Happy Together is the film that made Chloé Zhao want to make films.
When Zhao began developing Hamnet with novelist Maggie O'Farrell, one of the first things they discovered: O'Farrell's favorite filmmaker is also Wong Kar-wai. Zhao described this to WNYC's New Yorker Radio Hour as a foundational creative bond.
That shared sensibility is in the film. Here are all the influences Zhao and her collaborators named.
Happy Together (1997, dir. Wong Kar-wai)
Zhao's own description: "The film that made me want to make films."
In AwardsWatch interviews, she cited "all these nonverbal language in Wong Kar-wai's films" as a direct influence on how Agnes communicates in Hamnet. The film is built on gesture and silence. Agnes's relationship with the forest, with Will, with grief: it operates in the emotional register of Happy Together, which is itself a film about estrangement and what's communicated without words.
O'Farrell confirmed (in her interview with The Credits/MPAA): "We both really love the films of Wong Kar-wai. Chungking Express is one of our favorite films."
Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes, told AP: "She belongs with, like, Visconti and Wong Kar-wai."
The Tree of Life (2011) + The New World (2005, dir. Terrence Malick)
Malick is one of Zhao's three filmmaking mentors. She told Far Out Magazine: "I feel I come from his lineage. It is very significant as a storyteller because you feel like you belong somewhere."
She used The Tree of Life as a structural counterpoint for Hamnet, not a model. Where Malick ascends toward the heavens, she wanted to go the other direction: "How deep can we go to descend into the underworld, to the realms of the deluge." The forest in Hamnet is its own kind of spiritual territory. Just pointed down, not up.
Malick watched Hamnet after it premiered. He emailed producer Nicolas Gonda. The email was made public in January 2026: "My heart was in my throat the whole time. I felt shaken to the core. It was searing, wondrous. What a magnificent piece of work."
Into the Abyss (2011, dir. Werner Herzog)
Zhao's second mentor after Malick is Herzog. She called him her "spiritual father."
What Herzog gave her: the concept of "ecstatic truth." The idea that cinema's responsibility is not literal factual accuracy but a higher emotional or spiritual truth. For Hamnet, a film about historical figures whose interior lives are entirely speculative, this was essential. Zhao's quote on the philosophy: "Finding the right moment to have logos and the right moment to have mystery, that is up to you, to do the balancing act."
She named Into the Abyss specifically in her personal top 10: "It shows you how much life can shock you and how magnificent it is to be alive in the most bittersweet way."
Wuthering Heights (2011, dir. Andrea Arnold)
Also in Zhao's top 10. Her observation: "She has a very strong sense of place. The way characters interact with this place says so much."
Arnold's approach to the Yorkshire moors in that film is precisely what Zhao does with the Welsh forest in Hamnet. Landscape as a character. Zhao's own language about the forest: "The forest is deeply feminine, and it makes you stay still. When you stay still, you have nowhere to go but into the underworld and into yourself, where all your shadows are."
Arnold also mixed non-professional actors with professionals and shot in available light. Zhao's practice on her earlier films was the same.
Ang Lee as Mentor and Model
Zhao's third mentor. She told Far Out: "Ang Lee's career has been very inspiring to me, how he's able to bring where he comes from to all the films that he makes."
Both Zhao and Lee are Chinese-born directors who have worked across genres in Hollywood while maintaining an East Asian sensibility toward interiority and emotional restraint. Scholars have drawn the parallel explicitly: the Taoist philosophy in Hamnet (qi as life force flowing through wind, breath, and Agnes's bond with the forest) mirrors the cross-cultural synthesis Lee achieved in The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Brokeback Mountain.
Spielberg in the Edit
This is not a film reference but it shaped the film. Steven Spielberg, one of five producers, told Zhao: "You need to get us to the Globe quicker."
Zhao cut about 15 minutes of mourning scenes from the second act. Spielberg also suggested adding the scene where Will asks Hamnet, "Will you be brave?" Both changes are in the film you see.
At the Golden Globes, Spielberg said: "There's really only one filmmaker on the face of the planet who could tell the story of Agnes and Will and the spirits of the earth and the forest."
The Bottom Line
Jessie Buckley is at 64% to win Best Actress. Zhao is nominated for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. Hamnet is the second-most-likely Best Picture winner at around 18% odds.
Track live odds at waitingforamacguffin.com.
See where Hamnet sits in the current Best Picture race at our Nominees Browser.