'Hamnet' seemed 'completely lost.' How four days saved the year's most emotional film

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There were only four days left of shooting on “Hamnet” when Chloé Zhao realized she didn’t have an ending.The filmmaker had led the cast through a week filming the pivotal climactic sequence inside the Globe Theatre, where William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) is staging his opus “Hamlet,” but something was missing.

The script had Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), and her brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) witnessing the demise of Hamlet (Noah Jupe), a denouement that should have evoked a sense of release.But even though the moment was meant to tie Shakespeare’s masterpiece to the still-fresh death of Will and Agnes’ 11-year-old son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), neither Zhao nor Buckley could feel the necessary catharsis.“Jessie and I avoided each other for the rest of the day because we both knew we had no film,” Zhao says.

“We both went home feeling completely lost.”“We were searching for this ending,” Buckley adds.“It was a daunting idea to try and pull together all the threads of the story we’d woven prior to this moment.

I felt incredibly lost and a bit untethered.”Zhao admits that she rarely preplans the endings of her films because she doesn’t tell stories linearly.She imagines the journey of her characters unfurling in a spiral, with the story extending downward into the darkness before rising back up.“I’ve had to wait on every single film,” she says.

“But this time I was going through the ending of a relationship, so I was terrified of losing love.I was holding on to it with dear life.”The morning after they filmed the scripted ending, Buckley sent Zhao Max Richter’s “This Bitter Earth,” a reimagining of his song “On the Nature of Daylight” with lyrics.

The filmmaker played it in the car on her way to the set.“I could feel the tears and the heart opening, and then I started reaching my hand out towards the window...