Editor Affonso Gonçalves has worked with directors as wide-ranging in style as Maggie Gyllenhaal and Todd Haynes, Roger Ross Williams, and Ira Sachs. But on “Hamnet,” he wasn’t just brought in to bring a raw, rhythmic, textured approach to the fictionalized story of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal), Agnes Shakespeare (Jessie Buckley), and how the death of their son Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) ripples through their lives. He was brought in to be another set of eyes for director Chloé Zhao.
“Chloé is the co-editor. We edit together the way Chloé — I think in all her movies, she always does the first pass. With this one, we talked about it. She says, ‘I want to cut it. Don’t watch any footage. Don’t watch anything. I want you to watch my cut first, when you come in,’” Gonçalves told IndieWire as part of our recent craft roundtable.
Once Gonçalves had seen Zhao’s first cut of the film, they got on the phone to talk about those performances and the flow of the movie as a whole. But then Gonçalves was turned loose to make a film that is about a kind of mystical communion — between the natural and the fantastical, between life and death, theater and life — even more lyrical.
“I think because she’s so specific, she’s so particular about performance, so she wanted to do the first pass the way it is in the script. And then I came in, and I had a little more freedom to do different things,” Gonçalves said. Gonçalves’ experiments allowed Zhao to either follow those curiosities or pull back towards the script, depending on what felt right. But assembling the film really was a collaborative push and pull between the two editors, once Zhao was back from shooting in London.
“It was super fun. It was great. It was a great relationship we had in the cutting room,” Gonçalves said.
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