Chloé Zhao on “Hamnet,” Which Is Nominated for Eight Academy Awards

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1:09This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Chloe Zhao was only the second woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. And that, of course, was for Nomadland, the 2020 film starring Frances McDormand as an itinerant worker living out of a camper and searching for work all over America. Zhao is up for Best Director yet again, and the film Hamnet on the surface is very different from her previous work. It takes place in England in the 16th century, where a young William Shakespeare and his wife Anne have to cope with the loss of their son. The film is based on a novel by Maggie O 'Farrell, and Hamnet is nominated for Best Picture, along with Best Actress for Jesse Buckley and five other awards.

1:53Chloe Zhao talked about Hamnet when the film first came out with staff writer Michael Schulman.

2:05So 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 so I was in and out and they were saying it's about Shakespeare's wife and the death of their son 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 Metzko for the first time I didn't know who he was because I had not seen normal people.

2:55His career has changed a lot in a short amount of time. Yes. 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?

3:42Were 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.

4:29I 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. Hamnet is set in Elizabethan, England. And you shot in Wales. and her for sure. I'm curious about what you got from that very different kind of natural landscape as you were thinking about the film.

5:23The 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, I'm lying there that 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?

6:23It's an embodied safety that you feel within oneness and that you can only find in nature when you become one with your surroundings. All of our great profits 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.

7:10And 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 the right kind of nature for me to dive deep in and when it comes to the forest in Wales in terms of inspiration I was, when I first visited that forest with my cinematographer, Lukács, we wanted to go to find the language for the film or just let the forest tell us what the film is about beyond what we read in the book.

8:13So nature, we consider nature an HOD, a department head is constantly working with us. So 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.

9:02I 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. Maybe 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.

9:43It'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 Uteritis as William Shakespeare. So 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.

10:39to express our emotions in real life and in our society. What are you looking at? You. Why?

10:54I 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, 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. And I need to feel like I understand him. And there's a part of me that is like him. I feel safe in my fantasy world on set.

11:43Then 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 thing 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.

12:31That's also pressure on Paul, yes. So 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 means but at the beginning Paul has said to me look I can study it and and translate every word and understand what it all 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.

13:26You 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, or 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 made me think about Shakespeare completely different. Director Chloe Zhao, speaking with Michael Schulman.

14:16More in a moment.

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16:46and every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos. Learn more at viking.com. This is Ira Glass of This American Life. Do you know our show? Okay, well, either way, I'm going to tell you about it. We make stories, old-fashioned stories that hopefully pull you in at the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations and then you just want to find out what is going to happen and cannot stop listening. That's right. I'm talking about stories that make you miss appointments and ignore your loved ones. This is American Life, every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

17:30I 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, it's, 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. I mean, you could call Hamnet then William Shakespeare IP in some way.

18:15But, you know, it's a— 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 well publishing house in Japan and they have everything from Akira to Ghost in the Shell to Attack on Titan, you know, their Sailor Moon.

19:05We just team 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. Like this glass has a spirit within itself. There has been quite a complicated relationship between studios licensing Japanese IP, and particularly manga IP. And the adaptation process has been quite complicated.

19:57for 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 an early stage, allow the artists to really see each other. Why did this artist create this story in Japan? 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 shoots of the plants are strong enough and then we go to our studio partners.

20:55I 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. 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.

21:45Must 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. 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.

22:37So 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, promoting the film is even harder. Because the amount of exposure, 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 doing a scene, right?

23:33All 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.

24:24like cleaning products, air fresheners, things like that. Well, 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. Thank you. It's a really beautiful movie. Thank you. Chloe Zhao's Hamnet is nominated for eight Academy Awards, and Michael Shulman will be in L.A. covering the Oscars just as he has for many years before and you can always read him at newyorker.com and you can also subscribe to The New Yorker there as well newyorker.com I'm David Remnick, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour 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.

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