How Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell Wrote ‘Hamnet’ Together: Chaos and Organization

Maggie O’Farrell was told not to expect much when she published “Hamnet.” The eighth novel by the Northern Irish writer dealt with the death of Hamnet Shakespeare, the young son of William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, and the subsequent writing of the classic tragedy “Hamlet.”

The book came out in March 2020, right on the verge of the COVID-19 shutdown. “I actually did have conversations with my agents where they said, ‘All the bookshops are shutting down, and unfortunately nothing’s going to really happen,’” O’Farrell said. “‘But, you know, there’s always the next book.’”

It turned out she didn’t have to wait for the next book. “Hamnet” sold 2 million copies, was translated into 40 languages and won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Dalkey Literary Award for Novel of the Year and Waterstones’ Book of the Year award. It was adapted into a stage play produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, then had a successful run on the West End. And now it’s been turned into a movie by Oscar-winning “Nomadland” director Chloé Zhao, starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as the Bard and his wife and Jacobi Jupe as their son, Hamnet.

“I’m a bit astonished, really,” said O’Farrell, who was a significant contributor to the film beyond providing its source material: One of Zhao’s prerequisites for taking on the film was that the author would co-write the screenplay with her.

“The internal landscape is so rich and so profound, and it was exactly what I was looking for at that time for my own growth and healing and self-exploration,” Zhao said. “But I told the producers, ‘If Maggie doesn’t write it with me, I won’t do the film.’ I compare her to the cowboy, Brady (in her 2017 film “The Rider”), or the nomads (in 2020’s “Nomadland”) or one of the Lakota teenagers (in 2015’s “Songs My Brothers Taught Me”). She’s my access to that world, which is in her imagination. She took everything she researched and then alchemized a world. That’s the world I’m loyal to, the world I’m going to pull things from. So I needed her there all the time.”

O’Farrell had never written a screenplay before and was working on a new book, so she got on a Zoom call with Zhao planning to politely decline.

“I was all prepared to say, ‘I’m really flattered that you want me to help, but it’s not for me,’” she said. “But by the end of the conversation, I agreed to do it and agreed to send my first pass (of the screenplay) in a couple of months. When I shut my laptop, I did have the sense of, I don’t really know what just happened.”

Their first task was to replace the book’s deliberately fractured chronology with a more linear timeline, and to distill the 300-page novel into a 90-page screenplay. But it wasn’t just a matter of cutting, because Zhao knew she had to expand some moments in the book as well, including enlarging the role of the husband who was absent for much of the novel.

“I felt like a film audience had to see Shakespeare more than we see him in the book, and it was important that we see (Agnes) through him, too,” she said. In addition, the play “Hamlet” was a major priority. Like the movie, the book ends with Agnes attending the first performance of “Hamlet” and realizing how her husband has woven his grief over the death of their son into the story of a Danish prince and his murdered father. The novel concludes with the father’s ghost delivering a single line.

“The book ends with ‘Remember me’ and then blank,” Zhao said. “Written language is much older than film, which is like a baby language. It doesn’t evoke the same thing as those two words, black on a white page and then into blank. What that does to us is not directly translatable into film. So we knew we had to keep going and really pick the moments in ‘Hamlet’ that show how life corresponds to what happens in the play.”

O’Farrell had studied the play thoroughly since she was a teenager, and she’d gone through it “with a fine-toothed comb” when she was writing the novel.

“I looked at it through the lens of the loss of Hamnet,” she said. “I knew the lines that reveal what Shakespeare himself was thinking, the lines where he briefly becomes visible to us as a human being and a grieving father.”

Even with the additions, though, the action in the film’s final moments, with Agnes and the audience around her reaching their hands toward the stage, didn’t come to the filmmaker until Buckley gave Zhao a copy of Max Richter’s gloriously elegiac composition “On the Nature of Daylight.” Listening to it as she was driving to the set on a rainy day, the director found herself stretching her hand toward the raindrops outside the car, which inspired the final scene.

Throughout the writing process, Zhao relied on O’Farrell to be the organized one. “I left her really long voice notes,” she said with a laugh. “My creative process is quite chaotic, so it’s good when I collaborate with someone who has some order, which Maggie does. I would leave her these epic voice notes that were just trains of thoughts, and then she’d some back with something more concrete. So we just go back and forth like that quite a lot.”

Their exchanges, she added, were crucial to get to the crux of the story. “I wasn’t trying to say, ‘This has to be exactly like this,’” she said. “It was to try to say, ‘What is the most important thing? What is this actually about?’ With all of that back and forth, I think we probably did more talking about these characters than I did with my actors.”

When she was writing the book, O’Farrell tried as much as possible to stick to the facts not only of the Shakespeares’ lives — much was written about William, little about Agnes and next to nothing about Hamnet — but also of the way everyday life was lived in the 1580s and 1590s.

“I felt a responsibility to those real people to get it as close as I could to what it was actually like,” O’Farrell said. “But the issue of historical accuracy is a bit looser with the film, and maybe that’s as it needs to be.”

“Well, yeah,” Zhao said. “The film is not historically accurate in every way, and I take responsibility for that. I will say that something about the book that I love and think is really powerful is the portrait of daily life — the mundane, the domesticity. And I do think we preserve that as much as possible.”

And when she watches the film, do the actors and the action on screen conflict with what O’Farrell saw in her head as she was writing the novel?

“I was really worried about going on set or watching the rushes because I worried that the images of the film would replace the images in my head,” she said. “But actually, they haven’t, which I’m really glad about.

“They’re all brilliant and the costumes are brilliant and the set and the lighting and the direction are all so perfect. But that’s the film. That’s Paul and Jessie and Jacobi. And there are also the images of the book that I have in my head. I’m very glad that the two can coexist.”

As for Zhao, she’s grateful that the world alchemized by O’Farrell enabled her to create a landscape for healing, both for herself and for others.

“Speaking for myself, I feel that we are in an epidemic of being afraid to feel, or not having the space to feel,” she said. “I’m hoping that with this film, we are giving people a space for two hours together to feel. It’s just like in the film, when people gathered so many years ago in the Globe Theatre.”

This story first appeared in the Actors/Directors/Screenwriters issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.