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“Hamnet” and “The Testament of Ann Lee” screened during this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival, and following each of the films, directors Chloé Zhao and Mona Fastvold, as well as “Ann Lee” star Amanda Seyfried, discussed the feminine energy that fueled their work on-screen and behind the scenes.
Onstage, Zhao confirmed rumors that when she first received the call from producer Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment to adapt Maggie O’Farrell’s emotional novel about William and Agnes Shakespeare, she initially replied, “I’m not sure.”
Zhao partially credits her reticence to the hectic nature of the call, which came through during her spottily serviced drive to the Telluride Film Festival a few years ago. Once she arrived at the festival, though, she was asked to meet with actor Paul Mescal. It was a moment of kismet.
“Just looking at him, I saw a young Shakespeare. He had an earring,” Zhao told Variety’s Angelique Jackson, who moderated both conversations. “I just said to him, ‘Have you ever thought about playing young William Shakespeare?’ and he said, ‘Well, if you’re talking about “Hamnet…” Because I love the book. You have to read the book. It is perfect for you. It’s not what you think it is.’”
Zhao took Mescal’s advice and read O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, which tells a mostly fictional story about how the death of William and Agnes’ son Hamnet inspired the Bard to write “Hamlet.” When Zhao read it, she immediately thought of Jesse Buckley for Agnes. “All I saw was Jesse,” the filmmaker recalled. “It was very tunnel vision.”
Casting Buckley proved fruitful not just for her committed performance but for her contributions to the production as a whole. Zhao explained that the actress helped her and O’Farrell rewrite the ending. While the novel ends with the emphatic line “Remember me,” and the initial script concluded with Hamlet dying on stage during the play’s debut performance at the Globe Theatre, the film added an emotional final scene of Agnes and the Globe’s crowd reaching out towards the actor in a moment of collective grief and empathy.
“Jesse sent me Max Richter’s ‘This Bitter Earth,’ which is a lyrics version of ‘On the Nature of Daylight,’” Zhao recalled. “I was listening to the song in the car, and I started to cry. I felt tightness in my heart, but also opening. And then I started reaching out to the window. I was trying to touch the rain outside.” Zhao was going through a personal loss at the time, she explained. “But this gesture, I realized, I was trying to reach for something bigger that I could be a part of, so that I would have the strength to let go. And then I realized that’s what Hamlet needed.”
That collaborative spirit and emotional intuition are indicative of why Amblin wanted Zhao to direct “Hamnet” in the first place. Zhao jokes that empathy has always been a part of her nature, and that she can now prove to her parents that the “oversensitive child had a purpose.”
More sincerely, though, she said, “Sometimes we’re made to be ashamed of the part of ourselves that seeks connection and relatedness and love as if it’s less important, not productive or weak, but that is the life force. That is the force that binds. That is the creative energy that crosses everything together, that sustains and fosters growth and enhances everything in life. So as vulnerable as it feels, I would try to create from that place and seek that connection.”
Mona Fastvold is no stranger to leading from a feminine lens, either. As a director, her filmography consists of “The Sleepwalker,” “The World to Come” and now, “The Testament of Ann Lee” — all of which focus on powerful female characters. Only recently, however, has she come to embrace the label of a “female director.”
She associates some of that empathetic approach to “female leadership,” which she suggests, “doesn’t just mean women. It means the feminine consciousness in all people is drawing strength from interdependence, not dominance. It’s drawing strengths from intuition, relationships, community and interdependence.”
Regarding being just one of nine women out of 111 directors who helmed 2025’s 100 top-grossing films, Zhao says the data indicates that a more feminine approach “doesn’t fit into the current model that we exist in, the container we exist in. It’s difficult to come through, and I feel very lucky that I had people in power that trusted that this way of leading is needed for this story.”
“I used to resent being called that, and now I love it,” Fastvold told Variety, seated next to the film’s star, Amanda Seyfried. “I will take it. I will be a ‘female director,’ and tell feminist stories about women. I’m very proud of it.”
Seyfried plays the titular heroine, a real-world figure who lived in the 18th century and founded the Shakers, a religious movement that championed gender equality and communal living, and whose followers expressed faith through dance. As chronicled through the film, Lee’s followers began to see her as a female messiah while others marked her for persecution.
“The Shakers worship through ecstatic song and dance,” Fastvold explained. “There was something about this idea of expressing faith through movement and song in such a free and intense and guttural way that was very exciting to me and scary.”
Accordingly, the film is a historical musical. Fastvold initially expressed trepidation towards directing her first musical, but saw the genre as unavoidable given the subject matter.
“Making a musical is scary, even though it’s a different kind of musical,” the director reflected. “I’d never made a musical before. My background is in dance, but I knew that I had to approach it in a different way and that I couldn’t really look to other projects as inspiration for this. So it was kind of terrifying. But the short answer is it had to be a musical because that’s how they worshipped. They kind of lived their life in that way.”
The director cast Seyfried partially because of her singing and dancing capabilities, as showcased in her roles in “Mamma Mia” and “Les Misérables.” Even so, embodying Lee and choreographing her intense movements proved to be demanding for the seasoned actress.
“As challenging as it was for me to memorize those moves, once I got there, I felt closer to Ann Lee and once we were all moving in unison, it just takes you to another place,” Seyfried said. “You just had to feel like it was part of you. It was an extension of your body, and then it becomes real for that moment in time.”
Part of the challenge came from the fact that the Shakers’ choreographies are buried in history. Seyfried worked with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall to create and execute dances that were “based on these paintings and drawings and descriptions” of events that took place over two centuries ago.
Seyfried credits the artisans and practitioners across all departments for their thorough research in recreating Lee’s story and the Shaker movement, and she expresses profound esteem for Fastvold, whom the production affectionately referred to as “Mother Mona” on set.
“She is very nurturing,” Seyfried said of Fastvold. “Her job as the director is mothering. The leadership comes from this beautiful, nurturing, female, empowered artist. The nurturing quality of her really impacts how we felt on set and I think it went a long way.”
Similarly, Fastvold shared how the opportunity to tell a story about a woman whose historical impact had been unsung fueled her sense of purpose while making the film.
“There are so many wonderful, exciting, important female historical figures that are overlooked,” she said. “I feel very lucky that I found Ann Lee.”
English (US) ·