As co-editors Hamnet, Affonso Gonçalves and director Chloe Zhao they say that they found the ending of the film the most difficult to piece together. Not necessarily just because they wanted an emotionally powerful ending, but also because Zhao decided to film much more Hamlet than shown on the screen.
“This was the most difficult production to mount,” says Gonsalves.
“In the first version, it was 35 to 40 minutes long, and we shot scenes with Ophelia… and all the scenes are full-length, because you respect Shakespeare's play,” Zhao says. “You let everything happen and then we had to really slaughter Hamlet try to reduce it.”
After so much of the play itself had been filmed, editing The process of selecting scenes that were important to the film was a difficult task. “It’s kind of a house of cards because you take one thing out and suddenly everything around you stops working,” Gonsalves says. “We cut it out, then put a little bit back in, and then cut it out… so it was a dance of putting things back in and taking them out until we found the right balance.”
The pair continued to work on the game scene until the last minute of post-production, wanting to make sure every background layer came together. Zhao has previously said that rhythm is very important to her during the editing process, and that she was thrilled to find Gonçalves who could match her rhythm, so putting the piece together was a fun challenge.
“Until the last week of the mix, we were still cutting,” says Zhao. “We only built the first floor of the auditorium, and in the back are all the visual effects, so we were waiting for the visual effects to see what angle to use. You have a lot of different layers going on – you have the dialogue happening in the audience, you have Will behind the screen, you have Hamlet playing… so there are about three things going on and you want them all to start moving towards catharsis.”
