal Shakespeare of Shakespeare love. He's actually a man of pretty few words. He's brooding. He's frustrated. As you and Maggie were writing the screenplay, how did you approach just the challenge of writing lines for William Shakespeare? I think the reason why the producers and also Maggie chose me is because I don't feel that way about William Shakespeare. I don't have the same reverence. I do have reverence intellectually, but I don't have the burden on my shoulders as many people in the West do.

10:18Maybe the same as I am with, you know, cowboys or Westerns. Right? I watched only two and a half Westerns when I made The Rider. So, but I watched more afterwards because I fell in love with it. And it's the same. I'm probably going to be doing more Shakespeare-related things after this. But I didn't come feeling that he's any different than a man who fell in love with a woman and couldn't quite express his feelings. So, I never, the pressure is on the actors. It's on Paul, who does have a lot of reverence in the sense that not only will we put him through not only playing William Shakespeare, but also telling the story of Orpheus' uterine disease as William Shakespeare.

11:10So that, and to answer your question, he's very different than in the book. Actually, Maggie reminded me a couple weeks ago when she was here. She's like, do you remember that? You see, in the book, he's quite talkative. He's expressive, you know, an actor. And I guess that was me. I guess I made a decision to change his character because I find a lot of artists, male artists, get into expressing themselves in their arts because they never felt safe. to express their emotions in real life and in our society. What are you looking at? You. Why?

12:01I thought you were a man of words, Master Tutor. As a little boy, they're told to toughen up or there's no space for your emotions because mom is crying, my sister is crying. So I was raised by a man like that. I've loved and beloved by a man like that my whole life. So it just became natural for me and Paul as well was part of that decision as well, like watching him. There's him in this character as well. And I can only work that way because moment by moment, I need to feel love towards this character, right? And I need to feel like I understand him. And there's a part of me that is like him.

12:46I feel safe in my fantasy world on set. Then I can deal with emotional situations in life. So Paul was under a lot of pressure because we don't talk about who this character is. We start shooting and find him. So that's day three when we did the Orpheus scene. you know the scene where he goes I don't talking to people is difficult for me and then she said tell me a story we did that whole scene on day three and many many takes usually I don't do that many takes just for him to find who is William Shakespeare speaking one of the greatest myths to a woman he fell in love with very loaded yes and then at one point he actually bursts forth with the to be or not to be speech That's also pressure on Paul, yes.

13:41So I know you went to school in England as a teenager. Were you taught Shakespeare there? Was that your first encounter with sort of his actual text? Well, I didn't speak English, so when you don't speak English and you have Romeo and Juliet in front of you in the equivalence of a ninth grade, still, when I was on set of Hamnet, when Paul was delivering his speech, I only understand a third of it, technically, because I just don't understand what those words mean. But at the beginning, Paul has said to me, look, I can study it and translate every word and understand what it all means. But Paul said to me, listen, if Shakespeare is performed right, you don't have to understand what they're saying.

14:33You feel it in the body. The language is written like that. And so in a way, me and Lukács, who also doesn't speak much English, we sat there and we watched Paul's performance. And in a way, we kind of embody Agnes, who doesn't quite understand everything, but we feel it. So in those days in the globe, I'm judging by me and Lukács' physical reaction. We start crying, where we go, oh, you know, our throat is tight. Our stomach turns. then we know it's the right take. We didn't even have to understand every word, which is really magical. It's making me think about Shakespeare completely different.

15:17I mean, I think that's true for anyone watching Shakespeare. I believe you just wrapped directing the pilot of the Buffy the Vampire Slave revival. So you're back working on a franchise with a very intense fandom. I wish I'm also one of them. I'm sure that helps. But I'm curious, as you move forward in your career, how do you see your relationship with the franchise-driven part of Hollywood? You know, I think from what I can tell, it's only getting harder and harder to make a movie that isn't based on something connected to some form of IP. And yet you've done both. You're continuing to do both.

16:01I mean, you could call Hamnett and William Shakespeare IP. in some way, but, you know, it's... I thought about his sellability when I signed up. Both Maggie's book and him, so it's pretty strong IP we're dealing with here. Right. So how do you see yourself fitting into the industry that is now so IP-driven? Why do you think that is? Because people want to save bets. It's hard to make money. Yeah. On a film. Yeah. You know, I just launched, I just made an announcement, me and my producing partner, Nick Gonda. We teamed up with Kodansha, which is the oldest and one of the largest manga publishing house in Japan.

16:50And they have everything from Akira to Ghost in the Shell to Attack on Titan, you know, Sailor Moon. So we just teamed up with them to launch Kodansha Studios, which means that we will be developing live action adaptations of their IP in-house before it goes to the studios. Tell me more about manga. Manga is quite different than Western comics, particularly American comics. Manga is heavily influenced by Shintoism, Japanese Shintoism. And if you don't know what that is, it's believing that every object has a spirit, right? Like this glass has a spirit within itself. There has been quite a complicated relationship between studios licensing Japanese IP, and particularly manga IP.

17:45And the adaptation process has been quite complicated for years and years and years now. so I've always dreamt to be a bridge between the East and the West and to be able to create a safe and nurturing garden in a way for international filmmakers writer, directors and Japanese senseis, manga artists, authors to come together and to at early stage allow the artists to really see each other Why did this artist create this story in Japan? You know, what is really the core of it? And then spiritually, emotionally, and then to find the right filmmaker and then can allow them to work together to develop the screenplay until the little, you know, the shoots of the plants are strong enough and then we go to our studio partners.

18:47I think that's, I guess, one of my plays in the IP world. And I think adopting from IP is beautiful. I started my writing career as a fan fiction writer. Oh, really? In China. A pretty well-known one, too. But you never know because I will never share with you my pen name. But I don't mind. I think the word original is misunderstood in modern world. because oracle means the source. It means old, the beginning. So original actually means going back to the source. Yeah, but our modern culture is so obsessed with new things, must have new things. It's a very masculine-dominated way of looking at the world.

19:37Must have new things all the time. But in nature, everything goes back to the source. So I don't mind working with IP. It's just how we do it needs to be, I think, could be healthier, more wholesome. The last thing I want to ask you about is you've described yourself as deeply neurodivergent. And you've talked about how you become overstimulated and kind of shut down. You know, a director on a set has to deal with so much, so many people, departments, questions, images. is. So how does that challenge you on a movie set? And how does it help you on a movie set? Good question. See, I didn't know, you know, I didn't have my official diagnosis until this year.

20:29So in the past, I always wondered, maybe I'm just billed wrong. Something is off with me. And I mean, going to premieres or press days, you know, promoting the film is even harder because the amount of exposure, you know, going to an award show or things like that. So I feel a lot of shame around why can't I enjoy it, you know, like the people around me could be. And then once I have some language around it, it's very empowering. I go, okay, so the fact that I'm good at some things, right, is my sensitivity, my intuition, my ability to process information, my pattern recognizing skills. I can watch people and find patterns and I can pretty much predict what they're going to do in the scene, right?

21:26All those things I understand is because my brain takes in so much more information than the person next to me. So I need time to process that information. And if I don't process it and more are coming in, then I could shut down and implode or just have massive, you know, meltdowns. So since then, and also a really strong perfume can give me a shutdown. Really? Yeah, if someone's going through the airport, Geico, you know, that's tough. Okay, so you won't be working in smell-o-vision. No. But I love, you know, anything that's natural from the natural world is fine. It's the chemical in the perfume that is overwhelming, like cleaning products, air fresheners, things like that.

22:21Well, you are very likely headed on the road to the Academy Awards again. So I hope that no one is wearing very strong perfume at them. That's lost cause. And congratulations on Hamnet. Thanks. It's a really beautiful movie. Thank you.

22:41The New Yorker's Michael Schulman, speaking with director Chloe Zhao. You can find Justin Chang's review of Hamnet at newyorker.com. And of course, you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well. Newyorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for this week. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer.

23:22with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Dequet.