Łukasz Żal (photo by Krzysztof Wesołowski)

A tutor and a free spirit fall in love in sixteenth-century Stratford, but then Will (Paul Mescal) leaves Agnes (Jesse Buckley) for London while she raises their three children. Tragedy threatens to split them apart until Agnes sees her husband’s latest play, Hamlet.
Based on the best-selling novel by Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet has been earning praise since it screened at Telluride in August. Chloé Zhao’s direction, and performances by leads Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, have drawn particular attention. But Hamnet has a distinctive atmosphere that sets it apart from many of this year’s releases. That look and feel is largely due to cinematographer Łukasz Żal. Known for collaborations with Paweł Pawlikowski on Ida and Cold War, Żal has also worked with filmmakers like Charlie Kaufman and Jonathan Glazer. He approaches each shot with meticulous care, building layers into his frames so they convey emotion as much as narrative.
Żal introduced Hamnet at this year’s EnergaCAMERIMAGE, where it screened in the Main Competition. Before the closing ceremonies we spoke at his hotel.
Filmmaker: How did you connect with Chloé Zhao?
Żal: We met in London, where she told me about the book. There was no script yet. She explained what was important to her in the story, how she saw it, what she was looking for. We talked a lot about existential and philosophical questions on nature and the cycle of life: things being born and dying, femininity and masculinity, love and the healing power of art. We didn’t talk much about images back then, except for one key idea that we wanted to tell the film mostly through tableaux. We were like two people who had known each other a long time, seeing the world similarly.
Filmmaker: The world you depict looks so realistic. How much was built?
Żal: Almost everything—the Henley House where they lived, the Globe theater, their attic room. We scouted many locations and took lots of pictures. Production designer Fiona Crombie and her team did incredible work. With such precision and tenderness, they incorporated the most interesting things from our scouting and used them to create beautiful sets. It’s hard to invent things like the weird steps we found on location that led nowhere, so finding these real details was essential. Before the set was built, we used a 3D program to test camera positions. We created a catalog of frames and shots the house offered us and took these ideas to Chloé. We did chalk layouts with markers to determine distances, then created primitive mockups to rehearse scenes. We wanted to make sure the house would work before shooting. We had a day for camera tests with Jesse, Paul and the kids—like a family photo. I was trying find a look for this house, to understand it before shooting, get at least one benchmark image with the cast in costume and lighting.

Filmmaker: There’s a striking shot of Will and Agnes in the attic: they’re at the bottom of the frame, lit by a candle, surrounded by deep black. How did that come about?
Żal: During prep, I create pitch decks to structure my ideas and show what I want to achieve. I’m trying to anticipate as much as I can before shooting. Here I wanted that feeling of darkness pressing down on them. But on set, the process becomes very intuitive. Actors make choices about where to stand, how to behave. The key work happens in rehearsals: finding the frame, but also how the camera should move and what rhythm the scene needs. There’s a very small window between rehearsals and shooting where we make all our decisions about staging and camera work. I need to be completely present and focused, like a cat about to jump. I’m proposing images to Chloé based on everything from prep, everything we’ve rehearsed. We usually agree, but sometimes what initially seemed right doesn’t actually work. It’s the moment I need to be the sharpest—reading the scene, the actors, the energy in the room, and translating all of it into concrete staging and camera choices.
Filmmaker: That sounds demanding.
Żal: It’s exhausting because you can’t push yourself. Say it’s the sixth day of shooting, a Saturday, and you’ve already been working for half a year on the film. If you suddenly invent something, you get too excited or you’ll burn out. This happens multiple times a day depending on how many setups we do. Between them, I’m working with the crew but also need to stay focused and ready. I reference the dozens of photos from rehearsals, but I stay open. We test camera positions, see what works, adjust. The actual decision only locks in right before we shoot.
Filmmaker: Did you use natural light as much as possible?
Żal: We wanted to be natural, simple and honest—not flashy. That comes from the core of the film, but it’s always been my approach. How can you not be naturalistic in lighting this kind of film? I mean, I could light it differently, but I don’t believe that would work. Then it looks like a film.
Filmmaker: You’re still guessing how it looked in the seventeenth century.

Żal: I know it’s not always historically accurate, but I think it’s real and honest. It’s believable. During Q&As, I heard complaints that actors use the word “okay” or that Will had the wrong haircut. But our priority was to capture a presence, some truth between people. We built a house, we went there with camera and cast and worked almost like a documentary—searching for what felt real. You put all these pieces together, and suddenly everything clicks. The light, the performance, the space all come together into something whole, and a moment of life appears. Maybe these moments never existed in the past. Maybe there never was this reality. But that’s filmmaking—building artificial worlds where real truth can happen.
Filmmaker: Back to the attic shot, how dark was Chloé Zhao willing to go?
Żal: We agreed that I could make things darker and darker, because when it’s night it should be dark. You know the actors, you know their faces. What you need to see are the eyes. If somebody is going through something important or dramatic, I will show eyes. But I don’t want conventional lighting where actors are evenly lit. I don’t accept it, it’s not me. The light has to emerge from the scene itself—from the objects, the mood, the situation.
Filmmaker: The scenes of Hamnet in the afterlife, where do those images come from?
Żal: Almost by accident. I remember our still photographer, Agata Grzybowska, showed me this photograph she’d taken from backstage—the reverse side of the painted backdrop. The moment I saw it, I knew we’d found something. There was this quality to it. That’s the beauty of filmmaking—the best ideas often come from the entire crew, not just me alone in a room somewhere.
Filmmaker: The first time we see the afterlife, Hamnet disappears into darkness.
Żal: Exactly. What you’re seeing is literally the back of that stage canvas, the unpainted side. All that texture and void. It felt like the perfect metaphor: the hidden side of performance, of life itself. What Agata captured accidentally became the key to visualizing that threshold between worlds.

Filmmaker: So you knew you were going to tie the afterlife to the portal on the stage?
Żal: The idea was that the stage contains things Will experienced throughout his life. “The world’s a stage,” quite literally. And the Globe itself is like the interior of that tree where we first encounter Agnes. A temple built from dead trees, a sacred space made from what once lived.
Filmmaker: That’s what Will does. Everything he sees, he turns into something else, a story, a sonnet, a play. He’s removed from people.
Żal: There’s a huge loneliness in that—never fully understood, fighting with demons inside him. Writing was his only way of expressing feelings, of expressing himself. He felt everything so deeply, but he couldn’t handle those emotions directly. Only through work.
Filmmaker: The book has a narrator. Does that affect how you work?
Żal: When I read the book the first time, I’m wondering “How am I going to transfer this to film?” It felt like an enormous challenge. The narrator moves fluidly—one moment observing someone from a distance, the next diving inside their head, then moving through time. The perspective is constantly changing. So, I started thinking about those points-of-view as different cameras existing within the story. One camera is immersed in the present moment—when they look at each other, fall in love, argue. For those scenes, we stayed close and handheld, intimate. Then there’s an all-knowing camera, almost like CCTV in the corner of a room. God’s point of view—or maybe death’s. A ghost camera, drifting and observing, scanning the scene without judgment. Then there’s the camera that knows everything, knows the ending. Also a camera of tableaux that creates a mosaic of still images. Like when I’m talking with you now and want to say something wise but I’m exhausted, I could suddenly jump to the corner of the room and watch myself: a very imperfect man trying to sound intelligent and witty. That’s what I wanted to achieve in this film, jumping to all these points of view where you still sense, throughout the story, the presence of death. You feel that things which are given can be taken away. Everything is a cycle, things are born and die. In a certain way it’s kind of beautiful.
Filmmaker: Like the forest, which is half-dead.

Żal: But still beautiful. We went to Lydney Park in Gloucestershire for four days on a location scout. It was me, Chloé, focus puller Rami Bartholdy and location manager Lindsey Powell. We had a bunch of lenses and explored how to shoot the forest. Everything was like a painting. Leaves, grass, trees, branches—all were so rich in detail, with patterns, textures, veins. It was early spring, so things were blooming, but you could still see death there. We found these holes, this spiral, which we would use as a portal, a black hole. A void.
Filmmaker: What can you say about Paweł Pawlikowski’s film 1949?
Żal: I can’t really talk about it, especially what it’s about. We finished it a few weeks ago. A 38-day shoot. I saw an edit. It’s a soft lock now. Black-and-white. Thomas Mann and his daughter, travelling from West to East Germany. It covers a short stretch of time. It’s a period film with many locations. We shot it in Poland and Germany.
Filmmaker: Has it become easier for you to work in black-and-white?
Żal: It’s never easy. I have this disorder where I always try to do something different. Sometimes it’s like a curse. So if it’s your third B&W film, your main anxiety is not to make it the same way.
Filmmaker: Is it a big-scale movie?
Żal: It’s small and big. Small in scope, but as you probably have noticed, we are always using a small scale to talk about bigger things. With Paweł, there’s a main story, a historical story. But underneath, it’s always a meditation about life, you know?