‘H for Hawk’ – LitFest screening at The Parade Cinema with question and answers to author Helen Macdonald

For fans of international bestseller and award winning novel H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, The Parade was the place to be on Friday night. To celebrate the release of its movie adaptation last month, the author gave a captivating and emotional interview after the screening, in conjunction with LitFest, which included Helen’s thoughts on a cast including Claire Foy, Brendan Gleeson and Lindsay Duncan playing her family as well as how the breathtaking footage of hunting goshawks was filmed.

But firstly, she said the last time she was in the Parade was before it had become a cinema, and she’d bought a “moth eaten taxidermic buzzard”. But that’s not where her connection to the area ends. Helen spent a lot of time at the Hawk Conservancy at Weyhill in her youth, she revealed, “Learning my falconry and being a bratty 13-year-old.” She flew hawks with falconer friends on Salisbury Plain, and as a family, they’d have tea in Polly’s when they were in Marlborough. “When I got my first job,” Helen recalled, “I bought my parents coffee there and dad was so delighted, he framed the receipt and put it on his wall!”

It’s dealing with the sudden death of her dad, Daily Mirror photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald, in 2007 that the book and film is focused on. While Helen was a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge at the time, she decided to buy and train a Eurasian goshawk to help process her debilitating grief. The novel’s success was so bewildering, Helen says she “didn’t really know what was going on” at the point she was contacted about making a movie adaptation. Game of Thrones’ Lena Heady called about wanting to play her – instead she became executive producer and it was Claire Foy who was cast. Claire’s interpretation of Helen was so realistic, she said, it was like watching herself – not least because she had a natural knack for falconry.

“I did a BBC documentary about training hawks, which Claire watched and she listened to the audiobooks and watched my interviews to get my voice. I had no communication with her until about a week before the filming started saying, ‘Claire wants to speak to you’, so we had a Zoom and after about 30 seconds, I thought, ‘She’s just like me!’ And then I realised she was just finessing me. She got me down so well – even the fact I’ve got one leg longer than the other, so I have a bit of a weird walk. So when I went to watch the filming, I felt like I was watching myself. I had to grab the wall and make sure it was real. It was very weird.

“But also what astonished me was that it wasn’t so much just even her being me, it was the space between her and the hawk, which is quite a magical. I was nervous because she’d said, she didn’t get on with the horses filming The Crown but it turns out that she’s a natural falconer. As an actor she can pick up on tiny nonverbal cues so she became very good at reading hawks very quickly. And now she’s a massive goshawk fan.”

Helen explained why she wasn’t keen to write the screenplay of her book but what she did want to make sure was that they “didn’t mess up the falconry” from seeing goshawks badly handled in The Vikings TV series as a child. “This poor goshawk was terrified, twittering and screaming, which completely traumatised me as a kid. And it couldn’t be a Harris Hawk, which is the easy hawk in Hamnet. Goshawks are known as the murderous psychopathic killers of the bird world. They used about five goshawks with my film, for different scenes.”

The aforementioned hunting scenes were created with a drone, training the goshawks to fly alongside them. “It’s the closest I’ve ever seen on film to how it feels when you’re flying a hawk. Like your heart is somehow with the bird flying.” The wintry English countryside, too, looks stunning. “I think they’re produced a love letter to the English landscape,” she said.

While Claire played Helen’s grief much quieter than the “loud, shouty, crying person” Helen says she was, all the photographs of her dad’s are authentic, including the ones of Helen as a child. Brendan was nervous of playing Helen’s father and getting him right but it was because it was a rare opportunity for him to play a positive father figure that was such an appeal to him. “I saw the concern on his face and my heart just crumpled,” reveals Helen. “I just gave him a big hug and said, ‘Hello film dad’. He’s a lovely, lovely man. And so is Claire. Everyone in this film is just incredibly annoyingly lovely.”

Helen, too was in exceptionally engaging form. The film may depict her going through the most challenging period of her life, but it’s clear that the novel and subsequent movie has given her life an exciting and positive new focus and direction. The fact the Parade was packed and the many questions from the audience (including one from John Suchet) only proves how so many have connected with it. “It’s a book for anyone that’s ever been through a period of grief, loss, mourning or some other kind of darkness,” muses Helen, “which is very hard to talk about person to person. It’s easier if there’s a book. But it’s not really a book about ‘I was sad and then I got a hawk and I was happy’. That would have been a much shorter book! This was a book about falling off the world and learning some really big things about life and death.” Remember to take tissues when you go to see it.