This is Fresh Air.
I'm David Bianculli.
Sixty-five years ago, director Alfred Hitchcock shocked audiences and changed cinema forever with the release of his 1960 thriller movie Psycho.
It was a slasher film before that term existed and was based on a book by Robert Block.
Hitchcock was attracted to the film because of the unexpected sudden murder of a central character early on.
Joe Stefano, who wrote the screenplay, preserved that central surprise, and so did Hitchcock.
He cast movie star Janet Leigh in the role of a criminal on the run, then had her character stabbed to death in the shower after checking into a remote motel run by Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins.
Most of Psycho was photographed quickly and cheaply by the same crew Hitchcock used for his still-running TV anthology series.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
The budget for Psycho was 800000, making it one of the most profitable films in Hollywood history and one of the most influential too.
Psycho elevated the suspense and murder genre to a higher level and has been copied saluted, even remade, by generations of subsequent movie makers.
Today we're going to hear from actress Janet Leigh, the star of Psycho.
Well, the star for the first third of the movie anyway.
Terry spoke with her in 1999.
Leigh wrote a memoir in 1995 about the making of Psycho.
They started with a clip from the film.
Janet Leigh plays Marion Crane, who has stolen some money, is on the run and has checked into the Bates Motel run by Anthony Perkins as a mild-mannered Norman Bates.
He offers her a sandwich.
They sit in the parlor eating and he tells her about living with and caring for his invalid, mentally unstable mother.
Marion suggests he put his mother in an institution.
Have you ever seen the inside of one of those places laughing and the tears and the cruel eyes studying you, my mother, there?
But she's harmless.
She's as harmless as one of those stuffed birds.
I am sorry, I only felt it seems she's hurting you.
I meant well.
People always mean well and shake their heads and suggest oh.
So very delicately.
Of course I've suggested it myself, but I hate to even think about it.
She needs me.
It's not as if she were a maniac, a raving thing.
Sometimes we all go a little mad sometimes, haven't you?
Yes sometimes, just one time can be enough.
Thank you, thank you, norman.
What was your reaction when you read that your character was killed halfway through the story?
Well, actually, in the novel, it's only two pages.
Oh.
But what Mr Hitchcock explained is that he wasn't going to go into the entire history of this gentleman because it was just too much that he was going to concentrate on, on Mary and the discovery of Mary.
In other words, it would revolve around her.
So I knew it was going to be a short part.
I didn't know it would even be as long as it turned out to be, which was due to Mr Stefano's take on it.
Because it was interesting to me that when I interviewed Mr Stefano in regard to the book he said that when he first met with Mr Hitchcock he had said I really don't like Norman Bates very much.
I mean, he's unattractive.
He's just not something I want to write about.
He said but what interested me was that if you start the movie with the girl and get the audience into her life and her problems and her traumas and bring her then to Norman Bates then, especially with Anthony Perkins playing Norman Bates, then you have lured the audience into a situation where they think it's going to be oh yeah well, now there's two guys, and which one is she going to go for?
And that's, you know, your typical kind of little wrapped in a blue ribbon package.
And, of course, then the... tragedy becomes even more shocking.
And of course, Mr. Hitchcock immediately saw the value of this.
And Mr. Stefano said to me that Hitch leaned over and there was this gleam in his eye.
And he said, oh, yes, and we'll get a star to play her so that it would even be more of a shock.
Well, and it was.
I mean it was shocking for audiences when you were killed and when this motel owner, who you seemed to kind of pity if anything, turned out to really be a monster.
Right.
Well, that's why he was so.
You know, Tony Perkins was just so brilliant because almost you wanted to mother him in a way.
You know you felt sorry, and yet he had that undertone of where there would be a spark of something that would set him off.
And you could see that there was.
It wasn't quite right, and yet you could never identify what was wrong.
And that's why it was, you know, so beautifully done by him.
Now let's get to the shower scene.
There were, what, about 70 different setup shots in the shower scene?
Yes, it was 70 plus.
How did Hitchcock explain what he wanted from you in that scene in the overview, before getting into each shot, every day that you were doing a new shot?
Well, the overview was the actual drawings of each shot.
And so he showed us the overhead shot.
He showed us this shot.
He showed us the close-up there.
He showed us, you know, it was all planned.
So every time you did a shot, you knew exactly where the camera was looking.
You knew if the camera was looking at your navel or looking at your head.
Of course, yeah.
Because if it was looking at my navel, I could wear a bra... and pants.
In other words, I dressed according to where the shot was or undressed according to where the shot was.
So the camera was looking at your navel.
Did you feel, well, I don't have to particularly act in this shot.
My face doesn't need to express anything because the camera won't see it.
That's not exactly true, because it's amazing how your body has a tone, has a I don't know a reaction to it.
I can't explain it, but if you're just bland, your body's going to be bland.
But if you're feeling the terror and the effect of the blows and whatever, your body shows that.
I don't think that you can sort of separate it.
Now, what kind of knife was Anthony Perkins using?
A big, long butcher knife.
Was it a retracting knife?
No, no, it didn't retract.
It wasn't steel, however.
I mean, it looked like steel, but believe me, it wasn't.
Because what people forget is that we could not show penetration of a weapon.
So you could never see the knife going in, so you couldn't use a retractable knife.
I mean, it had no purpose.
What you saw was you saw the knife go back and lunge forward, and then you showed the shot of either the shoulder or the thumb or the thigh or whatever.
And you, in your mind, imagined it going in there.
And then you saw it pull back, and then you saw it go again.
But you never saw it enter the body because it was not allowed to.
Now, what did you do?
What did you think about to get that look of horror on your face when Tony Perkins pulls back the shower curtain and is there with his knife?
Was just being in the moment with Tony Perkins enough, or did you think of other things beyond that?
I think that just, it wasn't always Tony Perkins doing that with the knife, you know.
He had different people doing it.
With stand-ins?
Stand-in somebody, a woman, at one point, so that the audience could never get a fix on the character.
I mean, they all had the same clothes and wig and everything on, but different people were in different shots so that the audience could never kind of get a glimmer of who it might be.
Oh, you mean so even on screen we weren't always seeing Jim Perkins?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
He wasn't even there.
He was in New York. rehearsing a play, I think.
That's very sneaky.
Yes, of course, but that's Mr. Hitchcock.
Because if the same person did it all the time, there was a possibility slim but still a possibility that perhaps the audience might guess it.
And I didn't really need a lot of other thoughts in my head because when that shower curtain came, goes back and you look at this figure, which is exactly what they did in the thing, you know.
I mean that's pretty frightening.
I didn't have any trouble with that.
Now you were doing the shower scene, so although you weren't completely nude, you weren't exactly clothed either.
You write that you wore moleskin.
Right.
Because in the full shots, where you wanted the... body outline, right?
I wore moleskin over, you know, where I should.
And that was, I think, the roughest Well, one of the roughest things about that sequence, because it's as you know, it's a nude-colored, almost soft suede-like or something on the outside,
And then it's adhesive, obviously, on the inside.
And, you know... taking it on and off is was very uh on tender skin it's it's it was painful it you know you must have felt particularly vulnerable because here you are in the shower you know knowing that this actor with a big knife is going to be coming at you but also you've got these crew guys looking at you from on top and from the sides making you i'm sure feel more vulnerable were you able to use that vulnerability knowing that the crew was looking at you when you were mostly naked did Could you work with that and use that for your facial expressions?
Well, I think you use everything, every tool available for whatever you're trying to portray.
Certainly I always noticed that during this shower sequence that everybody seemed to have a lot of assistance.
It was a closed set but there were more people than I remember being on that set And one time one of the most difficult scenes, technically and also for me, was at the end, when she falls forward and grabs the shower curtain and goes over the tub.
Her head is kind of against that tub.
And he starts on a close up of the eye and pulls back into a long shot.
Now, we did it. several times.
We were in the 20 takes.
I don't know which one, 24, 5, something.
And because it wasn't automatic focus, it was hand focus, it was a very difficult technical shot for the camera operator who had to do the focusing as we pulled back.
And it was hard for me because of trying to just have a non-live look in your eye because I
Well, that's another story about I couldn't wear contact lenses in not enough time.
So it was just a hard shot.
And around the oh I don't know 24th or 5th, somewhere in there, everything seemed to be going well.
But the steam from the hot water had started to sort of melt the adhesive on the moleskin.
And I could feel it pulling away from my bosom.
And now, I knew that camera-wise, it would never show.
But the guys upstairs on the rafters, the electricians up there, the gaffers, they were going to get a peek.
And I thought to myself, well, what do I do?
I feel it pulling away.
This shot is going well.
I don't want to do this shot again.
And it's nothing they haven't seen before.
So I just said, let it rip.
And that was the shot that they printed.
What was your reaction the first time you saw the final cut of that scene?
I didn't see that scene separately.
I saw the entire picture.
But I have to tell you that I screamed bloody murder.
I mean, I really did.
Even though I read the script, I'd done the show, I knew what was happening, and I was still here.
It just blew me away.
Do you mean it was more frightening to watch the scene than it was to shoot it?
Yes.
Why do you think it is?
Well, because in shooting it don't forget you wait maybe two hours while they're setting up the shot, and of course the emotion is there when you're doing the scene.
But then you relax again for another hour while they do the next setup.
In the actual seeing of it, you saw the staccato, you saw the... the beat of the scene.
You saw the mounting tenseness and the mounting.
You know desperation and that's where it hits you.
And the music.
Seeing that all together that was what made it emphatic is putting all the editing together and the music, because otherwise, you know it was spread out over seven days.
This way, I saw it in, what, 45 seconds.
And it was terrifying to me.
It's the truth that I never realized in my life before how vulnerable one is in a shower.
And I don't take showers.
That's the truth.
Because you are completely defenseless.
I mean, one, you can't hear because the water's running.
Two, unless you have different kind of curtains, which I'm sure afterwards I know they did.
But at that time, you couldn't see out because of the curtain.
And you're naked.
You're defenseless.
And it just terrified me.
So it's been only baths since the making of Psycho?
Exactly.
And if there's no other way, I mean if wherever I happen to be only has a shower, it's with the door open.
The shower is never closed.
The bathroom is very wet.
And I'm always facing the door, and there is something by my side that I could grab if I had to.
Alfred Hitchcock didn't want anyone in the audience to know that your character Marion, was going to be killed or that Anthony Perkins was really the mother that he was impersonating, his mother.
Right, right.
So what did Hitchcock do to make sure that you and the other actors didn't inadvertently give away any of this information?
We did not go on tour for this picture.
Mr. Hitchcock did.
If you remember the classic now teaser for the movie is you never saw us really.
You saw Mr Hitchcock taking you through the motel and the various you know places saying, oh Well, we don't want to talk about what happened there.
I mean, it's a classic teaser.
And he went on tour around the world.
We never gave an interview.
He was afraid that we might just let it out.
And I don't know if you remember in the book the story of how it came.
Because again, this was a first interview, except for roadshow pictures, where you would have a matinee at 230 and an evening one at 730, like Gone with the Wind or something like that.
Most movies just ran continuously, and you could come in at any time.
Right.
In fact, the bywords of moviegoers were, this is where we came in.
Exactly.
Because you'd come in in the middle of the movie and you'd stay until that point came around again in the next showing, and then you'd leave.
That's right.
And what happened was he was sitting with his assistant and he said you know, he said, I just thought he said this stars Janet Leigh and Tony Perkins.
What if somebody should come in in the middle of the picture and keeps looking for Janet Leigh and she's not there?
That's going to be very strange.
So he said, there's only one thing to do.
He said... we can't let anybody in after the picture starts.
Well, there was all heck to pay because the theater owners, just I mean they couldn't believe that that was a rule.
And actually the day it opened, Barney Balaban, who was head of Paramount, who distributed the picture, got calls from theater owners all over the country saying look, It's a 9 o'clock show.
You know, it's half full.
And there's a line outside.
What do you mean?
I'm going to let them in.
And Barney said, you better read the fine print.
You can't do it.
Well, of course, once they realized, they used this.
I mean finally, when people realized that they couldn't get in.
Once the picture started, there were lines.
People went crazy.
The theater managers used that.
In the rain, they had umbrellas for people.
And everybody tried everything.
So it was revolutionary.
Right.
Well, Janet Leigh, thank you so much for sharing some of your memories of Psycho with us.
It was fun.
Janet Leigh, speaking with Terry Gross in 1999.
Janet Leigh died in 2004 at age 77.
Her daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, starred in her own low-budget, influential slasher horror film...
1978's Halloween.
Coming up, more about Hitchcock with Evan Hunter, the screenwriter of Hitchcock's The Birds.
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We're looking back today at a couple of Alfred Hitchcock films.
We just heard about the making of his 1960 movie Psycho which was released 65 years ago.
Next we focus on the film he made in 1963.
The film The Birds, based on a novella by Daphne du Maurier, is set in a small coastal community where the birds inexplicably begin attacking humans and pecking them to death.
The story was adapted for the screen by Evan Hunter, who had written the novel Blackboard Jungle, which itself was made into a movie.
Under the pen name, Ed McBain Hunter also had written a series of best-selling mystery novels set in New York's 87th precinct.
When Terry spoke with Evan Hunter in 1999, she asked him about adapting the novella and he admitted he found it difficult.
Well, I wasn't so much worried about how the birds would perform, because I figured that was his job, not mine directing the birds.
But if we stuck to the original premise of these two people in the cottage who, in the story, as I recall, spoke to each other mainly in grunts and long pauses, there would be a lot of lapsed time on the screen.
Right.
Now, what was the climax in the novel, and what did you think of the climax?
The climax was the scene that survived, the only scene that survived, the story where the finches come down the chimney into the cottage.
Hitchcock told you that he wanted to get rid of everything in the novella except the title and the idea of birds attacking.
Did he have a similar reaction to the novella that you did, that there really wasn't much there that would adapt into a film?
I think he had other reasons for not wanting to keep it the way it was.
He liked to deal.
In all of his movies he dealt with more sophisticated people who were intelligent and and almost glib.
And he didn't have that opportunity with these characters.
So in a sense, our reactions were the same in that respect.
But he also did not want to shoot ever again in England, he told me.
He never wanted to go back to England and shoot there.
So he wanted to transfer the entire story to the United States someplace.
And we chose the San Francisco location because because he had had luck with I guess it was the trouble with Harry, or suspicion, or one of them that was shot up there in Petaluma in the chicken country up around San Francisco.
And he looked upon omens and little superstitious things.
Like he had great luck with Rebecca, which is why he bought the birds, you know, and he had had luck shooting around the San Francisco area, so he wanted to go back to shoot there.
Now you say in your book Me and Hitch that you wanted to do the birds as a screwball comedy.
That suddenly turns terrifying.
Yeah, that idea came later.
We went with several notions of.
I remember one of my ideas was to come out and have her a schoolteacher, the new school mom in this little town, Bodega Bay, and a an inbred hostility from the natives against the newcomer, the big city girl from San Francisco.
And this was one of the ideas that was shot down.
She survived, of course, as Annie in the screenplay and in the movie, but not as the lead character.
One of the ideas he had was that she was a newspaper reporter coming up from San Francisco to examine, to look into some reported bird attacks.
And this went by the by, but it survived as her father being the publisher of a newspaper.
We kept flipping around, looking for a handle on it.
And then one day I was on my lunch hour and when I came back I said to Hitch, why don't we do a screwball comedy?
And suddenly it turns to terror.
We have a bird attack in the middle of some nonsense. and we know we're serious here.
We're talking about bird attacks.
And he liked that idea very much, and that's what we went with.
Do you feel that that was a successful idea?
Yeah, I thought it was a successful idea, but I'm not so good.
I'm not so sure how successful it turned out to be in execution.
It was a very difficult premise to bring off to begin with and I think it required enormous skill.
All along the way and perhaps I had not the skills and I know Hitch had the skills because he dealt with comedy very often in the past, but I don't think he ever dealt with emerging comedy with terror.
And, of course, it takes a great deal of skill on the part of the performers.
Yeah, well, Hitchcock, I think, had wanted Grace Kelly and Cary Grant.
Did you write with them in mind?
Mm-hmm.
Yes, there was no question.
There were, at the forefront of both of our minds while we were talking the script a Grace Kelly Cary Grant team.
And of course it was impossible, you know, because Grace was already in Monaco, as Hitch said, being a princess, you know.
And Cary Grant wanted 50% of the picture, and Hitch would never give him anything like that.
Now, when you were working with Hitchcock... on the screenplay.
Did you talk a lot about why the birds were attacking?
It came up frequently, because we didn't want to make the movie a science fiction film.
We could have said well, you know, the birds are attacking because there's a strain of virus 217 going around and this is probably from another planet, or any such nonsense as that.
And, at the same time, we didn't want it to seem as if we hadn't thought of it, as if we hadn't thought why are these birds attacking?
Why the creative forces behind the picture hadn't once thought to ask this question of themselves.
So it was a dodgy situation.
And we decided I did a scene in the screenplay where they try to figure out why the birds are doing this.
And they succeed only in frightening themselves.
But what they do come up with is the notion that there is a collective intelligence behind it, that these birds are not acting in isolated little groups, but that it's all the birds.
It's all the birds attacking mankind for whatever reason.
We never explain why, but at least we do explain that there is a unified force here and not some stragglers.
What happened to that scene? on the cutting room floor.
I don't think he ever... Wait, did he shoot that one?
Yes, he did shoot it.
He shot it, and it did not survive the final cut.
Now was Hitchcock concerned when you were writing the story about how he was going to technically pull off the bird scenes.
Never.
I once asked him in one of our meetings...
How far can I go with this hitch?
And he said, go wherever you want and let me worry about it.
You put it on paper and I'll get it on film.
And I think he really believed that.
You know, you must remember this was in 1961.
And we did not have Star Wars technology, which is unfortunate because we would have had them screaming out of the theater.
I promise you,
But we did not have it.
And I don't think he realized, when he made that promise to me, that how difficult it was going to be to deal with birds and to deal with animation and to deal with puppetry and all the other little gimmicks he used to create the illusion of reality.
It was interesting because the most real thing in the movie to me anyway were the birds, not the people.
The people, in a way, were the puppets and the hand puppets that were biting the people alive seemed real.
It was a strange irony.
What percentage of the birds, would you say, were puppets in animations?
How much of the birds was real?
I can't assign percentages to it.
I can only give you absolute examples.
The scene where the birds are attacking the town, where the gas station catches on fire And we cut to way above the gas station.
We see the birds flying in formation like a flight of fighter planes.
Those were animated.
One of the most frightening scenes in the film is where Rod Taylor is trying to pull the shutter closed and tie it with a cord and a bird is pecking at his hand.
That was a puppet.
Some of the birds in the scene where the children are running away from the school.
Yeah, and the birds are on the children's backs and they're trying to get them off and they're going at them.
Those were mechanical birds that the children were operating from little buzzers and things inside their clothing.
The scene where the swifts come down the chimney, that was all double exposure.
We shot the people running around the room flapping their hands in the air, and then the birds were added onto that later on.
Uh, like that.
Evan hunter speaking to terry gross in 1999.
More after a break.
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Let's get back to Terry's 1999 interview with Evan Hunter, who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds.
Let's hear a scene from the film.
The townspeople are gathered in a restaurant after a bird attack on the school.
Well, maybe we're all getting a little carried away by this.
Admittedly, a few birds did act strange, but that's no reason to believe.
I keep telling you, this isn't a few birds.
These are gulls, crows, swifts.
I have never known birds of different species to flock together.
The very concept is unimaginable.
Why, if that happened, we wouldn't have a chance.
How could we possibly hope to fight them?
We couldn't, you're right.
You're right, Mrs. Bundy.
What's the matter?
Is something wrong out here?
We're fighting a war, Sam.
A war against who?
Against birds.
I'm glad you all think this is so amusing.
It frightened the children half out of their wits.
If the young lady said she saw the attack at a school, why don't you believe her?
What attack?
Who attacked the school?
Birds did.
Crows. sitting around here debating.
What do you want him to do next, crash at that window?
Mommy.
Why don't you all go home?
Lock your doors and windows.
What's the fastest way to San Francisco?
The freeway, ma'am.
How do I find it?
I'm going out that way, lady.
You can follow me.
Well, then let's leave now.
Do you feel like you learn things about building suspense by working on the birds with Hitchcock?
Yeah, he was very good on suspense and he was very good on detail.
It was amazing.
I'd be in the middle of discussing a scene with him and he would say, out of the blue well, how long has she been in San Francisco now?
How long has she been in Bodega Bay?
And I would say, well, I don't know, two days.
And he'd say, well, has she called her father?
And I said, what?
He said, has she called her father?
I said, no, she hasn't.
He said, well, don't you think she should call her father?
Tell him where she is, you know?
And I said, sure.
So it's easy to do a phone call to Papa.
Or things like... I'll remember this always.
I described the scene to him where she goes up to the attic.
I don't know if you recall the movie where there's been a big bird attack on the house and they're all sitting around and Mitch is asleep in the chair and she's asleep in the other chair and she hears a sound and she looks up, she leans over to Mitch and he doesn't hear her because he's asleep and she grabs a flashlight and goes to investigate.
And I'm describing the scene to him and this to me.
By the way, it didn't turn out to be this in the film itself, but in the screenplay, when she opens the door to that attic.
There's every bird imaginable to mankind in that room.
I mean, there are hawks, there are eagles, there are seagulls, there are.
Anything you could imagine is in that room.
When her eyes pan that room, we see all the birds in the universe in that room and we know right at that moment that this is a unified attack against human beings and not something we're playing around with here in Bodega Bay.
It didn't turn out that way.
In the film, he just used crows and seagulls.
But I described the scene to him.
And she goes up the stairs and she hesitates, and then she opens the door and all these birds are in there.
And he was silent for a while, and then he said, let me see if I have this correctly, Evan.
And I said, yeah, and I...
He said, there's been this massive bird attack on the house.
I said, yes, there has.
He said, and now she hears a sound, and Mitch is asleep, so she doesn't want to wake him up.
So she goes to investigate by herself.
Have I got that correct?
I said, yes.
He says, well, is the girl daft?
So...
I said, well, you know, I realized he had me.
And he said, we'll take the curse off it.
He said, we'll have her first go into the kitchen and spot the lovebirds in the cage.
And this makes her feel a bit more complacent about it.
And then we'll have her along the way open some other doors and she'll see that everything's okay.
And we'll lull the audience until she opens that final door and boom, there are all the birds.
Can you think of an example of a scene that Hitchcock added that you hadn't written?
Yes, there were many in the film.
For example, the scene where Melanie is trapped in the phone booth.
This is not in the screenplay at all.
Not at all.
The scene ends, I don't know.
The birds are chasing the children and everybody's running from the town.
But it was Hitch who put her in that phone booth and Hitch who had all the birds smashing into the phone booth, picking up the metaphor of she being a bird in a gilded cage from the beginning of the film, and now she's back in the gilded cage in the phone booth.
It was wonderful imagery and scary as hell.
When they're battering the walls of that thing, you think they're going to get her.
The other nice thing about a phone booth is that she's enclosed, but it's also a transparent enclosure, so you can see her through the glass.
And you can see everything that's happening.
And you see people running and the one guy with blood all over his face almost trying to want to get in the phone booth.
So it was a brilliant scene, and not at all in the screenplay.
Now, did you enjoy working with Hitchcock?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, he was wonderful.
He was like the father every boy wished he could have.
You know, he was...
I think approximately twice my age while we were working on the film, and in good health and good spirits, and told me many, many times that he felt he was entering the golden age of making films, his golden age of making films.
He had just come off the success of Psycho you have to understand, and was looking forward to Birds being an even bigger success.
But he was humorous, he was anecdotal, he was generous, he with his time and with his uh uh patience.
And, uh, you know, I was a new kid on the block out there and in many, many respects.
And uh, he was uh, he took me under his wing, not to uh.
Evan Hunter speaking with Terry gross in 1999.
He died in 2005 at age 78.
Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film Hamnet about Shakespeare as a husband and father.
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In the new drama Hamnet, which opens in limited release next week, Paul Meskel plays William Shakespeare as a young playwright, husband and father in the years leading up to his writing of Hamlet.
The film, which also stars Jessie Buckley as Agnes Shakespeare's wife, was adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel.
It's the latest movie from Chloe Zhao, the Oscar-winning director of Nomadland.
Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review.
In her moving 2020 novel Hamnet, the Northern Irish writer Maggie O'Farrell explored the possibility that a real-life tragedy may have inspired one of the greatest fictional tragedies ever written.
William Shakespeare's son Hamnet, died at the age of 11 in 1596, a few years before the first recorded performances of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre in London.
From these facts O'Farrell spun a historical fiction, a mix of research and speculation into Shakespeare's personal life, starting with his rapturous romance with a farmer's daughter, Anne Hathaway, the arrival of their three children and the effect of Hamnet's death and Shakespeare's career on their marriage.
Now O'Farrell has co-written an adaptation of her novel with the director Chloe Zhao, and it plays like a more somber and realistic version of Shakespeare in Love.
Call it Shakespeare in Grief.
The chief focus isn't really Shakespeare at all, though he's sensitively played by Paul Meskell.
The heart of the movie is Anne, though here, as in certain historical documents, she's referred to as Agnes.
She's played by an extraordinary Jesse Buckley.
Agnes is a gifted healer with a deep connection to the earth.
She's most at home wandering the woods near her family's farmhouse in Stratford-upon-Avon.
She falls into a passionate romance with William, who's tutoring her younger brothers in Latin to help out his father, a struggling glove maker.
Agnes becomes pregnant to the chagrin of both families, especially William's mother Mary, played by a strong Emily Watson.
Even so, the two lovers marry and settle down.
Agnes gives birth to a daughter, Susanna.
But before long.
William, on the verge of becoming the most celebrated writer in the English language, is feeling boxed in by sleepy Stratford.
And so Agnes selflessly sends him off to London, knowing he'll find the creative outlet he seeks there.
William is thus away when she gives birth to their twins, Hamnet and Judith.
They enjoy a happy childhood, despite their father's long absences from home.
In this scene, William prepares to say the latest of many farewells to Hamnet, who's played by Jacoby Jupe.
Will we go with you this time?
No, not yet.
Hey.
I'll miss you.
But I have to go, you understand I. I know.
I understand.
That's good.
Because I need you to look after your mother and your sisters.
Will you do that?
Yes.
Will you be brave?
Yes.
Yes.
Will you be brave?
Yes.
Will you be brave?
Yes.
Yes, I'll be brave.
I'll be brave.
I'll be brave.
After her clunky 2021 Marvel movie Eternals, it's good to see Chloe Zhao back on firmer footing with Hamnet, though it isn't necessarily a film I'd have expected her to make.
With its English period setting and real-life historical figures.
It's a far cry from dramas like Nomadland and Songs My Brothers Taught Me, which used a mix of fiction and nonfiction techniques to focus on little-seen corners of rural American life.
That said... there are echoes of the director's past work throughout Hamnet.
William has some of the same vocational drivenness as say, the rodeo cowboy we meet in Zhao's film, The Writer determined to do what he was born to do.
But William's time away from home takes a heavy toll on Agnes and their children, and Hamnet is, among other things, a tense portrait of marital estrangement.
Agnes is in many ways a classic Zhao character, a woman deeply and eccentrically attuned to the natural world.
She also feels like an amalgam of some of Buckley's past roles the wild child she played in the thriller Beast, but also the ill-treated girlfriends she played in mind-bending films like Men and I'm Thinking of Ending Things
There's an elemental force to Buckley's performance in Hamnet.
When Agnes gives birth or watches as her son takes his last breath, she howls her agony to the skies.
At some point, Buckley doesn't even seem to be acting anymore.
So effortlessly does she seem to inhabit Agnes's earthy mysticism, her maternal love and her bottomless grief and despair.
She's the reason the film is as affecting as it is, especially at the climax, when we finally see how Shakespeare's son Hamnet, and the first production of his play Hamlet, converge.
It's undeniably effective.
It also feels a little reductive in the way that it regards an endlessly complex Shakespeare masterwork in purely therapeutic terms, a means of achieving closure.
Zhao knows that in the end, the play's the thing.
But as staged here, It feels like a smaller, less meaningful thing than it should.
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker.
He reviewed Hamnet.
On Monday's show, actor Brendan Fraser tells us about his new film Rental Family.
He plays a struggling American actor in Tokyo who works for a service that provides stand-in family members for rent.
We'll also trace Fraser's remarkable resurgence from The Whale to to Killers of the Flower Moon and beyond.
I hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.
You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash thisisfreshair.
We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests, behind-the-scenes shorts and iconic interviews from the archive.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Sam Brigger is our managing producer.
Our senior producer today is Roberta Shurock.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld and Deanna Martinez.
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi and Anna Bowden.
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For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bean Coon.
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