‘Hamnet’: How four days saved the year’s most emotional film

There were only four days left before filming. “Hamnet” When Chloe Zhao I realized that it has no end. The director directed the cast all week, filming the climactic sequence at the Globe Theatre, where William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is staging his opus Hamlet, but something is missing. In the script, Shakespeare's wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) and her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) witnessed the demise of Hamlet (Noah Jupe), a resolution that was meant to bring a sense of relief. But even though the moment was meant to connect Shakespeare's masterpiece to the still-fresh death of Will and Agnes' 11-year-old son, Hamnet (Jacoby Jupe), neither Zhao nor Buckley felt the catharsis needed.

“Jesse and I avoided each other for the rest of the day because we both knew we didn't have any tape,” Zhao says. “We both went home feeling completely lost.”

“We were looking for that ending,” Buckley adds. “It was a daunting idea to try and piece together all the threads of the story we had weaved up to this point. I felt incredibly lost and a little lost.”

Zhao admits that she rarely plans the ending of her films in advance because she doesn't tell stories in a linear fashion. She imagines her characters' journey as a spiral: the story goes down into darkness and then up again.

“I had to wait for every movie,” she says. “But this time I was going through a breakup, so I was afraid of losing love. I held on to it dearly.”

The morning after they filmed the scripted finale, Buckley sent Zhao Max Richter's “This Bitter Earth,” a reimagining of his song “On the Nature of Daylight” with lyrics. The director played it in the car on the way to the set.

“I felt tears and heart palpitations, and then I started to reach out to the window,” Zhao recalled. “I tried to touch the rain outside the car. I looked at my hand and realized that I needed to become one with something greater than me so that I would no longer be afraid of losing my love. Because love does not die, it transforms. When we are one with everything around us, it is the illusion of separation that makes us so afraid of impermanence.”

The real climax of Hamnet happened to Zhao when she reached for the rain. If Agnes had reached out to the dying Hamlet, he would have been able to rest and she would have been able to let go of her grief over losing Hamlet. And if the public had joined her, the feeling of liberation would have been even stronger.

“What I didn’t expect and what surprised me was the complete capitulation of the community,” Buckley says. “The way the fourth wall between the play and the audience was broken, the need to reach out and touch the essence of the play. Agnes' compass was always about touch.”

Although the details were not realized until those final days, Zhao always planned the production so that the Globe scenes would be filmed last. Production designer Fiona Crombie recreated the historic open-air theater in the backyard of England's Elstree Studios using real timber imported from France. The version of the set, which took 14 weeks to create, is smaller than the original Globe, giving it a close feel.

“This is my version,” Crombie says. “Our footprint is a little smaller overall, but the basic architecture of the tiers, the roofline, the shape and everything else is accurate. Having real beams that are worn and distressed makes it feel more realistic. We wanted it to feel completely authentic. You want to smell those sets and feel those textures on screen.”

“I told Fiona I wanted it to look like the inside of a tree,” says Zhao. “So spiritually it's right for the story. And the play is accurate. We didn't change any lines.”

Historically, there would have been no background on stage. But for the thematic purposes of Hamnet, the background was necessary. “There was a whole conversation about not only the aesthetics, but the importance of this motif,” Crombie says. “It's also the wall that separates Will from Agnes.”

Hamnet's Globe was built so that Mescal worked behind the scenes, Jupe and the players could come and go from behind the scenes. There were actual prop tables and makeup artists, as well as references to other Shakespeare plays. “We had a horse from A Midsummer Night's Dream that was borrowed from the real Globe,” says Crombie. “There were a lot of details throughout that are a credit to the theater.”

The actors learned a significant part of Hamlet. Mescal led the cast in rehearsals before filming. “We rehearsed later in the evenings as a regular part of the process,” Mescal says. “Once the camera came in, it was Chloe's baby, but we rehearsed constantly throughout the production. It was so much fun. I have a lot of sympathy for directors. What I loved about it wasn't necessarily the process of directing. It was more part of the process of helping me act. It was weird directing them as Paul, but I could direct them as Will.”

Mescal and the players acted out 30 to 40 minutes of Hamlet during filming. The actor describes the feeling of being on the Globe stage as “sacred,” both because of the physical space and the emotional quality of the scenes.

“It was very intense,” he says. “Up until that point, we knew we had done something very special, but we were also acutely aware that this is where you have to land the plane. And that came with its own pressure. There is something special about playing Shakespeare and hearing Shakespeare's words spoken in this place. The film speaks to the collision of art and humanity, and there are no better words to capture that feeling than the words in Hamlet.”

Zhao hired 300 extras to work in the theater. Each day, Zhao and Kim Gillingham, a dream coach who worked on the film, led the actors and extras in a daily meditation or sleep exercise. It was unlike anything many actors had experienced before.

“Everyone went into this very deep place of connection with themselves and what was happening in front of them on stage,” Alwyn says. “It was an amazing collective feeling of catharsis and connection to something bigger than ourselves.”

“The performances from some of the supporting actors are outstanding,” adds Mescal. “And that was intentional in terms of how Khloe created that feeling and Kim being there.”

After Will spots Agnes in the audience, he goes backstage and finally breaks down, experiencing a long-awaited release from grief. Mescal prepared for the stage by listening to Bon Iver's “Speyside”. By the way, this was the last thing he filmed.

“The play becomes something else because Agnes is the witness,” says Mescal. “He comes alive for the audience because of this strange alchemy. Something in the air seems different. There was such a relief in that moment, as if he could just let it go.”

Hamnet ends with Agnes reaching out to Hamlet. At the same time, she gives herself permission to let her son go. It was a moment to be discovered, not constructed.

“The scene became a repository of collective grief in a shared space where we were allowed to release it,” Buckley says. “It was like a tsunami. I will never forget it.”

According to Mescal, the ending of the film is actually its beginning. He imagines that the relationship between Will and Agnes will continue, continuing the spiral.

“I have no idea how a relationship survives the death of a child, but I think there is wonderful hope and at this point they will be able to see each other again,” Mescal says. “They abandoned each other at certain points, but now she understands where he went. And I think they will come back to each other.”