Hamnet Gives New Life to “On the Nature of Daylight”—and Even Max Richter’s Impressed

If you have been to a fashion show in the last decade, you’ve probably heard the song before. If you saw Shutter Island or Arrival, you’ll definitely remember it. It soundtracked emotional valleys on The Handmaid’s Tale and The Last of Us too. “On the Nature of Daylight,” composer and pianist Max Richter’s 2004 short work for string quintet and synthesizer, has become a modern classic with a list of credits to match.

Though the composition doesn’t have a traditional melody, it has nevertheless become one of the most recognizable tunes of the 21st century. The piece is so recognizable that it’s surprising to find that a movie as restlessly inventive as Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet—which stars Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife, Agnes, and is out in wide release this week—would cover such well-trod ground.

But Zhao, who worked with writer Maggie O’Farrell to adapt her 2020 novel, manages to place “On the Nature of Daylight” in a brand new context. She juxtaposes Richter’s track against Hamlet’s final lines, emphasizing the song’s impact and its universality. Clearly, Zhao really loves this song; according to Richter himself, she’s credited it with helping her envision the film’s ending, and played it nonstop on set during one of the final days of filming.

As Richter tells VF, he signed on to score Hamnet after he read O’Farrell’s script. “It already felt really like a no-brainer, honestly, because to have the opportunity to work with that extraordinary writing—both from Maggie and Chloé. And of course, the Shakespeare material in there,” he says. “It was one of those projects that comes along, and you just think, ‘Yeah, this is going to happen. This is going to be good.’” But neither he nor Zhao initially intended “On the Nature of Daylight” to be part of the film. Below, Richter explains how his most famous composition wound up underscoring Hamnet’s emotional conclusion—and how the film would have looked (and sounded) a lot different without it.

Vanity Fair: When you first were composing “On The Nature of Daylight,” did you have any idea that it would have this sort of longevity?

Max Richter: It’s funny, isn’t it? You’ll write something, but you don’t really know where it’s going and how it will be received. You have your intentions, but once it’s left your desk, it goes out into the world. It does its own thing, and people connect to it in their own ways. It comes from this album, The Blue Notebooks, which is an anti-war protest album, the buildup to the whole Iraq adventure. So that’s what it is for me. For any artist, it’s really a privilege to have people embrace your work in that way. It’s something you can never expect or count on, but it’s wonderful when it does happen.

At the time, we were living up in Edinburgh, and kind of scratching by. Of course, I’d made Memoryhouse, but no one bought or listened to Memoryhouse. And then I made Blue Notebooks, and a handful of people sort of knew about it. So it was a tiny sort of situation, almost word of mouth. Then the guys from Stranger Than Fiction picked it up. I remember going to our local movie house, watching it, and just thinking, “Oh, my life’s all going to change now,” in my naive way. Then of course, nothing happened at all for years. But it was a special thing, the feeling that people are listening somewhere. It’s very encouraging for young artists to find that in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, there are people listening.

I know people complain that protest art can be unsubtle, but clearly, “On the Nature of Daylight” has resonated long past the Iraq War moment. What do you think about that?

Artists are just people, and when there’s something important or anxiety-inducing going on, people talk about it. As artists, our way of talking is making stuff. So it’s just a very natural human instinct. That moment certainly felt like there were things to say about it.

The song is in B-flat minor, a key I associate with mournful hymns—I think that might be why it conveys dread and anxiety so well.

It’s true—I guess it’s mostly black notes, and it has a feeling that the thirds [intervals between three half steps] are very small, so it’s a very chromatic feeling. I love that key. I probably spend too much time in that key, to be honest. I probably need to get over it somehow.

Do you have a favorite piece of pop culture that has featured the song?

Max Richter: I’m not a gamer, but I think The Last of Us was quite a big moment for lots of people who were invested in the game one way or another. I don’t know. It was in Shutter Island, and that was kind of amazing—the beautiful remix that Robbie Robertson did with the Dinah Washington track was stunning. I’m always sort of surprised and curious about what people tend to do with it.

I suppose the most prominent one was in Arrival, and I think it worked very beautifully—it played in the beginning and end. Arrival is essentially an anti-war film, so it chimed with the theme of the piece beautifully. Also, the structure. I thought it was quite nice, because “On the Nature of Daylight” is palindromic, and the movie is kind of palindromic as well.

It’s also very popular in fashion. Why do you think that is?

I haven’t been present when it’s been played in fashion shows, but I know that it has been used quite a bit. I think it might be because it has an emotional directness and the architecture is really legible. It starts; something happens, and you go, Oh yeah, I know where we’re going now. And then the other thing happens. I quite like that in a piece of music, where it leads you by the hand.

It’s just to do with my overall sense of the world being utterly chaotic and unpredictable. I feel like music can be a space where things do make sense. It’s like wish fulfillment in this slightly mad world we’re living in. There is this creative space where everything lands in its right place.

It feels like a pop song despite having none of the normal elements of a pop song. The orderliness, things in their right place, leading listeners by the hand—those are qualities that good pop songs aspire to.

The emotional directness of pop is a beautiful thing. I guess because of the modernist period in the last century, emotional directness is considered very, very suspicious and insubstantial in classical music. You can’t do that sort of thing. I never really liked that, because for me, music is a feeling language. It’s a way of communicating how one person feels and having somebody else experience that feeling. That’s what it is.

I trained at a conservatory to write super complicated, squeaky music that no one would ever listen to, and that was my training. But I had an epiphany moment when I was studying in Italy with [composer Luciano] Berio a bit later. He deflated all of that complexity stuff, and he said, “You need to go back to really the basic things. Why are you even doing this?” I thought about that quite a bit and made a very deliberate decision to really just simplify my language—to just take away all that stuff and get down to really the basics. In a way, it is similar to a pop sensibility, which is all about just getting that lyric out in a really direct way.

At what point did “On the Nature of Daylight” come into Hamnet? Did Chloé come to you with that idea first?

“On the Nature of Daylight” wasn’t part of the film until about three days before they wrapped shooting. I’d already written a bunch of material just off the page, from the script, and they were playing them on set. Chloe was not really satisfied with the ending of the film as it was on the page—originally Hamlet says, “the rest is silence,” he dies, and then a black screen, we’re done. That whole last sequence wasn’t originally in the film, and I don’t think she was satisfied with that. Jessie sent her “On the Nature of Daylight” on the morning of that third-to-last or fourth-to-last day. Chloé had an epiphany listening to it in the car, and the end of the film came to her. So it just gave them the architecture of the end of the film. I actually visited the set—I think it might’ve been the second-to-last day—when they were shooting in the Globe, and we played it on repeat for 10 hours. It saturated every aspect of the filmmaking.

When we got to the scoring part, I obviously wrote a cue for that ending. I was like, That’s fine. We’ve shot the movie, now I’m going to write the score as normal. Ultimately, Chloé felt that the piece had been so instrumental to bringing about the end of the movie that we couldn’t replace it. We had to be faithful to that moment. So it ended up at the end of the film.

How did you move from the script to the rest of the score? There is so much dialogue in the film, and the music doesn’t try to crowd it out.

There’s a lot of talking! There’s a lot of dialogue, and it’s important. It reinforced my initial impression about the kind of music that would suit the script. I was thinking about something which is kind of transparent, which would let the material—the acting, the psychology—glow through. Apart from one or two places, it had to be really quite restrained and have a subtlety about it because important things are being said. We want to be able to really connect to those.