Danish director and writer Elvira Lind’s “King Hamlet” may, on the surface, be about her then-boyfriend-now-husband Oscar Isaac’s preparation to play Shakespeare’s most famous character in Sam Gold’s 2017 theater adaptation. But one would be wrong to frame the film as process-oriented, with Lind much more interested in weaving a precious, intimate look at the relationship between two partners — who just happen to be creatives — anchoring each other through an almost overwhelmingly intense patch of life.
The doc, which premiered in Telluride late last year, arrived in Lind’s home country of Denmark for its international premiere at CPH:DOX, Copenhagen’s documentary festival, this week. When she opens the door of her apartment in the Danish capital to Variety, her priority is to finish buttering small slices of toast for her two little boys, one of whom was growing in her womb while she filmed the documentary. Screening the project alongside her now sharply attentive 9-year-old feels “a little surreal,” says the filmmaker.
“It’s the ephemeral nature of it all,” adds Isaac. “As soon as it’s happening, it’s already over. I felt this impact a lot yesterday.” The actor says young Gene, who attended the film’s CPH:DOX premiere alongside Lind’s friends and family, was “smiling the whole time.” “He would look up at me and give me a kiss when I was kissing him as a baby [on the screen]. He just had a great time being there. He felt really proud. It’s crazy that this exists, right?”
In a 2022 essay for TalkHouse, Lind describes feeling nauseous while capturing footage of Isaac’s early preparations to play the Prince of Denmark in New York’s Public Theater. The positive pregnancy test came almost at the same time as the actor’s mother was diagnosed with an aggressive terminal illness. The intensity of this dance between tragedy and euphoria took over their lives both on and off the stage and instigated in the director a desire to capture how they “approached the world” through it all.
In one of the film’s most poignant moments, the two organize a last-minute wedding ceremony on a rooftop at sunset, attended only by the couple, three friends and their dog. In another, Isaac returns home from saying goodbye to his mother in Florida to lie quietly by Lind on their bed, his hand gently resting atop her distended belly.
Elvira Lind and Oscar Isaac
George Chinsee for Variety
“We filmed a lot, and it was very personal, so it really did need that lens of being able to look back at something that had taken time to settle. It was such a raw experience and a lot of things happened that felt really overwhelming, both because it was beautiful and sad,” says Lind, to which Isaac replies: “I think that if Elvira had tried to put it together right away, there wouldn’t have been perspective at all, you know? The biggest character in the film for me is her. This is her life. It was not as if she was coming in to film these people doing this thing. Being able to have some judicious perspective to not be so sentimentally attached to certain things has been good.”
One of the great triumphs of Lind’s moving documentary is how quickly and effectively it brushes away at any cynical suspicion around her motivations in allowing viewers into some of the most private moments of her shared life with Isaac. As we navigate a media landscape increasingly saturated by celebrity docs, audiences have grown weary of how films sold as special insights into the lives of the famous are oftentimes mere prestige promotion, carefully and meticulously packaged to either solidify an already pristine public persona or facilitate a much-needed redemption.
“King Hamlet” is neither, with the Danish director rooting her capturing of a piece of life in specific moments of complicity. For a few seconds, it’s almost easy to forget we are watching the same leading man behind some of the greatest hits of the last decade, like Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” and Guillermo del Toro’s multiple Oscar-winning “Frankenstein.” Did this level of access feel risky to Lind?
“It was a very open-ended, playful project,” she says. “When we started filming, it was sort of a let’s see what happens situation. Then life really happened and came into the film in a way we hadn’t anticipated. There’s always a sense of risk when we try to control images, even what we share online. Oscar and I have always been quite private, so this definitely felt like a big jump. But this was… I don’t know quite how to explain it, but it wasn’t sharing our lives for the sake of sharing our lives.”
Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the Creature in “Frankenstein.”
Courtesy of Ken Woroner/Netflix
Isaac immediately intercedes to say the film was never “promotional.” “Part of the kind of unwritten contract of doing it was that this might never see the light of day,” he goes on. “That’s kind of the baseline. Sure, we can film this stuff, but I can’t guarantee it, and I likely won’t want it to be shared with the public. Especially when we’re shooting down in Florida with my mom. Because of that, I think I was relaxed. There wasn’t a sense of: this is made for public consumption.”
A few years ago, Lind decided to look at the footage again, with Isaac’s green light. At first, she approached it from a more abstract point of view, stitching short snippets together in black and white. “It eased me into it, which was very wise, because it allowed a little more distance,” remembers Isaac.
“In the end, it does feel like a group of people coming together to do a thing,” he continues. “I think that’s also what gives it a sense of it not being a vanity project or not trying to send some curated piece of representation of this person, Oscar, as accurate. It’s a moment in time for this group of people and the personal life of the filmmaker, all coming together.”
Lind emphasizes how it is common in her practice to “not edit in the moment.” “I never release anything people don’t feel a hundred percent comfortable with. It’s really hard for the brain to watch isolated things and try to think about how they will come together, so it’s easier to say no. But when you put it in a film, and each of these vulnerable things supports and relies on each other to find meaning and purpose, suddenly it’s different.”
“It’s almost like everything’s off the record until the edit,” Isaac jumps in.
Turning that process into herself was not easy at first, says the filmmaker. While struggling with the notion of making a personal film, the director looked back at how she asked her subjects for the same vulnerability she now feared. “I made a film before this called ‘Bobbi Jene,’ and it was such an honest, raw film. I ask other people to make their stories as close to their hearts as possible. So I felt like I could be brave too. That’s how we get a chance to connect to things, to feel things.”
What Lind didn’t originally foresee, however, was how, by inviting strangers into some of the most intimate moments of her life, she would also be getting the chance to mend one of the most painful consequences of choosing to build a family in a country that is not your own. After the film’s screening in Copenhagen, the director’s friends told her how nice it was to “be at her wedding” and to see her pregnant. “We didn’t really get to do any baby shower or Lamaze classes or any of these things. We were doing home hospice, then we flew out and got married, and it was all so intense. Not being able to share those moments with my family in Denmark, I felt really excluded. It was a wild ride.”
“Not wanting to live traditionally, that’s why you become an artist, right?” adds Isaac. “But you don’t get to have all the fun stuff either. Everything was just coming at once; there wasn’t ‘this is what a wedding looks like, and this is what preparing for a birth looks like.’ We were these kids dealing with all this crazy stuff.”
Having now collaborated on screen in both Lind’s Oscar-nominated short “The Letter Room” and “King Hamlet,” the couple are eager to continue to extend their creative partnership under their production banner Mad Gene Media. Lind is currently working on a fiction project that Isaac calls “a big passion of hers.” “We’re always collaborating,” says the director. “It’s been this way since we’ve met. We’re always reading each other things and brainstorming. Two creative souls, or what have you, that will always be part of our relationship.”
“But we’re not shooting a secret documentary right now,” she laughs.
“King Hamlet” is produced by Sara Stockmann and Sofia Sondervan, in collaboration with Sonntag Pictures, Mad Gene Media, and Dutch Tilt Film.
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