“Hamnet” and “The Testament of Ang Lee” screened at this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival, and after each screening, directors Chloé Zhao and Mona Fastvold, as well as “Ang Lee” star Amanda Seyfried, spoke about the feminine energy that animated their films on screen and behind the scenes.
On stage, Chao confirmed rumors that when he first received a call from producer Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment about adapting Maggie O’Farrell’s moving Shakespearean novel of William and Agnes, he initially said, “I’m not sure.”
Chao attributes her reluctance to call, in part, to a busy phone call she received several years ago while occasionally driving to the Telluride Film Festival. However, upon arriving at the festival, he was asked to meet actor Paul Mescal. It was a kismet moment.
“Just looking at him, he looked like a young Shakespeare. He had earrings on,” Ms. Zhao told Variety’s Angelique Jackson, who hosted both conversations. “I said to him, ‘Have you ever thought about playing a young William Shakespeare?’ And he said, ‘Well, if you’re talking about Hamnet…’ Because I love this book. I have to read the book. This is perfect for you. It’s not what you think it is. ”
Chao took Mescal’s advice and read O’Farrell’s 2020 novel. The novel tells a mostly fictional story of how the death of William and Agnes’ son Hamnet inspired the Bard to write “Hamlet.” When Chao read that, Agnes immediately reminded her of Jesse Buckley. “All I saw was Jesse,” the filmmaker recalls. “It was just tunnel vision.”
Buckley’s casting proved beneficial not only for her dedicated performance, but also for her contribution to the production as a whole. Chao explained that the actress helped her and O’Farrell rewrite the ending. The novel ends with the emphatic line, “Don’t forget me,” and while the original script ended with Hamlet dying on stage during the Globe premiere, the film added a moving final scene in which Agnes and the Globe audience reach out to the actor in a moment of collective grief and empathy.
“Jesse sent me Max Richter’s ‘This Bitter Earth,’ which is a lyrical version of ‘On the Nature of Daylight,'” Chao recalls. “I was listening to the song in the car, and I started crying. I felt my heart constrict, but at the same time it felt like it was opening. And I started reaching for the window, trying to touch the rain outside.” Ms. Zhao was dealing with a sense of personal loss at the time, she explained. “But I realized that this gesture was trying to reach out to something bigger that I could be a part of, so I could have the strength to let go, and I realized that’s what Hamlet needed.”
“Hamnet” director Chloé Zhao poses with Kering Americas president Ewa Abrams at the 37th Palm Springs International Film Festival.
Vivian Kirilia/Getty Images, Palm Springs International Film Institute
That collaborative spirit and emotional instincts illustrate why Amblin wanted Chao to direct Hamnet in the first place. Chao jokes that empathy has always been part of her nature and that now she can prove to her parents that “this hypersensitive child had a purpose.”
But more sincerely, she said: “Sometimes we are ashamed of the part of ourselves that seeks connection and connection and love, not productivity or weakness, as if it were less important. But that is the life force. It is the force that unites. It is the creative energy that holds everything together, that sustains and fosters growth and strengthens everything in life. So no matter how vulnerable I feel, I try to create from that place and I want to seek that connection.”
Mona Fastvold is also used to coaching from a female perspective. Her filmography as a director includes The Sleepwalker, The World to Come, and now The Testament of Ang Lee, all of which focus on strong female characters. But it’s only recently that she’s come to embrace the label of “female director.”
She associates part of that empathetic approach with “female leadership,” which she suggests “doesn’t just mean women. It means that the feminine consciousness of all people draws strength from interdependence, not domination. It draws strength from intuition, relationships, community, and interdependence.”
Chao, who is only one of nine female directors out of the 111 female directors who directed the top 100 films of 2025, said that the data shows that a more feminine approach “doesn’t fit the current model that we exist in, the container that we exist in.” It’s difficult to achieve, but she feels very lucky to have people in power who believed that this story needed to be guided in this way.
“I used to resent being called that, but now I love it,” Fastvold told Variety, sitting next to the film’s star Amanda Seyfried. “I’ll take it. I’ll be a ‘female director’ and tell feminist stories about women. I’m very proud of that.”
Seyfried will play the titular heroine, a real person who lived in the 18th century and founded the Shaker sect, a religious movement that championed gender equality and communal living, and whose followers expressed their faith through dance. As recorded in the film, Lee’s supporters began to see her as a savior of women, while others marked her as an object of persecution.
“Shakers worship through enthusiastic song and dance,” Fastvold explained. “This idea of expressing faith in a free, intense, deep-throat way through movement and song was so exciting and frightening to me.”
Therefore, this film is a historical musical. Fastvold initially expressed reservations about directing his first musical, but thought the genre was inevitable given the subject matter.
The director said, “Even though it’s a different kind of musical, it’s scary to make a musical.” “I had never made a musical before. My background is in dance, but I knew I had to approach it differently and I couldn’t look to other projects for inspiration for this piece. So in a way it was scary. But, long story short, it had to be a musical, because that’s what they worshiped. That’s how they lived their lives, in a way.”
One of the reasons the director cast Seyfried was because of her singing and dancing abilities, which she demonstrated in her roles in “Mamma Mia” and “Les Misérables.” Still, embodying Lee and choreographing her intense movements proved tough for the veteran actress.
“It was hard to learn the movements, but when you get there, you feel so close to Ang Lee, and when everyone moves in unison, it transports you to another place,” Seyfried said. “I had to feel like it was a part of me. It was an extension of my body, and in that moment, it becomes real.”
Part of the challenge arose from the fact that the Shakers’ choreography was lost in history. Seyfried collaborated with choreographer Celia Rawlson Hall to create and perform a dance “based on these paintings, drawings, and descriptions” of events that took place more than two centuries ago.
At the 37th Palm Springs International Film Festival, “The Last Testament” star Amanda Seyfried and director Mona Fastvold spoke with Variety’s Angelique Jackson.
Presley Ann/Getty Images, Palm Springs International Film Institute
Seyfried credits the craftsmen and practitioners in each department for their thorough research in recreating Lee’s story and the Shaker movement, and pays deep respect to Fastvold, whom the production affectionately called “Mother Mona” on set.
“She’s a very easy person to raise,” Seyfried said of Fastvold. “Her job as a director is to be a nurturing mother. The leadership comes from this beautiful, nurturing woman, a strong artist. Her nurturing nature really influenced how we felt on set, and I think that helped a lot.”
Similarly, Fastvold talked about how the opportunity to tell the stories of women whose historical impact was unknown fueled her sense of purpose while making the film.
“There are so many amazing, inspiring, important historical women figures who are overlooked,” she says. “I feel very lucky to have met Ang Lee.”
