J Paul Johnson
The just-completed film Hello Beautiful is the complex, moving, and all-too-real story of a woman diagnosed and living with breast cancer. Its story is based on the best-selling book Walk Beside Me by Christine Handy, who, when diagnosed with breast cancer at 41, re-evaluated her life, took stock of her values, and dedicated herself to her recovery and to the cause of others who share the disease. Hello Beautiful is the result of a long and close collaboration between herself and writer-director Ziad Hamzeh: it depicts aspects of Handy’s diagnosis and recovery in telling the story of its protagonist, Willow Boutros (Tricia Helfer), a top model who, like Handy, is confronted with the stark reality of breast cancer.
Ziad Hamzeh, who also serves as a producer of Hello Beautiful, has earned over fifty awards and honors for his filmmaking, including the Tunisian hit film Take My Breath and the Rwandan film Upstanding. In 2022, he produced the critically acclaimed The Island of Forgiveness with Claudia Cardinale, and executive-produced the Iranian film Forbidden Womanhood. His prior work includes The Flower of Aleppo, honored as Tunisia’s entry into both the 2017 Academy Awards and the Golden Globe Awards. Christine Handy began her career at the age of 11 and has done campaigns for Guess, J. Crew, JC Penney, Bud Light, Pepsi, Petco and Target. Following her breast cancer diagnosis and the publication of Walk Beside Me, she serves today as a spokesperson, speaker, and ambassador for cancer related causes.
Hamzeh and Handy spoke with Film Obsessive Publisher J Paul Johnson recently about the adaptation of Handy’s book and life for the film Hello Beautiful. The transcript following the video below has been edited for space and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Hello, and welcome to you both. I’m so eager to hear both of your stories. Let’s begin with Ziad. Could you tell our audience a little bit about the film Hello Beautiful?
Ziad Hamzeh: Indeed, the film is an actual depiction of Christine Handy’s life. It’s not only inspired by her, but it is literally as close to her struggles, pains, and triumphs, in which Christine, as you probably have read, was a model in which at the top of her career contracted, unfortunately, breast cancer, and it was her journey on a roller coaster down into hell and her ability to find the warrior inside of her and come back up again. That is basically what the story of the film is.
I have seen the film, and it is a moving story. Christine, I’d like you to go back in time and tell your story. Especially as you translated it into your book Walk Beside Me.
Christine Handy: So, my journey started really when I was about eleven years old. That’s when I started modeling. So you can imagine that type of external pressure from a young age, and that’s what you learned. You learned that your value is dependent on things that are really not of value, it turns out. And so when I was diagnosed with breast cancer after a 30-year career in the modeling industry, I realized that my self-esteem was completely dependent on things that were being taken away. So as an example, I was losing my beauty, losing my hair, losing my chest, losing some relationships. You know, we can all put our time and energy into material things and things outside of us, but does that stuff really matter? No, because that can all be stolen or taken away.
So was in duress. I was diagnosed with breast cancer at 41, which was shocking. I was a self-proclaimed athlete, allergic to sugar, no family history. So other than the shock, I was really questioning my value, value in society, value in my family, value with my friends, and And I just realized that in the first few months of cancer, that I was doing it wrong, that I had put my faith into things and not people, and I had put my my success was based on again, external things, and that had nothing to do with who I was inside. So I really had to go deep and dig into who was Christine Handy.
And what I found out was I had a lot of determination and grit and grace, and during that very difficult time when I was very ill in 15 months of chemotherapy, I had a lot of time with people, but a lot of time by myself because breast cancer is a very lonely disease. Cancer is in general a lonely disease. And so during that introspective time, I thought, well, if I can reinvent my life, if I can do it differently, maybe I can be a light to somebody else. Maybe I can use my story of how I did it wrong to show somebody how to do it right. And maybe I can encourage somebody at a young age to work on their self-esteem and not work so hard on materialism or work so hard on trying to get society to love them. And so it’s this great transformation between, you know, really trying to follow the path of society to following my own path.
And now my light and my drive to serve is what stewards me. It has nothing to do with whether people like me, whether I get the next modeling job. It’s not transactional. So it’s been a complete 180 shift. And so I thought if I could write the book and possibly get the movie made, well, wouldn’t that make a splash in the world? Wouldn’t that help a whole lot of people?
Well, I think your book has certainly done that. And your book has been out for a while, and the two of you have been planning for this film, Hello, Beautiful for some time now, is that correct? About six years? So it’s been a long journey. I take it you were interrupted for a time by COVID.
Ziad Hamzeh: Certainly, that was part of it. Certainly, there were issues during development, like finding funding was a little difficult. Also, Christine had another bout with going back into the hospital, and she struggled and again, triumphed. So there are a variety of things that really took quite a bit of time. But the work never stopped. So the script was continuous work to evolve into the place where It becomes as impactful as what Christine had intended for the book itself to be. And and so it wasn’t a bad thing, actually. It was a good thing for us to be able to take the proper time to allow the story to mature and also not only to become as personal as possible, but also to become a representational film about all women who are dealing with such an issue, unfortunately.
It’s interesting that you say that, and I’m wondering about the choice to make the protagonist of the film, someone who is not Christine Handy, but who is also Cristine Handy. The character’s name is Willow. She’s played by Tricia Helfer, who does a magnificent job. Could I have both of you talk to the process of collaboration in story development here?
Christine Handy: Well, you know, as Ziad had said, it’s taken years to mold the script. Because if you read my book, in it there’s two other major illnesses that I went through before breast cancer, which were important, I thought in the beginning for the film, because it’s this downward spiral, which at the onset of the breast cancer, it’s like, you’ve got to be kidding me. Like, it was just enough. I mean, I was I was distraught. I was in a total emotional paralysis, and it wasn’t just the diagnosis. It was these other things that had compounded. And so I worried that if we didn’t have those things, it would be like, Well, why is she so you know, suicidal, why is she so mentally distorted?
But the truth is, when Ziad really wrote the original script, that it kind of confused the story. And so Ziad gave it to several people that he trusted to read the script, and they all said to him, You know what? I think you need to cut certain things out, and this is one of them. And that was the right decision. As you saw with the film, it’s very clear, and it’s very organized, and the arcs are impressive the way they work with all of the characters that couldn’t have happened if we had kept the script from four years ago. It was almost like when I ended up in the hospital with breast implant illness and that those other pauses, they were meant for this film to stop. It had to be changed to get to where we are today. So I’m very grateful for that.
Ziad Hamzeh: So, you know, one of the interesting things as you live with a story, and live with a character. And in my case here, I had the incredible opportunity to get to know the main character, which iis Christine. So in developing that relationship between us and building on the sense of trust that I am going to do justice to the story. I absolutely committed to getting to know her, to getting to know the little details of what made her tick, things in which, you know, stories sometimes ignore because we go to the big thing, and that’s it, and everything is really driven by that. And in this case, what I wanted to find are the tiny elements that made the whole that made everything becomes three dimensional rather than flat on the screen.
And In the various research and development process, what I discovered is that this is really not only Christine’s story. Christine is the driving force because she is the one who’s struggling against the disease itself, but there are other people within her circle that had that much investment in Christine’s life. Thus their own struggle had to be absolutely planted within the pages and words of the script to do justice. It was not only to know Christine, but to know what happened in all the elements in Christine’s life that contributed to the making of who this woman is. So the time really allowed me to be able to investigate that thoroughly and then find the exact platform that we needed to stand upon and go from there.
It is a moving story, and I appreciate having had the opportunity to witness it unfold on screen. And I also respect the fact that it is a story that speaks to and for many other women who have had to suffer this same disease, and more young women are suffering it, it seems today, more so than ever. But I also just wanted to ask the two of you to comment on what I see is kind of an unusual working relationship.
Normally, Ziad, It would not be uncommon for you to have an executive producer hanging around the set commenting on what’s going on, but it probably would be unusual to have the subject of the film doing so. And for you, Christine, I expect that it’s unusual to see a version of yourself developing on screen in this way.
Christine Handy: Looking back, in many ways, although I was a subject, I had a marginalized perspective because these are actors playing these scenes. And so it can be confusing when you’re watching it, but there are a couple scenes that I couldn’t go to set for. And I won’t give it away to the people that haven’t seen the film, but if you recall, there’s a scene with a table. And that was a really traumatic scene for me. That was a true scene for me. But the whole six minutes in the film, that was a big portion of that season of my life. And so even though that was ten years ago, to actually witness it…
Now, every time I see it in the movie, I tend to get emotional, but I wasn’t able to be there on set. It was joyous to be in the situation that I was in to know that we were at the final stage of giving hope to people. We were actually getting this done. The funding was done. The characters were higher, the crew, the team, the strike was over, and of course, that was just joyous. But when reality set in, and I was onset every day and I was reliving these moments, some of these dark moments, we weren’t showing the best times of my life. We were showing the most traumatic. So there comes with that some courage that you have to sustain during that process.
But I wanted to be there because Tricia, as an example, she’s an extraordinary actor. I’m blown away by her performance. Every single person that’s seen this film has said the same thing. But she needed to know me. She needed to ask me questions. We became friends. We texted each other. We have a relationship because prior to the filming, she needed to know, well, why would you feel this way? How did you make this decision in your life? And how does this feel? And so it was important for me to be on set. And I had to kind of try to distance myself from the emotional bonding that sometimes I felt. But as you know from watching the film, I do carry a lot of courage. And so I ended up triumphing over that, but there were a couple of days where I couldn’t go to set.
Ziad Hamzeh: Well, it’s for me, it was incredibly valuable for Christine to constantly be on set to be the resource. The first-hand experience that she had will be able to be transitioned and transformed to these actors who really wanted to be able to do justice to the characters. And what was interesting, having her on set, actually, made the film tangible and real to these people. It wasn’t just an imagination. Somebody wanted to make some story or something. So having her on the set made everything so truthful, so real. And that added a tremendous amount of respect from the cast and crew. That this individual who actually exists, we can’t treat their story in any less value to anything else we sort of put tremendous respect and energy into. And they did.
So it was really the inspiration of having Christine’s story to be told started on the set because everybody was inspired by her strength, by her courage, by her ability to actually make things happen the way she intended to make them happen, allowed for a tremendous amount of dedication, respect, and commitment on behalf of everybody. I knew that every once in a while, that it would be difficult for her because of the incredible performance that Tricia was able to bring out. And I knew not to say, Okay, I need you to be here tomorrow because she needed to take a break. She needed to be able to breathe again, to re-energize her psyche, to have the strength to come back again and face all of these dark moments in her life. But she was fantastic. I loved having her there.
It sounds like the two of you really have had a marvelous working relationship collaborating on this film. And now you’ve reached the end of one stage of this process, and the film is complete. What is your hope for audiences? What do you want them to take away from Hello Beautiful?
Christine Handy: Well, you know, when I was diagnosed, you are bombarded with medical information. You can’t even hear half of it. And so what I did was I sought books. I saw—and I’m not talking about like self help books—I sought stories, right? We need to hear other people’s stories so that we don’t feel so alone. And so the movies that I saw to see troubled me. There are some really beautiful Hollywood films about breast cancer, and I love those films. But I wanted to show hope at the end of the film. I wanted to show somebody that could walk offset and was alive.
And so I thought, if I could get this movie made, then there would be no ceiling to how many people we could give hope to. Because I’m not a psychiatrist, but I think I think the ratio of one sad tragic story to negate that is ten hopeful stories. So we can have a hopeful movie about breast cancer, which, by the way, is so imperative right now in our world, not just the United States, because breast cancer is on the rise. And like you said, it’s not necessarily an older generation of people, it’s much younger. So if we can put this movie into the largest audiences, and they have the ability to see it, I know, for certain, that I’m being the hope facilitator that I’m trying to be.
Ziad Hamzeh: This is part of my entire philosophy to begin with. And so when Christine and I met and knew exactly what she had intended for the book and for the journey of her life, to be able to be transformational, inspirational to the people she meets, appealed greatly to me. And so when we set out to actually develop the story and think about the audience and think about the result and the outcome and who and how we needed it to become a story of love. And ultimately, to allow the message to be carried through within the folds of the love that existed on multitudes of levels, the love of a mother to the child, the love of a spouse to their own and on and on, the friends and all of these different relationships that all coalesced to become the foundation and the strength. That Christine had and wanted to be able to give everybody.
So we saw the challenges. We saw the dark times in her life as well as in theirs, but we also saw what it takes to be able to become 100% committed to the idea of allowing people to experience such positive transformation. And hopefully, that’s, you know, what we’ll come across in the film, as many people have already stated. But until we see it, you know, the out there in the big world, we’re hopeful that it is a positive message.
That is indeed a message that the film and its story and your story, Christine, conveys, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to seen it and to have talked with both of you today. Do we know where and when audiences will be able to see Hello Beautiful?
Ziad Hamzeh: Well, hopefully, it will be sometime around the late falls or early January. We’re still working on the details of how to make sure that this finds the proper home for it. And we’re taking our time. We’re not rushing to just put it on any platform because it’s not necessarily going to serve the story and its mission. We want people to benefit from this. We want people to be inspired by this. So we’re taking the time to be able to find the right home.
I’d just like to thank both of you for getting this out into the world, to you, Christine, for sharing your story, first with your book, and then with this film and Ziad for dedicating your time and your talent to this story. And I hope that in the future, it reaches the widest audience possible. So I’d like to thank you on behalf of Film Obsessive for speaking with both of us today and wish you and Hello Beautiful the very best of futures.
Christine Handy: Well, thank you so much for having us, and indeed, it has been a pleasure. Thank you.
