“Claire Foy was a natural at falconry”: Philippa Lowthorpe on H is for Hawk

“I started off being a documentary maker and I’ve never quite managed to shake it off,” Philippa Lowthorpe says of her preference for recreating real events in her fiction film and television work. She last explored this on the big screen with the feature Misbehaviour (2020), about activists for women’s liberation disrupting the 1970 Miss World competition during its live broadcast, which coincided with the ceremony’s first ever Black winner. On the small screen, she’s perhaps best known for her BAFTA-winning work on BBC miniseries Three Girls (2017), a dramatisation of events surrounding the Rochdale child sex abuse ring. 
 
The success of the latter project is apparently what drew producers of H Is for Hawk to the English filmmaker, seeking a director for their adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s award-winning memoir from 2014, which told the writer’s story of the year they spent training a young Eurasian goshawk named Mabel as a coping mechanism for grief over the loss of their father, Alisdair Macdonald, a renowned photojournalist who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2007. The film, which Lowthorpe co-wrote with Emma Donoghue (author of Room and The Wonder), stars Claire Foy as Helen and Brendan Gleeson as Alisdair Macdonald. 

How far was Helen Macdonald, the author of the original book, involved with the production? 
Helen was involved from the start and was a fount of knowledge and advice, not only about the story and adaptation but also about training hawks. And Helen knew of Lloyd and Rose Buck, who became our hawk trainers, training Claire Foy and Sam [Spruell] – and me as the director, I had to learn it all as well. Lloyd and Rose are very famous experts in the natural history world. They have a menagerie of all kinds of birds, from a golden eagle to starlings to rooks, owls and goshawks. 

Was serious consideration ever given to using voiceover narration for adapting the memoir? 
There wasn’t. My [concern] was not the inner monologue because that wasn’t really what they wrote. They were writing very personally about this experience, but in an intensely visceral, visual way. So, with the way Helen describes a morning dew or the breath from the hawk or those sorts of things which you can’t film, my job was to try and capture some of that brilliant language in a film language. Their descriptions of going hunting are like watching an amazing screenplay unfold in front of you. 
 
There’s a brilliant quote in the book where they say, “I wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father and bring him home”, which is a beautiful philosophical and metaphorical statement. How do you capture that in a visual way? I feel that the [scenes of the] hunts do that. You see Helen racing along with passion and energy, feeling part of that joy of Mabel flying free, and yet coming to the full stop of the hunt with [the sight of] a dead creature. That was my way of trying to illustrate that kind of central thought; that they constantly went off hunting all the time in order to try and find their father – reaching for something. 
 
In doing cursory research on Alisdair Macdonald, I found so many press website posts about his memorial service from the time. He was clearly a beloved man in his respective field. Although this is a portrait of Helen above all, you do also give a great sense of this man even through small glimpses. 

That’s exactly what we were trying to do. Give a sense of him as the living, breathing, incredible, eccentric, passionate, funny person that he was. And it was so important to give that rounded feel of this man, to experience his loss as well. And also, to see through him through Helen’s point of view. 
 
When I first started working on it with Helen, I had no idea that [Alisdair] was such a famous photographer and had taken those well-known photographs like the one of Princess Diana and Charles kissing on the balcony. And that one of young David Bowie, that’s an iconic photograph. He had an amazing eye. I think that’s what gave Helen their desire to watch the world and be involved in natural history, which was very important for us to communicate in the film. That passion became Helen’s passion. 

From the opening credits sequence onwards, there’s this recurring visual motif where the watching of people or animals is highlighted, whether it’s via the onscreen cameras or Helen holding a rolled-up magazine to her eye to tease the goshawk. 

I really wanted to bring out the idea of being patient and watching carefully, and remembering what you see. There’s a line that Brendan [Gleeson] says as the dad, and that is a theme that runs all the way through: “If we only just could stop and watch carefully, we would learn stuff about nature. We’ll learn stuff about the world instead of being in such a rush to always get to the next thing.” 

What is directing goshawks like? 

All the hunting scenes were storyboarded and planned to the absolute nth degree. We filmed [those scenes] with a tiny unit. We had two sisters, Mabel One and Mabel Two. And then for [hunting scenes], we had Jess, who’s the tamer hawk who plays with Claire as Helen, and some hunting hawks who can fly [alongside] tiny drones. Those scenes were extremely technical and we had to piece them together like you would an action sequence. We had to wear dark clothes, nothing bright. We all had to wear the same thing every single time. One time I came with a different cap and Lloyd [the hawk trainer] told me off. You can’t change anything around goshawks. 
 
And what of directing Claire Foy in the hawk sequences? 

She was a natural at falconry. She had two weeks training with Lloyd and took to it like a duck to water. Lloyd gave her Lottie the hunting hawk to practice with straight away on day one, and he sent me WhatsApps of Claire [easily] going along with Lottie on her wrist. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had somebody who was scared of hawks. 
 
Maybe you’d ask them why they signed on to the film! 

Yes, exactly. For that scene when the hood comes off [the hawk] for the first time, we were filming in real time. I was hidden behind a chair, with Lloyd in one chair and I’m behind him with my little monitor, watching it and thinking, “Oh my God, this is absolute gold dust.” Claire’s ability to perform the tiniest nuance at the same time as being with a wild goshawk was just astonishing. I don’t think I’ll ever get to film anything like that again. It was an electric moment. 

► H is for Hawk is in UK cinemas now.