Oscar-nominated Maggie O’Farrell discusses her screenwriting debut with Chloé Zhao and why art is crucial to understanding humanity.
Hamnet (Focus Features)
Maggie O’Farrell almost said no when Chloé Zhao asked her to co-write the Hamnet screenplay. O’Farrell wrote the book Hamnet, which explores the grief of William and Agnes Shakespeare over the loss of their son, but had never written a screenplay before, let alone written one with someone she admired as much as Zhao.
“Who would say no to Chloé Zhao?” O’Farrell told The Credits. “So, I thought I’ll give it a go. I’ve learned an awful lot. By the end of our first conversation, I agreed to write the first pass and sent it to her in two months.”
O’Farrell and Zhao collaborated mostly through voice notes, distilling O’Farrell’s 350-page novel into a 90-page screenplay. The biggest departures from the book were rearranging the scenes to be more linear and in how the characters’ emotions were conveyed, usually through dialogue or score.
What didn’t change was the heart of why O’Farrell wrote the book, the belief that there was a significant link between the loss of Shakespeare’s son and the play “Hamlet.”
“The book is about where art comes from and why we need it,” she said. “If you look at the play through the lens of Hamnet’s death, you can briefly see Shakespeare becoming visible as a human being, as a grieving father, and the play is a message from a father in one realm to his son in another. That’s why we need art, to be able to understand these things and to see ourselves in it.”
To learn more about O’Farrell’s experience co-writing the screenplay for Hamnet, read her full interview with The Credits:
