Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544392
is for Hawk is a new feature from Roadside Attractions starring Claire Foy as Helen, a Cambridge pro- fessor 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 sadness, Helen decides to focus her energy on training a wild goshawk named Mabel. As she teaches Mabel to hunt and fly free, how- ever, 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, 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 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 off-set. So it was a closed set for the hawks. And then when we did the hunting scenes, we were just this tiny little crew." You dealt with multiple settings. Were you able to group the shots together? "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 bril- liant. They'd done all their falconry train- ing 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? "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." Charlotte Bruus Christensen, ASC, was your DP. 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 some lovely portraits. "Charlotte and I also were very in- spired 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. It's set in 2007, and a lot of it is about mem- ory. 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. We really want- ed 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." Was editor, Nico Leunen, ACE, working close to production and seeing dailies as it was being shot? "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, H IS FOR HAWK BY MARC LOFTUS PHILIPPA LOWTHORPE DIRECTS CLAIRE FOY IN A NEW FILM ABOUT OVERCOMING LOSS H FILMMAKING Director Philippa Lowthorpe The feature was shot in 2024.