About two-thirds into Hamnet, the film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, there is a scene in which Agnes (William Shakespeare’s wife, and mother to the titular character) is witnessed expressing an unimaginable amount of pain. All fidgeting and commotion on both sides of the screen halts. We watch the veins on Agnes’s throat constrict, see her face contort in utter devastation, and witness her wailing die into a sound that tells us: This is the moment that truly breaks her. From that moment on, sniffles from harried hearts punctuate the rest of the film, even into the credits. Speaking personally, my tears willed themselves free with ease—I was useless to try and stop them. Such is the experience of encountering Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. Both the novel and its recent film adaptation follow the story of William Shakespeare’s son, who—as O’Farrell fabulates in her fictional telling of his life and death—inspired the writing of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays.
The trickiness of adapting such an emotionally complex novel comes in knowing how, exactly, to communicate the internalities of its characters. The family members in Hamnet move through unutterable bouts of heartache, grief, frustration, and even hope—the cross-sections of which are difficult to capture in the written word, let alone in visual language. But as the many tissues used at my local AMC theater would suggest, O’Farrell and her co-writer, the Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao, tactfully rose to the occasion.
I had the chance to speak with O’Farrell over Zoom about the experience of translating her heartbreaking narrative from the page to the screen. We discussed speculative storytelling, the novelist’s unique relationship with the truth, a writer’s role on a film set, and how fictional narratives will always help us through our lives.
Jalen Giovanni Jones: What always interested me about Hamnet was that it used a great deal of speculative storytelling to narrate the gaps between the real life Hamnet and Shakespeare’s famous play Hamlet. I was wondering what first sparked your interest in taking a speculative route to tell this story.
Maggie O’Farrell: It really goes back to the play. I loved the play when I first read it when I was 16. It really got under my skin in a way that his previous plays hadn’t done. I just loved Hamlet. He felt like a kind of relative. He appeals to a certain type of teenager—ones who maybe just wear too much black and too much eyeliner. That was definitely me.
My teacher mentioned in passing one day that Shakespeare had a son who’d been called Hamnet, and he died at age 11, and then Shakespeare had gone on four years or so later to write the play Hamlet. The links between these two names and the obvious, very, very, very close similarity really fascinated me, and I couldn’t stop wondering why. Why would it be that he had given the name of his dead son to a play, and a prince, and a ghost? What did he mean in doing that? That can’t have been a coincidence. It can’t have been a casual act of just reusing the name. It must have meant something. I went on to university and studied literature, and I was amazed that it was never part of the conversation about Shakespeare, that actually nobody knew or really cared what his children had been called, or the effect that his domestic life in Stratford had on him. Obviously I know the main story happened in London—that’s where he put on his plays, and probably wrote most of them—but it always seemed to me that there was an interesting story to be told in this gap. All works of scholarship and biography focused on his career, which I can understand, but they really glide over his children and his wife, which I think has been a mistake.
We’re always going to need stories to help us through our lives, and to explain us to ourselves.
JGJ: I too was that teenager—secretly, I quoted Hamlet in my high school yearbook. How did you go about researching this story that pulls a lot from real life people, but also fictionalizes a great deal as well?
MO: I found as much as I possibly could about the real people, because I think you have to do that. If you choose to write a novel about people who were real, even if they’ve been dead for 400, 500 years, you have to really respect that and do all you can to find out whatever you can about them. I had a rule for myself, that even if I found out something that didn’t really fit with the story I wanted to tell, I still couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t read that book. I went to the houses, and that was really important to me. It seems so extraordinary that with Shakespeare, there’s quite a lot we still don’t know. Even despite the works of these brilliant scholars and literary detectives dedicated to studying him, there’s still quite a lot of gaps in his story. But at the same time, you can buy a ticket and walk into the house where he was born, and you can stand in the room where he ate all his dinners, and you can go upstairs and find the bedroom he shared with his brothers. It’s so extraordinary that they still exist.
JGJ: Hamnet was originally published in 2020—a much different context than the one that we’re in today. What place do you think speculative storytelling has in today’s world, where the narrative of Hamnet lives in such a different context?
MO: The world and writing, and the way we think about them both is changing all the time. But I don’t think human brains change that much. We’re always going to need stories to help us through our lives, and to explain us to ourselves.
JGJ: I’d love to know about that process from getting Hamnet from the page to the screen. I know you worked a great deal with Chloé Zhao, co-writing the screenplay adaptation together. Can you tell me a bit about how that writing process went, and how it looked different from your usual process when writing for a novel? I imagine the latter is much more solitary compared to writing a screenplay, as filmmaking is an inherently collaborative artform.
MO: Absolutely. That collaboration was something about the process that really appealed to me. The life of a novelist is very solitary, and I like that. But it does mean that you spend two or three years talking to basically two imaginary friends in your studio. I really enjoy that, but the idea of collaborating on a project was really appealing. Chloé obviously brought a huge amount of cinematic experience to the collaboration, and Chloé and I have very different but very compatible skills when it comes to screenwriting. She had a very clear idea, right from the start, of the structure of the film that she wanted to make out of the novel. She knew which threads of the novel she wanted to take, and which we should discard. The first challenge for us was cutting down—the novel is quite long; it’s 360 pages, and we had to bring that down to a 90-page screenplay. An awful lot had to go. Chloé had a very clear idea about which beats of the novel would work for a film. I was able to come in and say, “If we remove this thread, then several scenes later we don’t understand the motivations of this character.” In that way, we worked quite well together.
You take the novel, and you reduce it down to a 90-page screenplay. And then you have to trust the director, and the cinematographer, and the actors, to build it up again
Chloé’s also quite a verbal person. The collaboration happened a lot over voice notes. Chloé leaves amazing voice notes. Sometimes I would wake up in Scotland and my phone would give out 12, 13 notification noises from Chloé. Some of them were 20 seconds, and the longest ever was 58 minutes! She’s someone who verbalizes to work out how she feels about something, sort of extemporizing, whereas I’m the opposite. I have to have a pen and paper in order to work out how I feel about something. We have quite compatible skills in that way.
JGJ: How was your experience writing for this inherently visual medium? Did you find yourself writing the story of Hamnet differently in order to accommodate for that?
MO: Yes, writing for a screenplay versus writing for fiction uses very different muscles and also different parts of your head. One of the things I learned very early on is that I would write a scene, and I would realize that for my scene setting I would have this long description about the details, like what the lighting should be. And then I’d realize I have to forget my novel skills. I’d look at Chloé’s writing, and it would just say INT. STREET, and BAM go right into the dialog. I needed to hone some new skills here.
I think of the process in the shape of an hourglass. You take this large structure, the novel, and you reduce it right down to the bare bones of a 90-page screenplay. And then you have to trust the director, and the cinematographer, and the actors, to build it up again into this other new entity—to put all the detail and nuance and emotion back into it that you had to necessarily take out to write the screenplay.
JGJ: You really have to trust the people you’re working with. Did you ever picture this story turning into a visual medium before Chloé brought it to you?
MO: You don’t really think about it when you’re writing a novel, you’re just concentrating on the novel. The film rights sold quite early on, but what usually happens in that scenario is that somebody buys a film, writes it, and then sometimes it goes through to a script, and you never really hear much again about it. But I was really happy when I heard that Chloé was interested in making Hamnet into a film, because I knew that she was not the kind of director to package the story down into a kind of conventional costume drama, which I never wanted it to be.
JGJ: How did you go about deciding what to include or exclude from this adaptation? Specifically, what influenced your decision to make the film more linear, as opposed to including more flashbacks, which were pretty prominent in the novel version?
MO: The first half of the novel does jump about in time quite a bit, and I think that’s fine. On the page, you can ask your reader to follow you, if you give them enough footholds. But on screen that can be very jarring. And the idea that you have to age your actors, and then un-age them, and you’ve got to give your audience a signifier that shows that a character is the same person over time. It’s not that kind of film, and it shouldn’t be—I think that’s just too confusing. We had to unravel the chronology.
Chloé had a very clear idea about where she wanted to start the film. The book starts with Hamnet the day that Hamlet and Judith get ill, and in the film, it would be too jarring to move back and forth. So we needed to start with William and Agnes meeting. Another one of the challenges of adaptation was capturing the novel’s interiority. In order to make that into a screenplay, you have to make what’s interior, exterior. You’ve got to help your audience understand what’s happening, and who these people are, and what they’re going through internally. In the last scene, the novel just goes to the globe, and Agnes is watching the play and recognizing her son. She’s going through all these emotions, but they’re all inside her, and the reader is privy to what’s going on inside her head. For the screenplay adaptation we simply brought in her brother, so they could have conversation between them. That was a very easy way to solve that dilemma.
You never quite know how life has changed you until you can look back and realize it.
I always knew that Chloé is very talented—in her previous films, particularly The Rider and Nomadland, she’s brilliant at helping the viewer understand what this person is feeling by externalizing their thoughts and feelings into the landscape or their environment. In The Rider, you get Brady standing in the prairie. In Nomadland you get Francis McDormand staring at these incredible landscapes that she’s driving through. You know what they’re feeling, because of a kind of “objective correlative.” Chloé is brilliant at doing that, and I knew that she’d be able to do that beautifully with Hamnet. So you get Agnes standing in the forest, this wild place with the wind rushing through it.
JGJ: What role did you play once the writing process was done? Did you go on set or act as a consultant, or anything of that sort?
MO: Yes, I was on set in different locations, as much as I could be. A lot of Chloé’s films have been improvised. In this film too, there was a lot that she was changing as she went along, as she felt her instincts driving her. Sometimes she would suddenly say to me, “I think we need to say this. We need to say that. Can you write it so that it sounds like it’s from the 16th century?” I remember waking up very early one morning in Wales, we were filming, and she’d left a message saying, “If he was going to give his father a present, what would it be?”
Chloé likes to work quite instinctively in some ways. Sometimes the script might say one thing, and she might decide a couple of days before that actually, it needs to be something else. She likes to respond to her own instincts, but also the instincts of her actors. I think she gives them the space and respect to see where the story is pulling them.
JGJ: I’m curious to know what insights you gained from this more collaborative working and writing process. How might that influence your writing and projects moving forward?
MO: Sometimes you don’t really know how it’s influenced you until you start doing something else. It’s hard to make a list of it somehow, but I think all experiences change you. It’s a kind of a cumulative effect, like a glacier coming through a landscape and gathering up all these stones. You never quite know how life has changed you until you can look back and realize it. So we’ll find out, I guess.
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