David Farr was the co-writer of the original 2011 Hanna movie, and is now showrunner of the Amazon Prime Video series, whose second season was released at the start of July. The acclaimed British writer and director – who’s also been linked to remakes of Quatermass and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos in recent times – chatted with journalists from around the world…

 

You’ve described the script and the concept idea of Hanna the movie as more testosterone laden whereas the series is more female centred. Can you explain this a little bit more?

I very much admired the film – obviously I co-wrote it – but it does have a very particular eye. I think that’s Joe Wright’s directorial eye and it does feel, to me, quite male. It slightly fetishizes the characters and it definitely fetishizes Marissa. I wanted to make a show that spoke through the female characters and gave them the voices more, gave them the room to go on the journeys they go on. With television of course, you’ve got more time. You’ve got seven or eight hours in a season. We’ve done two now, so it really gives you time to really explore and allow these women to go on huge journeys.

But the fundamental idea for me, of Hanna, [at the time] was I had two daughters. They were quite young and I was just so aware of the limited imaginative scope of female characters that they could watch. It just seemed extraordinary compared to men, so that’s what was behind it all and that still remains, I think a governing politic of the show.

You give a young woman at fifteen years old, the ability to kill, the ability to run fast and have all the competence that she has and then at the same time it’s a coming of age story where she’s trying to figure out who she is. She’s trying to work out where her true family lies. Those two things together I think are very powerful and it’s something that I felt young women could really identify with.

One of the things we did very early on [on the TV series], just to relate to that: we said “OK, given that I’m a man, we’re going to have women directors leading both seasons,” which is what we’ve done so far. We’re going to have more women directing than men, which we’ve done so far, have some women writers come on to support on this team and because it creates more interesting voices, to try and find a more organic way of allowing that empowerment to happen.

I don’t want Hanna to be seen as this simplistic empowerment model. She’s not. She’s a really screwed up kid, she has a very very strange background. She’s been brought up in a forest, she was meant to be part of some brutal training regime of assassins, so she’s a deeply flawed, very messy human being. But she is also remarkable and wonderful.

I’ve always loved existential heroes, that idea of the lone individual who fights in resistance to the power structures. And almost all the ones I can think of off the top of my head would be men, so to create a female one, felt to me to be a very exciting endeavour.

There’s still a struggle to have more female characters like that in the cinema.

Well, Hanna started a whole swathe of female action heroines but the slight problem I had with some of them was that they weirdly fetishized that female character through quite a male gaze. So they were the sort of Lycra-clad sexy assassins – and it’s a symptom of the fact that cinema has lost faith in writing. Most of the really good writers now drift towards television where the writer is more in charge. The story can be longer, it almost becomes like a novel at some point, the level of writing for television now.

Cinema is caught now with three-line ideas; it feels like they’re written on the back of a cigarette packet sometimes. ‘Sexy girl in Lycra does this’ and that’s it. That’s not empowerment to anybody because she may well be able to kill people with a machine gun but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s all about the politics that lies behind it.

I think, put bluntly, cinema needs to re-engage with writers and give them way more respect. And because, right now you write a script, you can have the director arrive, you can be sacked and the whole idea is gone. There is no reason to write for cinema, there’s no incentive for a writer to write for cinema. and until they sort that out, they will only make blockbuster, tentpole movies because why would I bother writing for cinema right now?

The fundamental idea of Hanna is she’s an existential heroine and her enemy is a slightly shady, slightly unknowable organisation called Utrax. The season 2 idea is, whilst that’s true and it’s a dystopian organisation, it has created a family of young women, a bunch of trainees, who could be a family for Hanna. So Hanna’s dilemma in season 2 is a big progression from season 1. In 1, she’s worked out who she is but in season 2 she has to decide what she wants to be. She has to decide, should I become part of this family? Should I engage with these young women even though that means becoming part of a power structure, or do I rebel against it?

How do you think you would have felt if you’d known when you wrote the film that this was going to be expanded to this point?

When I was writing, I had a nine year old and a seven year old and so many of my instincts were based on being a little bit frustrated by what they were allowed to watch as regards to female role models. It was just really basic stuff.

OK in the end Hanna was for an older audience because it was too violent at [my children’s then] age, but for a teenage female audience I think it did hit a chord.

A little bit later, maybe two or three years after it came out, my older one was about to watch it and I thought, “This is going to be too violent for her. Is she going to be terrified?” because she’s quite a sensitive one but she just got it. She was like, ‘This is so exciting because I’m not scared, because I’m seeing a young woman doing this stuff.’

Normally it’s the woman who’s in peril, the woman’s always the victim. She’s the victim of a serial killer. She might be a nice cop trying to find the serial killer but she’s not going to be that person who’s out there being the active one, put bluntly, being the cowboy in a western, which was always how I used to phrase it to people.

I always had this idea of this training facility that she’d been taken away from by Erik. We never got there in the film. The first script ended up there just like we do in the first season of the TV show. But we never got there and the very simple reason I wanted to do it when I got the TV series is I wanted to go there. I wanted to show people where she actually came from and where she was taken from. It was the most exciting driving reason.

Then of course, as soon as you think back you think…so then, what was the plan? These young women are now fifteen years old, so what were they going to do with them? I knew it was an assassin project, that was clear. So season 2 is an exploration of that, an exploration of what was the plan for these young women?

If they were planning for them to be assassins, they also of course had to train them to be in the world. These are young women who’ve been brought up in a forest in Romania, they know nothing of the world. So they have to be trained and there’s a huge pleasure in watching these young women learn about the world – pretend to be American college students but they knew nothing about America, they’ve never been to America. They’ve never been college students but they create these identities online and virtually and somehow that feels, to me, to be a very exciting modern thing.

I have to say, that is the bit that I would never have imagined we’d get to twelve years ago.

How much of the development of season 2 came out of the performances of Esmé, and Mireille as the two key characters? Did the characters alter when you’d seen their performance? You’d had six to eight months of watching them build the characters.

The big arcs, to be honest, didn’t change that much because I think you have to have those big arcs in your head when you’re writing. I think if you don’t have them you’re going to get lost.

Esmé’s got a very strong political intelligence for someone who’s still in my head, relatively young and she had it from the first minute we met her. I wouldn’t say she struggled to play someone so much of an ingenue because she’s absolutely brilliant at it in the first season but she’s more politically engaged than Hanna was. Hanna couldn’t be, Hannah didn’t know anything. She literally was living in a forest. Every experience was new; she was a blank canvas and I think for Esme, she was pining to play a more engaged character. Someone who was actively making decisions about what kind of world do I want to live in? Do I want to stay faithful to this? Who do I want to be with? Do I fight?

I think it was certainly enjoyable to write for that part of her, that intelligence. Hanna is more articulate in season 2 than she was in season 1. For example, in season 1 she does an awful lot of watching, there’s a lot of her learning and watching. She doesn’t actually say that much. I was very conscious of writing it. I kept writing it thinking “God, she keeps not saying anything” and Esmé would occasionally say ‘Can I just say a bit more?’ and we tried it and sometimes it just didn’t feel right.

Now, it’s different. She still watches but she is more active, she’s more articulate, she’s making decisions, she’s an agent of her own destiny. I think that suits Esme.

It was Clint Eastwood I think, who said when there were scripts for the Man with No Name, he would cut through loads of the lines of dialogue because he could do it with a glance. And there’s so much, particularly in those first three episodes of season 1, where her head’s on a swivel.

She’s an animal in season 1, that’s the difference. She’s been trained to be an animal and now she’s not. Now, she’s a human being. Once you’re socialised, that bit of you has to balance out with something else.

In terms of Mireille, we can go further because she’s a really remarkable actress. She’s done Tennessee Williams, she can do the whole thing. So, Marissa goes on a huge journey in the two seasons, from essentially wanting to murder Hanna to essentially, I think, wanting to save her. I think she discovers maternal feelings. I think there’s an awful lot going on there and I know that’s in Mireille.

I still feel, with her, I can even go further, there’s more to come from her. She’s extraordinary.

The scripts evolved from season 1 to season 2; how much further can we go into this universe?

Obviously, we can only go as far as anyone lets us go. I can’t say anything specific about what’s in my head because I’m not allowed to and wouldn’t want to spoil stories but I would say, it’s not an endless piece of rope for me. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do when they came to offer me this as an idea. There’s a third bit that I would love to tell, it’s in my head.

I’m very pleased we got the second one because the second one took us beyond the film and it would have been a desperate disappointment is we hadn’t done that. In fact they resoundingly wanted it, they really wanted it. Amazon are very behind it, it’s very encouraging.

We’ve really told new ground in season 2, it’s completely new. There’s not a single thing that comes from the movie. It’s totally a new bit of storytelling. It’s political, that’s great.

To answer your question simply, there is an extra, a third act in my head but I can’t say more than that because we don’t know anything yet. And also, at the moment in this world that we’re living in, I don’t anything is very certain so I don’t think I’m the only person in that situation.

Was there a particular moment that you’re most proud of having directed?

There is but it’s so revealing of story. I think I can say this. There’s a character named Clara, played by Yasmin Monet Prince – she’s a wonderful young British actress – and the journey she goes on, I’d say it’s like the second story. The Hanna/ Marissa story is the first story and it’s the second story.

Hanna’s very involved in it. I would say Hanna discovers genuine love for someone else, as a first time. An affection, sisterly love for this woman; she really loves her, she grows to really care about her. There’s some stuff between them in my final episode that I think is really beautiful.

We’ve always tried in this series to marry two things that are not always easy to marry: highly intense action and thriller narrative and very tender emotional, quite intimate stuff. Esme’s amazing at that intimate stuff. I know people say, ‘Oh it’s amazing, all the fights she does’ but her real gift is that intimate ability to let you in, very subtly and quite undemonstratively. I wouldn’t say she’s a demonstrative actress: she doesn’t do much. She’s very simple but she’s open, she lets you in. Her and Yasmin are beautiful together in those scenes and they breathe in a way that you don’t always get in television. So I’m very proud of that.

Click here to read our interview with Esme Creed-Miles and Yasmin Monet Prince

HANNA Season 2 launched on Prime Video on 3rd July