Tina Kakadelis
In 2014, Helen Macdonald wrote H Is for Hawk, a memoir about a year spent training a Goshawk after the unexpected death of their father, Alisdair Macdonald, a well-known photojournalist. It’s a story about the unexpected ways we process our grief and how our healing is never linear. Ten years after the release of the memoir, production began on a film adaptation. Directed and co-written by Philippa Lowthorpe with Emma Donoghue, the film version stars Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson as Helen and Helen’s father.
W.C. Fields is often quoted as saying, “Never work with children or animals.” There’s some debate about what exactly he meant by that. It could mean they often steal the scene or that they’re difficult to wrangle. Or both. The goshawk at the heart of H Is for Hawk is one of the most notoriously difficult birds to train. Perhaps Fields wasn’t referring to goshawks back in the 1940s, but their reputation certainly precedes them.
“When you lose someone, quite often your subconscious pushes you toward something very bad for you,” Macdonald begins. “In my case, it was a goshawk. They’re astonishing creatures that are super wild and have never been domesticated. I’ve been a falconer for many years, but I never wanted a goshawk because they were these legendarily highly strong, murderous, psychopathic creatures in the world of falconry.”
“When I realized the film was going to be made, I remember thinking, my gosh, they can’t use these goshawks, they’re too hard. Getting an actor to film with the goshawks will be like getting someone to learn to fly by putting them in an F-16. It’s not a beginner’s bird.”
“Turns out the film did it faultlessly, and Claire turned out to be an astonishing, intuitive falconer. So hooray!” laughs Helen Macdonald.
“Logistically it was very, very challenging to film this movie with all those hawks. We had to have different hawks to do different things. We had our action hawks, who our lovely hawk trainer had trained to fly with a little drone so we could get those amazing shots of the hawks skimming over the grass for real without CG,” explains Philippa Lowthorpe.
“Then we had an amazing wildlife cameraman who got the shots of the birds flying overhead. I was lying next to him in the forest and the bird was going like that over us,” recalls Lowthrope with a smile. “As Helen said, Claire learned to be a falconer before we started filming. She learned all the stages. Not just the hunting stages, but the gentle stage where the hawk first comes home and Claire takes off the hood.”
“The Hawks were trained to just be at the right stage for those pieces of filming, but everything was done around the hawks’ welfare. Nobody was allowed on set and the crew had to hide upstairs in the house. We all had to wear very dark clothes too, to have a sort of plumage that was regular. Nobody was allowed to have anything bright. The director of photography has the most amazing mane of blond hair. She had to hide it in a black cap. Everything was to help the hawks feel comfortable on set. We planned it in great detail for a long time before we ever went filming.”
In both Macdonald’s book and Lowthorpe’s film, one of the central themes is how nature and grief can feel both miniscule and all-encompassing. Composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch stated in an interview that one of the aspects of the score she found to be difficult was this same size-varying phenomenon. As storytellers, Helen Macdonald and Philippa Lowthorpe have a hand in the scale of the emotions in their work, but Macdonald argues that we aren’t as in charge of grief and nature as we would like to believe.
“Grief does it for you,” Macdonald says. “The thing about grief for me is that I trained a hawk partly because I knew I couldn’t tame or train grief. It was uncontrollable for me.”
“I remember I had a friend who once said they had a terrible, terrible, terrible hangover and all they could do was press the heel of their hand to their forehead, and concentrate on that,” Macdonald continues. “It was the only way they could get through. The hawk was kind of like that, you know? I kind of offshored my grief into this obliterating immersion into the hawk’s world. I let the hawk be my guide on that.”
“In terms of making a film and showing emotion, you have to pace it,” agrees Lowthorpe. “As a storyteller, you can’t be hitting the audience over the head with big emotion all the way through. How do you calibrate emotion and how do you get the flow of it?”
“When we were making the film, we would often sit in the cutting room and watch the whole film. Then the next week, we’d watch the whole film again and see how it moved us in different places while we were working on putting it together. Sometimes we would say, oh, that bit was so emotional and therefore the next time it wasn’t,” explains Lowthorpe. “It’s like a river on a journey going over rapids and then into still bits and then round beautiful corners. You have to take your storytelling of grief on a journey and go through different passages, like a piece of music.”
