Inside Hamnet Producer Liza Marshall’s Literary Enthusiast Hella Photo

Liza Marshall recently discovered that she was the only one to bid on the rights to “Hamnet.”

This was back in October 2019, after producers were sent a copy of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel five months before publication. Marshall, a voracious reader, finished this book in no time. “And I just fell in love with it as a piece of writing,” she says. Of course, O’Farrell’s agent had led her to believe that others were equally into the film, but a month ago he let it slip that Marshall’s work was the only offer he had.

More than six years after the bid, the decision feels automatic.

Hamnet, a fictional account of the real-life relationship between William Shakespeare and Agnes Hathaway and their grief over the tragic loss of their eldest son to the plague, became a literary sensation in 2020, winning O’Farrell numerous awards and selling more than 2 million copies worldwide.

The film adaptation of Hamnet, distributed by Focus, directed by Chloé Zhao, starring Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal, and co-starring Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, and Jacobi Jupe, has become an awards season masterpiece since its premiere at Telluride and is currently a box office smash. The film recently surpassed $90 million worldwide and broke the record for feature nominations for a female director at last Sunday’s BAFTAs, winning Outstanding British Film and Best Actress for Buckley. In just over two weeks, it has been nominated for eight awards, including Best Picture, and is nominated for an Oscar.

But as Marshall admits, when he first read the book, adapting it for the big screen was anything but easy.

“This was a very internalized book about the death of a child, set in the 1580s. It wasn’t going to be an easy road to get it made,” she said shortly after Hamnet returned to the top of the British box office. “But it was really beautifully written and I was completely fascinated by it. And I always follow my intuition.”

That instinct has come to define Marshall, who for many years was a quiet, unassuming influence in British film and television, but only now, as lead producer on Hamnet, is he receiving the recognition he deserves as a true tastemaker par excellence.

She’s speaking from the breezy west London offices of her company, Hella Pictures. It’s a fair distance from Soho, her usual creative hub, but as she says, it’s just a short walk from her home (and, coincidentally, given the theme of her latest hit, overlooking a vast cemetery).

Hella was founded by Marshall in 2017 after co-founder of Archery Pictures (which produced Riviera), founded and ran Scott Free London for Ridley Scott (Life in the Day, Taboo), and spent five years as head of drama at Channel 4, where she greenlit top titles such as Top Boy and the Red Riding film trilogy.

Named after the wife of the Greek god-king Zeus – “It was a very feminine name,” she says (though she notes that her husband, actor Mark Strong, was not involved in the decision) – the name Hera was born out of Marshall’s desire not only to “be her own boss” but also to create work that “felt authorial and unique.” And since then, it has slowly emerged as one of the UK’s most distinctive independent production companies.

On the wall behind Marshall is a poster featuring Elizabethan glamorous Julianne Moore and Nicholas Galitzine from Sky/Starz’s raunchy historical drama series Mary & George, set to air in 2024. Directed by Olivier Hermanus, this historical drama about Mary Villiers, a British aristocrat, and her ruthless queer socialite climbers, was another breakout moment for Marshall.

“History doesn’t say much about her, but Mary basically went from being a nobody with no wealth or money to becoming the closest woman to James I by pimping out her really attractive second son,” she says. “It’s such an amazing story, but when I started talking about it, everyone was like, ‘Well, that’s never going to happen.'”

It took five years, but Marshall completed “Mary & George” (and currently boasts a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).

On the wall to her left is a poster for another long-in-development feature, The End We Start From, a gripping 2023 survival film in which Jodie Comer navigates an eco-apocalyptic Britain with a newborn baby. The film, based on the novel by Megan Hunter, was developed in 2017 by Benedict Cumberbatch’s company Sunnymarch and is Hella’s first feature-length work. “I fell in love with this beautiful book of prose poetry…again!” says Marshall. “But this movie took six years to make because it’s essentially a movie about motherhood in extreme conditions.”

There’s a decidedly literary-focused throughline running through Hella’s work, which makes sense given Marshall’s appetite (“I’m just reading all the time,” she says). This includes last year’s widely praised BBC youth drama series What it Feels Like for a Girl, based on the autobiography of transgender writer and campaigner Paris Leeds.

But Marshall says even from Hella’s first film, the Sky series Temple, based on the hit Norwegian drama Valkyrien and starring her husband Strong as a surgeon who runs an illegal clinic in an abandoned tube station, she wanted “everything to feel different and a unique way of looking at the world”.

And Marshall was able to accomplish this not only as her own deliberate and authored steward of each project, but also with the growing pool of creative collaborators she gathered along the way.

She had actually worked in television with Pippa Harris at Neal Street Productions in the 1990s, so when the producer approached her about the rights to Hamnet (after O’Farrell’s book became a hit), she felt it was a good fit. Harris, along with his Neal Street partner Sam Mendes, connected with Amblin’s Steven Spielberg through “1917,” before being brought to Focus. Suddenly, “Hamnet” cost $30 million to make and had a creative team hand-picked primarily by Marshall. Chao was her first choice as director because she loved The Rider and her unique nature shots, but she also wanted both a woman behind the camera and a non-British woman who didn’t have “such a reverent attitude toward Shakespeare” and who could see the story through Agnes’ point of view.

At Telluride in 2022, Chao, who was clearly looking for a project about “witchy women,” met with both Mescal (who was there for “Aftersun” and sporting vaguely Shakespearean hoop earrings) and Buckley (who was in town for “Women Talking”). “It was all just a coincidence,” Marshall says.

There may have been some serendipity in putting the film together, but there’s no doubt that Marshall’s first reading of O’Farrell’s words in October 2019 began one of the year’s most unexpected cinematic success stories. In the UK, “Hamnet” became the highest-grossing film among the BAFTA Best Film nominees, surpassing “One Battle After Another,” “Marty Supreme,” and “The Sinners.” And it’s a result of being driven by a younger audience (including Marshall’s eldest son, now in college).

“People hear that to fully experience that emotion, they have to go to the theater and watch a movie with a large group of people,” she says. “So it’s kind of a phenomenon.”

Next up, Hera, despite its growth and now expanding its small team, is actually not the novel that Marshall was hooked on long before it hit shelves. However, it will reunite her with her former collaborators.

Based on a short story by Steven Soderbergh, The Return of Stanley Atwell is a mystery thriller set in 1959 that was brought to Marshall by writer-director Brian Welsh, who starred in What It Feels Like for a Girl (Marshall hired him behind his 2019 indie hit Beats). She cast Galitzine, the craggy, “hot” son of “Mary and George,” in the role of the heir to the title and fortune of a feudal lord who was thought to have died but unexpectedly returns to his fiefdom. Further casting is expected to be announced soon, and the film is expected to begin production later this year.

And just over the horizon are projects taken straight from the Hera handbook, highlighting Marshall’s deep connection to the author. Following the success of “Hamnet,” she expanded her partnership with O’Farrell by acquiring the rights to her next novel, “Rand.”

Partly based on her own family history, the story follows a father and son across Ireland in 1865 after the Great Famine. The book, which is on sale until June, has already generated a lot of buzz, with ticket demand for book tours in the UK and US “on par with Margaret Atwood in terms of sold-out author events,” Marshall said. Of course, O’Farrell is beloved in his own right, but it certainly helps that “Hamnet” continues to dominate the headlines.

There will be no shortage of producers, directors, actors, and distributors lining up to be part of this project. “There’s a lot of interest in it,” Marshall admits.

“But I just finished reading it for the second time,” she says. “It’s a beautiful book and I’m really looking forward to reading it.”

The rise of Hella Pictures comes at a difficult time for many independent producers. Many spend years on a project, only to find themselves forced out of the final financial equation by ever-dwindling funds. For Marshall, the fact that she also produces television has helped keep her afloat. “You can’t make a living making films in the UK. It’s really difficult,” she says. “But I’ve always worked in television. I really like the fast pace of television and telling completely different stories. But film is like a passion and it takes time.”

But while many other British companies are now bringing in the deep pockets of major international partners to ensure longevity, Mr Marshall says he wants to remain “resolutely independent” for the foreseeable future.

“People ask me, but I really like doing what I want and being very flexible,” she says. “In fact, not having a distribution contract is really great, because when you put a project on the market, you’re often in a better financial position because you’ve got multiple people bidding on it. So I think there are advantages to being completely independent. But it obviously comes with risks.”

As Rand begins to attract potential suitors, Marshall admits that, thanks to Hamnet, far more unpublished novels are arriving in his mailbox than before. But she argues there’s a lot of competition now.

“Everyone is looking for the perfect book, but it’s difficult,” she says. “But you just have to rely on your guts. That’s all you can do to keep going.”