How working on ‘Eternals’ changed this key aspect of ‘Hamnet’ for filmmaker Chloé Zhao
Part of the press/campaign trail for Zhao's upcoming movie *Hamnet* starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal about a semi-fictionalized Shakespeare and his wife and their tragic loss that inspired the iconic play Hamlet.
>"The biggest change, if any of you read the book, is the book is not linear," Zhao continued. "The book \[begins midway through\], and it flashes back. I really had a hard time working with flashbacks in *Eternals*, because it's really difficult to keep flashing back and not kill the momentum."
>For *Hamnet*, Zhao asked \[Hamnet author Maggie\] O'Farrell for a "linear version," and then she "distilled it to another draft." During a four-day train ride from New York to Los Angeles, Zhao "pretty much wrote the whole script." She frequently sent voice requests to O'Farrell saying, "Hey, we now need this thing like this," and "I need a scene like that." The filmmaker joked, "I can barely speak good English, and I can't write like she does. She must have written 10 of those drafts, and they were distilled into one."
>"The biggest change, if any of you read the book, is the book is not linear," Zhao continued. "The book \[begins midway through\], and it flashes back. I really had a hard time working with flashbacks in *Eternals*, because it's really difficult to keep flashing back and not kill the momentum."
>For *Hamnet*, Zhao asked \[Hamnet author Maggie\] O'Farrell for a "linear version," and then she "distilled it to another draft." During a four-day train ride from New York to Los Angeles, Zhao "pretty much wrote the whole script." She frequently sent voice requests to O'Farrell saying, "Hey, we now need this thing like this," and "I need a scene like that." The filmmaker joked, "I can barely speak good English, and I can't write like she does. She must have written 10 of those drafts, and they were distilled into one."
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As a Shakespeare fan, I'll definitely love to check out Zhao's "Hamlet." 😊