From New Mexico to ‘hamnet’: A Director’s Journey of Doubt, Finding, and the Language of Forests
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A chance encounter and a powerful book propelled one filmmaker toward directing “Hamnet,” a poignant exploration of Shakespeare’s family life. the path wasn’t immediate, marked initially by hesitation and a growing sense of connection to both the story and its leading actor, Paul Mescal.
An Unexpected Call and a Hesitant “No”
the project first landed on the director’s radar while traveling through New Mexico en route to the Telluride Film Festival. A call from Amblin, steven Spielberg’s production company, outlined a story centered around Shakespeare’s wife and the death of their son. Initially, the filmmaker felt disconnected from the subject matter. “There are so many things in that sentence that I have no personal connection to,” they recall, leading to an immediate refusal.
However, fate intervened just hours later. A conversation with a friend, steeped in discussions of “synchronicities” and “signs.” Reading Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet proved transformative.
The book’s strength lay in its beautifully rendered internal landscapes. The director, accustomed to a lengthy immersion process to understand characters – citing the example of Brady Jandreau from “The Rider” – found that O’Farrell had already done much of the work.”She had already done that work for all of the characters,” they explained. “I thought, That’s my blueprint.” Beyond the character work, the director also identified a distinct rhythm in O’Farrell’s writing, a “heartbeat” that resonated deeply with their own creative sensibilities. Discovering that O’Farrell’s favorite filmmaker is Wong Kar-wai, whose work had initially inspired their own journey into filmmaking, further solidified the connection.
From the American West to the welsh Forests
The shift in setting from the American West – the backdrop for the director’s first three features – to the forests of Wales and Herefordshire presented a unique challenge. the director revealed a lifelong fear of death as a driving force behind their captivation with the natural world. “When you are afraid to die, you are not able to live fully,” they stated, describing a constant undercurrent of anxiety. “When you go into nature, you develop a vrey embodied spirituality that is not reliant on anyone else.”
The forest,in particular,represents a departure from the expansive plains of the West. Describing it as “deeply feminine,” the director explained that it demands stillness, forcing a confrontation with one’s inner self and “all your shadows.” A visit to Wales with cinematographer Łukasz Żal became a search for the film’s visual language, a way to let the forest itself speak.
The Weight of Existence and the Language of Holes
A recent experience in Kyiv, documenting a forest on the front line, unexpectedly informed this process. Juxtaposing the stark imagery of war – “dark, black holes in the ground, and sometimes they’re land mines” – with the natural voids found in the Welsh forest triggered a profound emotional response. The director recounted breaking down in tears beside one such hole, recognizing it as a universal symbol of mortality.
“It’s coming for all of us,” they acknowledged, connecting it to Shakespeare’s own contemplation of death in Hamlet: “All that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity.” For the director, that eternity is embodied in love. This realization, shared with Żal, led to a crucial decision: “We must film this hole!” The natural world, they concluded, is not merely a backdrop but an active collaborator, “a department head” constantly contributing to the creative process.
