There’s a post-”Gladiator,” (and also post-“Lord of the Rings”) soundscape that we kind of expect from period pieces — a certain amount of wagons rolling and armor clanging and chickens chirping and torches flickering to give us just enough of a sonic environment, while bombastic leitmotifs and ladies wailing sorrowfully on the soundtrack fill out a robust and rousing score. Even the “Dune” movies do that. There’s nothing wrong with it. But “Hamnet” doesn’t sound anything like how most period movies do, and is all the better for it.
Supervising sound editor, sound designer, and re-recording mixer Johnnie Burn has done everything from the almost hyper-documentary, detached horror of “The Zone of Interest” to the wild sci-fi/cinema ride that is “Nope.” Chloe Zhao’s film about the death of William Shakespeare’s son (Jacobi Jupe) and the vivid life of his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley), and how both and more spur the writing of “Hamlet,” is not on either extreme, but it did require some of the most detailed, meticulously curated sound design that Burn’s ever done.
“I learned so much on ‘The Zone of Interest’ about how, the more realistic and the more credible you make the soundscape, the more believable the immersion is, and therefore the deeper the immersion is for the viewer,” Burn told IndieWire. “Lots and lots of tiny details seem to, on a subconscious level, put people in the right place.”
The place that “Hamnet” most wants people to be is in the forest, in nature — both the actual Warwickshire forest where Agnes and Will (Paul Mescal) roam as young lovers and where Agnes gives birth to their eldest daughter Susannah (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), but also deeply connected in a visceral way to the nature of our being, to life and to death and to the meaning that, if we’re lucky, we can find in both. It is not enough to establish an exterior with birdsong and some wind blowing through the levels. Burn needed a lot of natural sounds and needed them to be incredibly emotionally specific.
“When young Hamnet is left alone in the courtyard at the house after his father has gone off to work, there’s a very sad bird there, for example. It does help paint how you are feeling about things, but all of those [choices] take an awful lot of curation to get right,” Burn said. “In the sound design of the birth scene in the forest, there are elements that are sort of quasi-score-like — it’s full of lots of different winds I created over a period of time to have a chord structure, tonally, to them that would impart a kind of mood, but without being specifically music or anything.”
The natural ambiance in any scene in “Hamnet” does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of mood, but to the audience just feels like a part of the rich, painterly compositions crafted by Zhao and cinematographer Łukasz Żal. That is entirely by design. When reading the script, Burn saw — or, perhaps more accurately, heard — what a dynamic ambient soundscape could do to bodily pull viewers into Agnes’s world, if it were paired with the right approach to cinematography. He went to Zhao with the pitch, which led to a proof of concept.
“It wasn’t just about the dialogue that we’re hearing. [The story was] about the immersion of the setting that we’re in. Chloe and Łukasz did, to a large degree, decide that if we’re filming it tableau-style, with not a lot of fast cuts, but [making] people walk into frame and then walk out of frame, that leaves a lot of scope for ambient sound design to place you in the right space.”
With sound and picture aligned from the very start of filming, Burn and his team could trawl the whole of Britain for the right sounds. Some of the team road tripped to Wales, and recorded a lot of the leaves and footsteps and wind noises as far from planes and cars as they could. But many of the tactile qualities of the Shakespeare townhouse on Henley Street come from Burn’s own home.
“I had a four-dimensional sound set up in the loft of my own house that is an equally rattly, windy space. I recorded lots of that kind of stuff on a very windy night,” Burn said. “You know, cold wind at night is quite a good pseudonym for grief.”
But for as much as has been rightfully written on the heartrending grief in “Hamnet,” Zhao and Burn found special providence in more than just the fall of a sparrow. Indeed, Burn snuck in a treat that really earns being an “Easter egg.”
“There’s a bird in the film that you hear often in the forest that whistles in iambic pentameter, which is the [meter] that they obviously used in the plays,” Burn said. “But Chloe [said], ‘You can’t just put birds wall-to-wall on my film. That’s not how we’re going to do it. Everything needs a natural ambiance. If you’re going to put any bird in, you have to ask me first and we will discuss it. So, as a joke, I made a written application for an additional bird.”
Burn ended up killing a lot of his bird sounds — although he assured IndieWire that no actual animals were harmed in the making of the film — but it was important to be as detailed and immersive as possible, and then pull back to find the exact right balance. “My first thoughts, even from reading the script, were so much of William’s and Agnes’ lives were spent [in nature], and obviously Agnes is a ‘forest witch,’ isn’t she? So it was about making the whole film about feeling that space.”