Straight off her low-budget Best Picture winner “Nomadland,” writer/director Chloé Zhao next released a massive blockbuster: Marvel’s “Eternals.” However, Zhao said the financial freedom didn’t exactly lead to an influx of creativity.
“’Eternals’ had, like, an unlimited amount of money and resources. And here we have one street corner that we can afford, to [stand in for] Stratford …. ‘Eternals’ didn’t have a lot of limitations, and that is actually quite dangerous,” Zhao told Vanity Fair in an August. 22 interview. “Because we only have that street corner [in ‘Hamnet’], suddenly everything has meaning.”
Zhao is currently on the press tour for “Hamnet,” her highly anticipated next feature. Aside from “Eternals” (which was already filming well before the 2021 Academy Awards), this will be Zhao’s first feature since “Nomadland” won Best Picture. This combined with the film’s setting and subject matter has catapulted it into the early awards conversation.
“Eternals” finds itself in a precarious place within the MCU. The film received a mixed critical reception, grossing just over $400 million — a massive sum, to be sure, but far from the cash cows of the MCU’s past. Though the film ends on a massive cliffhanger — one where three central characters are abducted by a Celestial, Kit Harington wields the Black Knight’s sword and Harry Styles’ Starfox/Eros enters the story in a mid-credits cameo — there has been no word on the continuing adventures of the Eternals in the MCU.
Many view “Hamnet” as a return to form for Zhao, a filmmaker who previously used micro budgets to tell highly intimate stories based in dramatic and emotional realism. But that doesn’t mean the director had nothing to carry over from her time in the MCU.
“‘Eternals’ prepared me for ‘Hamnet’ because it’s world-building,” Zhao told Vanity Fair. “Before that, I had only done films that existed in the real world. I also learned what to do and not to do—what’s realistic and what isn’t.”
“Hamnet” adapts Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, with Zhao and O’Farrell collaborating on the screenplay. The film is a fictionalized take on William and Agnes Shakespeare’s lives shortly after the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. It has been speculated that this tragedy informed the creation of the play “Hamlet,” which is featured in the film.
The film is produced by Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes — like Zhao, both are Best Director winners who helmed Best Picture winners at the Oscars. Zhao said her relationship with the filmmakers was helpful during “Eternals.”
“Their feedback was very filmmaker-driven because they’re both incredible filmmakers, so when they gave me notes, they were already infused with what they knew was my style,” she said. “Even when I did things that probably were confusing or didn’t make sense to people, they would say, ‘You know what? We trust her. Let her do her thing.’”
In “Hamnet,” Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal star as Agnes and William Shakespeare. In speaking to Vanity Fair, Buckley called the film “the most fluid, creative, immediate film experience” the Oscar-nominated actress has had.
“We created a working environment where our own lives and what we were dealing with as human beings—not just artists—were allowed to be projected onto the art we were making,” Zhao said. “That is the whole point of this story: how these things we experience in life that are sometimes impossible to deal with can be alchemized and transformed through art and storytelling.”
“Hamnet” will premiere on Sept. 7 at Toronto International Film Festival. Focus Features will give the film a limited release on Nov. 27 before a wide release on Dec. 12.
