H Is for Hawk’s Helen MacDonald & Philippa Lowthorpe on Hit Book Becoming a Movie | Interview

ComingSoon’s Tyler Treese spoke with H Is for Hawk director Philippa Lowthorpe and author Helen MacDonald about the new movie starring Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson. The duo discussed adapting MacDonald’s memoir and the use of real photos that MacDonald’s father took. Directed and written by Lowthorpe, the film is now out in theaters nationwide.

“H is for Hawk follows Helen (Foy), who, after the sudden death of her father (Gleeson), loses herself in the memories of their time birding and exploring the natural world together and turns the ancient art of falconry—rooted in European tradition—training a wild goshawk named Mabel to navigate her profound loss. But as she teaches Mabel to hunt and fly free, Helen discovers how deeply she has neglected her own emotions and life. What begins as an act of endurance transforms into an intimate journey of resilience and healing,” says the official synopsis.

Tyler Treese: Philippa, this is an interesting memoir to adapt because the book is so full of Helen’s thoughts, and you get so much detail and searching from those words, but there’s no voiceover here or an inner monologue. So you’re just watching this person close themselves off from the world and keep people at a distance. How was it depicting this work that is so internal on the page into a film, which is naturally voyeuristic?

Philippa Lowthorpe: That’s such a good question. We were blessed with Claire Foy for one thing. She’s our secret weapon because Claire’s ability to convey emotion and to convey feeling is absolutely second to none. You put the camera on her and you look into her eyes and you can see what’s going on inside her. So I didn’t really feel that we needed voiceover.

The other thing to say about Helen’s prose, when you really examine it, it’s actually very, very active. It’s very visual and it tells you what’s happening all the time. Often there is a lot happening. There’s scenes of hunting, which all which are very, very tense. There’s things that go wrong there. Although it’s much less interior than you think when you start actually examining it. Helen’s language, it’s very active actually. What I love about Helen’s language is it is incredibly energetic and full of vivid description and vibrancy.

So, my job and Charlotte [Bruus Christensen], the DP’s, job was to bring the visual out of Helen’s language. Because it’s intensely visual. I felt that our job in, not in the script… yes, a little bit in the script, but in the film, was to give that intensely visual and cinematic kind of vision for our audience. For example, with the nature photography, with the hawk photography, when we’re in the hunting scenes and try and capture that and with our soundscape to make it an auditory visual experience. So that’s what we want to do. I never wanted to have voiceover because I think in a film you have to do something different from the book, but which is utterly inspired and grounded in a book.

Helen, your father was such a talented photographer. I was looking at this photo of his of a broken water main and the worker just walking away with a cigarette. It appears in the film as well. It’s so funny. What did it mean for you that your father’s photos actually got to appear in the film and be a part of that lovely speech at the end? Because I can’t think of a better tribute.

Helen MacDonald: Oh my goodness. Yeah. When I realized that they were gonna use real photos, it was just such a special moment, you know? The film has a whole bunch of real things that are kind of woven in. So the cameras that Brendan Gleason uses playing my dad are dad’s real cameras that my brother and l loaned to the production. There are photos in the book that are mine. If you look at the scenes where Claire as me is in a house full of moldy coffee cups, but there are lots of things lying around on the walls as feathers and stuff. They’re all my things. Claire, in fact, even wears a hawking waistcoat that was the same one that I wore when I flew Mabel.

There’s something almost like religious relics about these. They kind of brought the past into the film and made it real and anchored it. Just giving audiences a chance to see my dad’s real work. He’s gone but his work lives on. Like all great photographers, he captures these perfect moments. It’s what the film is doing. It’s turning into these moments of visual purity and beauty, great truths about the world. So, yeah, the whole thing is just… it’s just been magical and completely bizarre to me as well. Like what? A film about me and my life? This is very strange.

Source: Comingsoon.net