James Cameron and Chloé Zhao on the Great Mystery of ‘Hamnet’ — and Why It Makes Him Cry

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” auteur James Cameron has been around the Oscar block quite a few times and is known for crafting crowd-pleasing blockbusters with universal appeal. He and “Hamnet” writer/director Chloé Zhao would not seem to be obvious kindred spirits. Yet at the recent Hollywood Reporter directors roundtable, they clearly bonded, followed up with a meal, and this week, Cameron interviewed Zhao onstage at the Aero Theatre about her Oscar contender in eight categories, including Best Picture and Director.

Watch the video, an IndieWire exclusive, above and read highlights below.

Zhao discovered Cameron through “The Terminator.” “I grew up in Beijing, and we didn’t have a lot of western films, at least not in my family,” she said. “At some point, we started to have one western film every Sunday on the television channel, and the very first one I saw was ‘Terminator,’ [which is] about what it means to be human… I remember seeing the film, and I couldn’t even process what I was watching, because there’s metaphors, there’s allegories, there’s entertainment, but there’s also — I was sobbing in the end. I couldn’t sleep. I was crying so hard.”

Cameron is also a cryer. He has seen “Hamnet” twice. “I bawled both times, multiple times in the film,” he said. “Your superpower is your empathy. So what the hell are you doing in Hollywood? How do you navigate that and still be able to keep your heart open? Is there a trick to that? I’d like to personally know. It seems like your connection with nature is the core of everything.”

“First and foremost, we’re storytellers,” said Zhao, “and storytelling is an alchemical process, and so the things that I’m curious about, or I feel empathetic to [are what] I don’t know how to deal with in life. I don’t have any other skills.”

“No,” said Cameron, “movie directing, screenwriting, editing.”

“Storytelling helps me to process it,” said Zhao, “or I might just go crazy. Process your own shit, right? Because I can’t quite understand why things are the way they are now. Or, how can we exist as humans? You were born, then you’re gonna die, and you love, and you’re going to lose love. The whole design feels like it could be better. And we try hard to make it better, but somehow make it worse. So, storytelling helps me try to understand: How do we be human?”

“How do you know when you’re ready to make a film?” said Cameron. “How do you identify that it’s what you need and you’re ready to go through that? Take this film, for example.”

“When I was younger, there were times that I pushed when I wasn’t ready,” said Zhao. “There’s four seasons to a cycle of creativity. And because our modern society doesn’t like the winter season, because it’s unproductive on the surface, we try to treat winter like summers, and I have done that for about a decade. I didn’t allow myself to winter; no composting, no allowing things to die and sit in that tension, allowing the soil to compost and to become nutritious again. So when the seed is dropped in the spring, it’s growing, but it doesn’t have all the support. And I’m pushing and pushing, and I’m exhausting the land even more, my inner creative landscape. So I feel like now, especially for ‘Hamnet,’ I had four years, and it wasn’t by choice. Nothing was growing. I crashed, so I went into a four-year winter, making up for the first two decades before that. In those four years, [I was] extremely uncomfortable, but I can feel that the world is happening within the compost, and then I can feel things shifting and when the soil is ready, and on the perfect day and the bird comes and drops that seed, that growth is going to be supported by the energy of the whole planet, and I feel it in my body, and also the synchronicity around that project is crazy. It’s like the whole world is helping me make it.”

Outside the Aero TheatreJared Cowan

Zhao was on the way to the Telluride Film Festival when she was alerted to “Hamnet” as a potential directing gig with producer Steven Spielberg. She had not read the book. She had a meeting with Paul Mescal at the festival. “Sometimes you see a raw talent, especially when the world hasn’t recognized it yet completely,” said Zhao. “There’s a simmering, an animal inside of them that the compulsion to create is so intense that if they don’t do it, it might eat them alive. And Paul was vibrating with that.”

Cameron asked Zhao about her editing process. “In my mind, each one is a draft of the script: The writing is a draft, the shooting is a draft,” he said. “Is it a process of finding something in the piece or in yourself?”

“You always are finding something new,” said Zhao. “Because when you move one little piece in the sound design, there’s something else that shifts, and it’s a very delicate system. So I think those three hands were on all the time. I’m never on set just as a director: the writer and editor is just as active, and they’re constantly bickering in a good and productive, creative way.”

“When you go into a scene that you know is going to wring everybody out,” said Cameron, “do you do anything to prepare the actors? Or do you just let it be quiet and see what they do?”

“I find some of these more emotionally intense scenes easier because they force you to conjure some Kundalini life,” said Zhao. “It’s some of those more subtle scenes that I find myself having a difficult time, because I’m not sure if I can’t hook it onto something archetypal, for example, people talking around the table. I take time in the morning to get on the same rhythm and same vibration for the whole cast and crew and speed things up later. I usually let them try it first. And sometimes it’s good for the actors to try everything they want to try, and get it out of their system.”

Jessie Buckley in “Hamnet” ©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

“Do you let them get going and then shape it with little notes or little prompts?” said Cameron.

“I usually let it happen, like two, three times, and if it’s not working, I would try to give notes with the least amount of words possible,” said Zhao. “A lot of times it’s like half or twice as much. What about you?”

“Surprisingly similar,” said Cameron. “Let them roam. I look for things that seem to be clicking, and focus on those and give a little nudge, saying, ‘OK, that’s working. Follow that idea. See where it goes.'”

Cameron returned to Zhao’s initial reluctance to take on “Hamnet.” “Was that an insecurity around the specific material, the historical, or the Shakespeare?”

“No, I wasn’t afraid of the Shakespeare part,” she said. “It was the mother part I was afraid of. In the entire ‘Avatar’ universe, so much is about mother. We are getting to the heart of that right? Not biological mother. We’re talking about this divine Dark Mother that we have cast away so much in our collective consciousness into the unconscious.”

‘Hamnet’©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

Zhao could have been a shaman, said Cameron, “a storyteller, a wisdom keeper of the clan. You would have been just as celebrated as you are now, doing a similar thing.”

“What I’m hoping to recover as a collective, as a species, is this capacity to remember, is this capacity for every one of us to know the alchemy of creativity and to be able to perform it in our own lives,” said Zhao. “This is great, but it feels like now it only belongs to certain people, and it’s not true. I’d like to join the circle of those who want to not just do it themselves, but share how to do that with everybody.”