H is for Hawk is a new feature from Roadside Attractions starring Claire Foy as Helen, a Cambridge professor who suddenly loses her father (Brendan Gleeson), causing her to fall back into the memories of their time bird watching and exploring the natural world.
To distract her from her grief, Helen decides to focus her energy on training a wild goshawk named Mabel. As she teaches Mabel to hunt and fly free, however, Helen neglects her own life, drawing concerns from her friends and family.
Based on “H is for Hawk” by Helen Macdonald, the film was directed by Philippa Lowthorpe (pictured), who shares writing credit with Emma Donoghue. Lowthorpe recently sat down with Post to discuss the production and post, as well as the film's challenges.
Philippa, tell us about the shoot.
“Some of it was filmed in Cambridge. Some of it was filmed near Bristol, where the hawks live. And some of it was in filmed in Wales. The whole shoot was about six to seven weeks. And then after that, we had a small ‘hawk unit,’ which was a very stripped-down crew - just me, the wildlife cameraman, the DOP for a little bit, and the hawk trainer and the hawks. Because they're so delicate, and you have to be so careful, when we filmed on set, everybody had to disappear. All the crew had to run off and be upstairs and be offset. So it was a closed set for the hawks. And then when we did the hunting scenes, we were just this tiny little crew.”
There are a number of settings. You have the outdoor scenes with the hawk, as well as Helen’s home and the university. Did you group the shots together for the shoot?
“What I always try and do - which I couldn't do so much on this one - was to film in some kind of order. So for Claire, when we filmed in Helen's house - which we had a really big block of that at the end of the shoot, because it was the wintertime - it was better for us to do those interior scenes right at the end so we could light them, because by then it was December. So we filmed them in order.
“We had to film in Cambridge first, which was a quite difficult thing to do. Our very first bit of filming was the scene when they're flying Mabel in Jesus College. That was our very first shot. It was silly to do that shot first, but we had to. We had to group our Cambridge shots together. But Claire and Denise Gough, who plays Christina, were so brilliant. They'd done all their falconry training by then, so it actually went very well. But we had to be very nimble and light on our feet because it was a low budget production. We had to be super efficient to get everything.”
Does this go back to 2024 for the production, and post production in 2025?
“Yes. We filmed at the end of 2024, sort of from September, pre-production, and then into the filming. And then we edited it in 2025. We edited all the material and did a little bit more hawk unit in the January after Christmas. We had some more shots to get.”
Tell us about working with director of photography Charlotte Bruus Christensen, ASC? There are so many extreme close ups of Helen’s face. Was that all captured in-camera?
“Everything was in-camera. We wanted to really capture the interiority of Helen and her subjective point of view, so we really wanted the camera to be with her as much as possible. Sometimes standing back, but really be with her to give us a sense that we are with Helen, experiencing Mabel. That's why we used a lot of those close-ups. And then then some lovely portraits. Charlotte and I also were very inspired by Tarkovsky's Polaroids…They're absolutely beautiful! They have a kind of raw beauty, and they feel like fragments of memory if you look at them. We really wanted to give the film this feel because it's not set in the present, but it's in the very distant past. It's set in 2007, and a lot of it is about memory. It's remembering 2007, and also remembering other times with her dad. This feeling of sort of trying to reach for memory was something that we really wanted to use. We used very soft colors, and we used 1.66. The ratio is different because we had to give room for the bird. The bird is sort of tall and a big, wide screen would have kept chopping her tail off all the time, so we'd chose this sort of slightly more square ratio.”
Do you recall what camera you were using?
“It's Arri 35. Digital. So with our digital, we really wanted it to have a softness and have a real celluloid look. Then we spent a lot of time testing our lenses, and Primo lenses are the ones we used in the end.”
What did you do to prepare for the shoot?
“We developed some really interesting LUTs before we went filming, so that when we were shooting, we could see the colors - the softness, the soft blacks - and to make sure that that was all happening in-camera. It gives a very sort of soft, moody and atmospheric feel to the film.”
The film gives the impression of using a lot of natural light?
“Well, we try to make it as natural as possible, but we had to use lights. We had an amazing gaffer (John Higgins), who works a lot with Roger Deakins, and had worked with Charlotte too. He is an incredibly experienced gaffer/lighting person, and helped us achieve this very naturalistic (look).”
How about your editor, Nico Leunen, ACE? Was he working close to production and seeing dailies as it was being shot, or was it only after production had wrapped that he start working on editorial?
“Nico likes to come very fresh to the material after the shoot, so he was available to me all the way through the shoot to discuss anything I wanted to, but our assistant editor (Hayley Wiliams) assembled all the film as I shot. And then Nico started afresh right at the beginning of the edit. And that's how he likes to do it. He's a brilliant editor. He's worked with Plan B before. He edited Ad Astra and
Beautiful Boy.
“He's often asked to come in and look at films which may have gone a bit awry, so he's developed this technique of wanting to look fresh at something instead of working on the assemblies while you're shooting. And it suits him, and it was fine by me too. When we sat down to watch it together, it was the first time he'd seen the assembly that Hayley made. And obviously the first I'd seen the whole assembly put together in a very long, long, long, loose, baggy, baggy assembly.”
Is that what it is? A very loose edit?
“Nothing's cut. It's just assembled. It's literally an assembly
How does that evolve?
“Nico and I - then we start working on it together, and I absolutely loved working with Nico. He's a wonderful, wonderful editor. In our discussions before we got into the edit, we knew that the script was just like a blueprint, and that we would be able to mess around with some of the positions of where the memories came. So in our script we placed them, but actually, we always knew that in the edit we might play with them a bit more, or they might end up somewhere completely different from where they were in the script. And that's so exciting when you're editing. It feels more like editing a documentary in a way than it does editing a drama.”
Where was the edit taking place?
“I live in Bristol in the UK, so he came over to Bristol. I was very lucky that he came over to Bristol and edited in a lovely facilities house in Bristol called Films at 59. We edited there, and the assistant was in a room next door. What I loved about Nico's editing is, he has a very poetic eye. When we first sat down to watch it, I said, ‘I think this film should be a poem and not a novel.’ That was my big note to him. You don't have to be too literal. For example, when Helen comes into the chamber of the chapel of rest, and sees her dad for the first time, there's a memory. It's like a little whirlpool of memory. And that wasn't written like that in the script. It was much more, ‘Here's a scene. Here is a scene. And here's another scene.’ But the way Nico edited it, it's like this braiding. It's a ribbon of memories sort of plaited together, and it's really beautiful and so evocative.”
It’s nice that the footage allowed for this flexibility.
“Yeah, because we decided before that some of these things could go anywhere. So I knew that they would maybe be used in different ways. And so did Charlotte, so we tried to make these things feel like little snatches of time.”
What were the visual effects needs and was the hawk an effect or stock photography? I see Gorilla VFX and Mystic Sangai Studio made contributions?
“I don't think there is any stock photography in there. It was all real! We did everything for real. The hawks at the beginning. There is no footage of those. In the script, it said, ‘The hawks are doing their display flight.’ There is no footage of goshawk doing a displayed flight that we could have used. We had to put our feelers out. We found a person who'd been reporting the sightings of hawks doing their display flight in March. This is when we were editing. and our cameraman (Mark Payne-Gill) jumped in his car, went down to the secret location, filmed these amazing, amazing shots on a very, very long lens. We would have maybe used stock footage, but there was none.
“The pheasants flying - they're all real. The rabbits - Mark filmed them and then the VFX people did put them into the hunt sequences because, obviously, we couldn't do that to a real rabbit. And when the hawk pursues the lure, which is like a little yellow pillow on the end of a rope, the VFX people had to remove the lure and the string and all of that, and then put in the footage of the rabbit. So those things are constructed, but the hawk is really flying like that, and the rabbit is really running. None of the hawk stuff is CGI, and we're very proud of ourselves. Now there's one CGI pheasant. It's a top shot and it's where the hawk nearly gets the pheasants. That's the one CGI peasant.”
What was the time period for post production?
“We had about six months all together, I think, and the VFX people started working with us quite early, just to get the feel of it. They also had to do boring things, like remove the odd light that got in the way. Boring, old clean-up. But we tried to use as little VFX as we possibly could. What I think Gorilla did brilliantly was, it's so subtle what they've done. They've maintained the real feel.”
Was the work with a live hawk the most challenging aspect of this project?
“We had to plan all the filming with the hawks like a military operation. There wasn't much unpredictability, because by then we'd learned so much about how to do it. The previous year I'd done loads and loads of tests, filming with (hawk handler) Lloyd (Buck), so we got quite a good idea with our fantastic drone cameraman men and Mark Payne-Gill, who's a wildlife photographer, and how to an earth we were going to do it. We put so many months and months into the planning because we knew we were quite a low-budget outfit and we had to get the shoot done quite fast, so there was nothing really left to be unpredictable apart from the lovely natural things that happened with the hawk.”
What's next for you?
“I'm doing a little bit of writing now, but I had another big television project at the same time called Prisoner 951, which was a co-thing between BBC and Fremantle. I filmed that. Then I filmed the whole of
Hawk and edited the whole of
Hawk. Then they went back and finished that other project.”