Chloé Zhao and Jessie Buckley brought their awards season standout Hamnet to Los Angeles on Tuesday night, along with some help from producer Steven Spielberg.
The film is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel and tells the story of William Shakespeare (played by Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Buckley) as their son Hamnet dies at a young age, inspiring Shakespeare to write Hamlet.
Ahead of the premiere screening at the Academy Museum, Spielberg told the crowd, “Directors are always searching for stories to tell, but sometimes the story tells us which director it wants to belong to. Chloé Zhao was the director that Maggie O’Farrell’s book Hamnet found its way to and there was no other choice that could have possibly been made in the world.”
He pointed at the theater’s screen, noting that these are “the kinds of screens that we are fighting the tides to keep filled with not just blockbuster, epic, escapist movie rides, but sensitive and intimate portraits of marriage and family and life-altering epiphanies that spring from heartache and heartbreak, like the film you’re about to see. There needs to be room for films like Chloé’s on screens like these.” Spielberg added, “I am so proud to be one of the producers who got to watch Chloé make this little miracle of a movie.”
The project is quite the tear-jerker, which Zhao said the cast and crew also felt while making it. “We were very emotional while we were filming. We all felt something quite strong and we’re happy that the audiences are feeling the same thing that we were feeling,” the filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter while teasing, “It would suck if we were the only ones feeling that.”
Buckley added that one never knows how a movie is going to land, as “you have an experience of making something and it goes through so many different portals before it gets put out into the world, so I never expected [the emotional response]; I hoped that they would be able to feel what it felt like when we were making it and that we were able to touch the magic thing that makes people feel something. I’m so happy that we have.”
Joe Alwyn, who also co-stars in the project, joked, “It is heartbreaking but there’s also hope in there and it’s uplifting and it’s healing. So I think and I hope that people aren’t leaving in bits that can’t be picked up.” For its team, those bits were picked up when Zhao would do “dance takes” at the end of heavy scenes, where “she’d blast music and everyone would just jump around,” Alwyn explained.
Buckley also noted how she and Zhao became very close during the shoot by “telling each other all our deepest, darkest secrets and crying and laughing and dancing and jumping into rivers together,” as they dove into the life of Shakespeare. “This man who’s a giant, to be able to peak behind the curtain and imagine and explore who he was as a human and who this incredible woman was beside him, it was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing,” she added.
Hamnet arrives in select theaters Nov. 26, expanding to more on Dec. 5.
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