Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley & Director Chloe Zhao Break Down a Scene From 'Hamnet'

Okay, I'm pausing.

Can we go frame by frame on Jessie's face

as she winds up? [laughing]

So... Oh, my god. [laughing]

[Chloé] I didn't...

Honestly...

Look. [laughing]

Hi, I'm Jessie Buckley.

I'm Chloé Zhao.

I'm Paul Mescal.

[All] And this is Notes On A Scene.

[footsteps approaching]

Have I sounded wild, Agnes?

Sounded wild?

To who?

To you.

This is after Hamnet died, spoiler alert.

And Agnes is in her full expression of her grief,

which is very different than how Will expresses his grief.

He couldn't really handle the weight of it,

so he decided to leave very soon after Hamnet died.

What I meant was that I should sound wild

when I reached London.

London?

I must leave.

We can take this opportunity, [giggles]

someone's peeling eggs,

to talk about the beautiful production design,

Fiona, our production designer has done.

For her, it was really important that the space, the house,

can contain the story of a full range

of humane emotions a person can go through.

So there's emptiness, joy, and grief.

There's so much about what plays on the table.

I don't think it was in the scene

written in that I was peeling eggs.

And while we were shooting,

I would send Chloe these like,

fever writings every night,

which were kind of abstract writings around the scene.

and a load of eggs, [laughs]

peeling eggs came into my mind.

And those are all the eggs.

But now I have this like,

book of this moment in my life

that I wasn't even kind of aware

what I was making at the time,

but now I have a full kind of memory book of this time.

And then, you know, just a shout out,

like that beam is like an old beam

that were shipped from France.

It was so important for the team

to have everything feels extremely lived in,

and every little piece of details, it's there purposefully.

Fiona's design was so amazing.

It had a smell that you felt

like you were entering into a world.

And even the room where Hamnet dies,

it smelled like an underworld in some way.

And every tiny detail,

like the candle holders were really like,

made out of this amazing corrugated iron

that she'd bought in Italy by a man

who was making candle holders

the same way as they did back in the 1500s.

And you felt like, as an actor, you could go to any corner

of the set and you could interact with it.

Yeah. Like it felt practical,

I think, that sometimes for actors,

a difficult thing when you're confronted with artifice,

if you go over to a place that you're not supposed to go

and then suddenly the whole illusion crumbles.

I have to go now.

Now?

There's a traveling party leaving today

and they have a spare horse.

So, yeah.

Look after the girls and I-

[arm swinging]

Stop.

[Jessie laughing] Okay, I'm pausing.

Can we go frame by frame on Jesse's face

as she winds up. [laughs]

So... Like... [laughing]

[Chloé] I didn't...

Honestly.

Look. [laughing] [everybody laughing]

No, this is everyone's reaction behind the monitor.

I mean, it's quite a shock

if somebody takes a swing at someone. [laughing]

I think that's the only take you did do a swing.

Yeah, I didn't do it again.

But also me, I looked at you and looked at like,

This is the one.

I thought you hated the take.

Me too. Well, I was in a like,

I hate life mode that day.

[everybody laughing] As you know,

the idea of, in moments like this,

when the emotions are so charged,

the camera will restrain itself from pushing for emotions,

because the space is like a bomb about to explode.

And we actually wanna stand back

because we want the audience

to feel the impact of the shockwave.

'Cause when you go in there, for some reason,

you actually does the opposite.

So we stayed wide, but what we didn't-

It also feels theatrical.

It feels like in the world of Shakespeare,

that like you're watching kind of in a meta sense

like you're watching actors in a frame

that like, you're not,

not that you don't see wide shots in films,

but I feel like some of the more emotionally charged moments

that you would see people jump in

on in different films, you don't.

Yeah, exactly.

And also the unpredictability,

'cause the camera isn't there,

they have all this space,

and the wild animals come out of them. [laughs]

And that's what happened here.

Let's look at frame by frame of her expression.

That's how close it is.

I felt it across my face.

I was so thrilled when that happened.

Like, just like...

I didn't, nobody,

firstly nobody knew that that was gonna happen at all.

It wasn't scripted.

It wasn't,

I didn't even know it was gonna happen.

And you get a shock when these, [laughs]

when these things come up.

Yeah, but the fact that you dodged that.

Well, I just think it means

that we were very much in our bodies.

Yeah.

Makes me scared watching it now. [laughs]

[Agnes struggling]

[Agnes screams]

[Agnes and William struggling]

[William panting]

On the day, I think all of us have come into this

with our own heartaches, with our own, you know,

really intense ones.

And that does reflect into the story.

And I was definitely going through

a really intense heartache

right around the time we're shooting this

that mirrored exactly what's happening in the scene.

So I was not really together that day,

but at the same time, the emotions I was feeling, I think-

Was so true. Yeah, yeah.

We were all linked together.

We didn't do much rehearsal,

but we did some physical rehearsal,

and we used this scene

'cause we knew this was gonna be a big physical scene.

And so we did a tantric polarity workshop,

because I've trained as a tantric practitioner.

And what it does is,

do you wanna?

No, you're the expert. [Chloé laughing]

A good scene has to have polarity.

Even if it's people just looking at you, nothing happens,

there needs to be polarizing energy happening

for any kind of chemistry.

That's just physics.

So I wanted Paul and Jessie to feel safe,

to be in their most extreme polarity of their gender.

So the most extreme of masculine

and the most extreme of feminine.

And that is actually really beautiful.

It happens in nature a lot.

So you have the masculine being the container,

and the banks on a river,

and then the feminine, full expression,

all chaos, all emotions, no feeling is restrained,

full expression.

Anything she feels,

grief, shame, pain, whatever it is,

is supposed to really make him come alive,

turn him on.

The more he contains unconditionally holding that presence,

the more she has the permission

to surrender even more to her emotions.

[Agnes struggling]

[William panting]

It's too much.

He's so sorry.

It hurts my heart.

Yes, but I'm so happy, I love it.

Just draw a heart around, please.

There. Yeah, there.

[Chloé] Oh, keep your heart open.

[Jessie laughing]

That's a good heart.

There was a moment,

then she relaxes,

and then there's a beautiful kind of surrender from her,

and it allows him to also soften.

And then nobody has any kind of pretense.

And they both are in their most vulnerable state.

And we planted the seed that day.

So even though on this day I wasn't really functional,

but I was so happy to see that you went there.

[both panting]

Go!

Go.

I think we all know,

fathers, sons, grandfathers, friends, uncles, lovers,

men who can't,

who are in pain, they can't express themselves

and they're so afraid of their feeling functions.

And he's not running away from her.

He's running away from himself.

She realized that in the end,

and the only place he feels safe

to express himself is creativity,

is through his art.

And just quickly on the costume is also, you know,

when we first meet the two of them, their colors,

even though different but really beautiful together.

Vibrant. Vibrant together.

And she, you know, Malgosia, our costume designer,

has a lot details because not only Agna is not fully dressed

and also, like, there's all these little stitches

that are down almost like absently onto the,

it is like she's coming apart,

while he is wearing more layers,

there's more of a dissonance between them.

Oh, this scene breaks my heart.

I think that's the eternal struggle

for the masculine to run from themselves

'cause they can't feel, they're too afraid to feel.

And then for the feminine to then have to...

What do you mean by that?

Too afraid to feel?

[Chloé laughing]

I know what you mean.

I like to express it openly in front people.

I don't think,

you know, life doesn't imitate art.

You two are nothing like these two people.

[everybody giggling]

Also, what was amazing is like there was,

everybody was in their unspoken imaginations.

And that's also because of the world

that Fiona and Malgosia created.

Once we entered into that house,

and entered into that scene, we were already cooking.

Like we were already in the scene.

And we all just got about being in it as much as we could

and didn't ask kind of permission for anything.

But we did that, I feel like in the weeks

that proceeded the shoot, like we did it in the workshop.

Yeah.

We didn't go say the thing about the workshop.

Of the male sexual organ.

Well, here's, I'll just say,

you use it or not...

To build a polarity, his job is to embody a...

Penis. Physically embody a penis.

And her job is to physically embody a...

Vagina.

Yeah, and they was making movements

and making sound to embody those two things.

And then forever just looking at each other until...

One of the lowest moments in my professional career,

I'd say. [laughing]

Embodying a penis.

I'll leave that to everybody's imagination.

[everybody laughing]

Lots of rigidity. [laughing]

I'm done now.

It's Notes On A Scene.

No, but truly, like I didn't know

who these characters were.

I had Maggie's book as idea archetypally who they were.

So very much that these two,

other than being brilliant actors,

but they were also so open and brave

to give themselves into these characters.

So who they are sort of melted

with who these characters are.

And so a moment like this for a director is, you know,

for me is just such a treat

because this is why I come to work

for moments like that to happen.

Half of that is Will and Agnes.

The other half is Paul and Jessie.