Max Richter had one guiding principle in his score for Hamnet.
“I wanted to work mostly with women’s voices,” he says. “This is really Agnes’ story. It’s a story about motherhood and that is so important in the film. It’s kind of everything.”
The film follows William Shakespeare, played by Paul Mescal, and Agnes Shakespeare, played by Jessie Buckley, as they mourn the death of their son, Hamnet, played by Jacobi Jupe. The film, directed by Chloé Zhao, serves as a dramatized version of the story behind Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Richter, who is nominated for an Oscar for his score, started composing as soon as he read the script, before he saw any footage from the film.
“It often happens to me that if I get a script that I’m going to connect to, then I will immediately start having ideas,” he says. “It’s almost like I fall in love with it immediately.”
He adds: “I wrote a lot of music from the script, not really for any specific scenes, but for color studies and world building. … I wanted to see what kind of things would illuminate the storytelling and speak to the psychology.”
Max Richter on the Ghostly Instruments of Hamnet
Women’s voices became the spine of the score. Richter avoided leaning into the familiar orchestral sounds that period pieces often use, and instead sourced Elizabethan instruments, like viols, hurdy-gurdies and nyckelharpas. He then reshaped those sounds electronically to become haunted versions of themselves.
“A big part of the movie is about how we manage the unknown,” Richter says. “I didn’t want the score to be legible in an obvious way. Now, Hamnet is also a story about a ghost, right? So I wanted to have like the ghosts of these instruments.”
That perspective also shaped how Richter approached key sequences. Rather than syncing to plot beats, he composed emotional atmospheres that Zhao and her team could weave through the edit. Because he began from the script, his music wasn’t reacting to images; it was growing alongside the film.
“I like the idea that the sound world feels like it’s been weathered,” he says. “Like it’s carrying history in it.”
That approach aligns with Zhao’s filmmaking style, which favors natural light, open space and performance over spectacle.
“Chloé has this extraordinary sensitivity,” he says. “There’s so much trust in the way she works. That gave me the confidence to be very minimal.”
The result is what the composer hopes feels abstract, organic and a little bit weird, with an overall sound that compliments the film’s central theme of grief without overwhelming it.
“I wanted to do the minimum possible. Most of my composing process is taking stuff away,” Richter says. “One of the great dangers of music is it could be dangerous to do anything that points you in any particular direction emotionally.”
The influential composer, who also has nine solo albums, cites abstract painter Mark Rothko: “Often the silence is better. He says he loves silence because silence is so accurate.”
In a film about a child’s death and a mother’s grief, Richter took that idea seriously.
“There are moments in the film where the absence of music felt like the most truthful thing,” he says. “You have to trust the performances. You have to trust the space. Music is incredibly powerful. It can override what you’re seeing. So the responsibility is to not overstep.”
Main image: Max Richter, photographed by Rory Van Millingen. Focus Features.