The migration of H is for Hawk from page to screen took its own good time. Helen Macdonald’s 2012 memoir, about training a bird named Mabel as a way of coping with the sudden death of their father five years earlier and struggles in an academic career at Cambridge University, had its movie option snapped up shortly after publication. That was before the book became a bestseller and winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and 2015 Costa Book Award for Biography.
But the challenge in making a film about how a real, high-achieving person dealt with grief and depression by taking up falconry is that while you can get an actor to portray the mental turmoil, the bird bit requires an actual bird. Or two. Ones with talons, beaks, feathers and mixed feelings about having humans nearby. And while you can train a goshawk as a bird of prey, you can’t teach it to act.
“It’s like dealing with leopards,” Macdonald, who uses they/them pronouns, tells the Listener from Maine, where they are staying with friends. Oh, and the birds moult in summer, meaning the film could only be shot in winter.
But under Philippa Lowthorpe, whose directing career has gone from documentaries to high-end BBC dramas, mostly about true-life stories, as well as episodes of The Crown, H is for Hawk finally took flight. Playing Macdonald is Claire Foy – The Crown’s first Elizabeth II.
The author, who was happy to leave the screenplay to Lowthorpe and Irish writer Emma Donoghue, was involved in the film as an adviser.
“I said I’m not a screenwriter, but I did want to make sure the falconry was done right, and I wanted the hawks to be happy.”
That meant some strange days of déjà vu observing Foy.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I’m being played by the Queen.’ I thought that was funny and delightful, and I expected her to come and meet me before filming, but it turns out there’s an awful lot of me on the internet – interviews and documentaries and stuff. So she watched those and she managed to get me so terrifyingly accurately. She finally did Zoom me to ask a few questions before starting filming.
On set it was like time travel. I was watching myself. It’s extremely weird.
Helen Macdonald
“There was this one moment I went to the set and I watched her walk through my college cloisters, carrying this goshawk, wearing the clothes that I was wearing back then, even down to a little painted bit of goshawk poop on her trousers, and honestly, I felt like a ghost. I had to put my hand out to grab the wall that I was standing near because it was like time travel. I was watching myself. It’s extremely weird and an astonishing testament to acting.”
The film cast Brendan Gleeson as Macdonald’s father, Alisdair Macdonald, in his day a legendary Fleet Street photographer for the Daily Mirror. “My dad was one of the softest, gentlest, kindest people I’ve ever met, but when he had a camera and he wanted a picture, he was a menace.
“He was as obsessive and passionate about photography as I ever was with falconry. I’ve heard this film rather sweetly described as a tale of family neurodiversity, which I think is fair, to be honest. I think both of us have got quite spicy brains.
“Dad and I used to have this bonding thing where we kind of swapped facts competitively, and that never ended. No matter how ‘educated’ I got, he would still know more than me. He was a voracious reader and an autodidact, and he always knew more than me; it was just delightful.
I just thought it was the most wonderful expression of love by adult daughters for their dads, and it’s a very rare thing.
Philippa Lowthorpe
“Brendan’s performance is astonishing to me, because he’s not physically very much like my father, but Brendan absolutely captured that weirdly compelling combination of quite unreconstructed old-school masculinity that is married to a huge heart. It’s perfect, their relationship on screen ‒ him and Claire.”
The story of Macdonald’s grief for her late father resonated with Lowthorpe.
“My dad had died not long before this project came to me,” she tells the Listener in a separate interview.
“When I read Helen’s memoir, I just thought it was the most wonderful expression of love by adult daughters for their dads, and it’s a very rare thing. You don’t really get that very much; there are lots of father-and-sons works, aren’t there? I loved her writing, and the honesty with which she described her decline was so moving.”
Foy had just two weeks of falconry training but proved a natural. So did the “Mabels” – goshawks of various temperaments ranging from those wary of human contact to those used to it, and those used for flying and hunting scenes. (“They all look like very different birds to me, but apparently most people can’t tell one from the other,” says Macdonald.) But in the indoor domestic scenes involving Foy with that day’s goshawk, it made for some interesting days filming. Macdonald imagines it was something like shooting a love scene between humans on a closed set.
“No one was allowed in. There was a very small crew. People had to wear dull-coloured clothing and if you had bright hair, you had to wear a hat. People were hiding behind furniture to stop these hawks from being nervous.”
Lowthorpe remembers the day that approach paid off, when they attempted to replicate a scene from the book in which Helen is playing a game of catch with Mabel, using a ball of paper. “Because Claire was so calm and the crew by then were so used to goshawks, there was a very calm atmosphere in the room. Claire started throwing those balls and then [Mabel] started throwing them back. We could not believe it. I just thought, ‘God, that is gold dust.’ Afterwards, we were just all so thrilled and jumping around the kitchen with joy at getting this amazing footage.”
When watching H is for Hawk, it’s hard not to think about Kes, the classic 1969 British movie about falconry that was an early film by director Ken Loach. They are birds of a different feather – Kes was based on a novel about Yorkshire working-class lad Billy and his kestrel.
But the films are related – or at least the people who made them are. Lowthorpe is Loach’s daughter-in-law.
“He was particularly interested in me making H is for Hawk … he wanted to see photographs of Claire with the goshawks, and he was amazed at how big goshawks are, because kestrels are tiny little things.
“I love [Kes] and it’s a very important film in the British canon. And it really has stood the test of time. It’s made with such heart and such humour and humanity – the three h’s.”
Macdonald: “There was a lot of worry in the falconry community that the film would produce what’s called ‘the Kes effect’. When the film Kes came out, there was a terrible problem with young people going out and taking kestrels from their nests to try to train them, and obviously welfare problems happened. Falconers back then were incredibly secretive and protective of what they did. They saw it as a kind of calling and it was very class-based, of course, because they were all quite posh people: ‘we don’t want these commoners.’
“I was worried the book would do that, and the film, too, but it turns out that in the book, at least, I made falconry look so miserable and difficult, no-one except a few people decided that falconry was their vocation. I have met a few people who read that book, and suddenly, something snapped into place … that was spurred by reading that book, and I’m really honoured by that. But not very many, thank goodness.”
H is for Hawk is in cinemas from July 30.