Interview: Seth Lochhead — Part 3

Scott Myers

24 Oct 2013 • 7 min read

Seth Lochhead’s original screenplay Hanna made the Black List in 2006 and was produced, then released in 2011, the movie starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, and Eric Bana. Seth’s background is an interesting one, so I was pleased when he agreed to do a Q&A with me. I was even more pleased by Seth’s responses which I am sure you will find both entertaining and informative.

Today in Part 3, Seth digs into the psychological and metaphorical dimensions of Hanna:

I’d like to dig into Hanna and your creative instincts at work there. You mentioned you’ve read Joseph Campbell and certainly Hanna feels like a Hero’s Journey. We meet Hanna in her Old World, the remote, snowbound area where she lives with Erick, who she believes to her father. Then a Call To Adventure when she flicks the switch of the transmitter, alerting Marissa and the powers that be of her location. With her capture, escape and intersection with Sebastian and Rachel’s family, Hanna separates from her Old World and enters a New World, and so on. How conscious were you of the Hero’s Journey in crafting the story for Hanna or is the narrative structure and are the story’s themes more reflective of the Hero’s Journey in a sort of organic, innate way?

I’ve never read Joseph Campbell as prescriptive per se. I think he was examining certain aspects that are innate and organic to human story telling across cultures and time periods as opposed to saying, like some gurus, that he’s discovered THE way — the precise formula — to tell stories. He’s just pointing out that this, for the most part, is the way human beings, when left to their own devices, tell stories that other human beings can relate to and understand. Our lives, and the minutiae of our lives, can easily be funneled through this filter: we are born into the world, we face obstacles, grow, have mentors and enemies (some inhabiting the same person), we learn and then return to some semblance of our former lives, wiser and changed. We’re all the heroes of our own journeys — no matter how short or how long those journeys may be — and therefore it is easy for us to sympathize/empathize with the heroes in the stories we consume (it’s also easier for us to tell stories in this way, it’s a fundamental, innate structure — we “write” what we know).

I feel like Campbell’s influence over me was less compelling than the influence of, say, Return of the Jedi or Bourne or Hamlet. If I had not been exposed to him, I think HANNA would’ve turned out the same way only because I put her through the filter of my own experience (as, I’m sure, Homer did with Odysseus and Lucas did with Luke). I find Campbell– and all literary criticism — to be utterly fascinating, but I always stop short of searching for formula in their words.

Going beyond Joseph Campbell, the story feels like a fairy tale. When asked where she comes from, Hanna replies, “The forest,” an archetypal image. Erik can be seen to be the Good Father, Marissa the Evil Stepmother. Looked at symbolically, the character Hanna would seem to fall into the shadow of Grimm’s fairy tales and figures like Little Red Riding Hood. Are you a fan of fairy tales and if so, did they have any bearing on the story as you developed it?

The Brothers Grimm played a huge role in a how I imagined the story and, also, how I came to understand how Hanna understood and interacted with the world. I keep talking about how I am who I am in this moment, right now, because of the experiences and influences my life has collected and I think of all human behavior in this way — fictional or otherwise. Hanna is a human and when we meet her she is the sum of her experiences and her influences and there are only a few tangible realities that she understands — her father, how to hunt, violence, the simplicity of life and death, the cold, the warmth of the sun. And then there is her imagination influenced by the abstract — her encyclopedias, her fairy tales, and the stories her father tells her. Both the tangible and the abstract play off her biology and give her the tools to survive in the present (because to survive is to understand the world, as best as you can, with what you have available, in each moment you are faced with it).

I’ve always thought of HANNA as a fairy tale, something you could literally rip from the pages of the Brothers Grimm. But I did not push the influence too far, I did not let any one fairy tale inspire me, and I did not weave in any extra-textual references to fairy tales (outside, of course, of the book of fairy tales Hanna covets and the character of Knepfler aka Wilhelm Grimm). It wasn’t until Joe got involved that he began to fill the frame with fairy tale images. I’ve said this before in another interview: Joe incorporated the archetypal symbolism to the design and look of the film (and the look of the actors). He wanted to make the fairy tale literal and not leave it entirely to subtext. I think, in hindsight, it was a good choice.

There’s yet another way to look at Hanna and that is from a more psychological viewpoint, and for me a Jungian one. It strikes me that Hanna has all these disparate aspects of her psyche: she’s a youth who has been trained to be a killer; she’s been drilled with all this book knowledge, but is virtually an innocent when it comes to the ways of the world; she thinks she has a father, but she’s really an orphan; as she has now reached adolescence, she has a natural instinct to want to explore and live her own life, and yet she is tasked with gaining revenge against Marissa. How much did you think about Hanna from a psychological perspective and how did that inform your understanding of her character and where she needed to go in terms of her personal journey?

It’s all psych 101, baby. I like the idea of Jung and he and Campbell seem to be coming at things from very similar places (even if it is for different reasons), but I found a lot of his writings to be too fanciful for my tastes (he never made things tangible for me). That whole collective unconscious thing-a-ma-jig was weird (not that it wasn’t a genius idea — Wikipedia is the collective unconscious!! Jung created the internet! — it was in the explanation that he lost me). Give me E.O. Wilsons’ super-organism and then, and only then, does the collective unconscious begin to make a modicum of sense. It’s weird that Jung doesn’t work for me because there’s an existential psychologist that has had a huge influence over me — R.D. Laing — and, I believe, Jung has a great pull over his work. Jung to me is like Freud to everyone else, I’ve only been exposed to the colorful tip of his work and not the good stuff below the surface.

B.F. Skinner, Pavlov, and behaviorists in general, inform a lot of what I do. They taught me that all behavior has subtext.

When Hanna contemplates flicking the switch on the transmitter, something she hesitates doing at first, then eventually does, what do you think is her overriding impulse compelling her to commit that act, willfully putting herself in harm’s way?

This was interesting sticking point for some, something that a lot of the audience seemed to push back against. I’m not sure if it was because a lot of my contemporaries have delayed adolescences (most of my friends were still living at home at 25), but it seems a lot of people couldn’t empathize with her decision (they were only looking at the micro consequences not the macro). She has a seemingly good life, she’s loved, has a warm place to sleep at night, why change? Why do any of us change? We grow bored, we begin to wonder if the grass is greener, and we feel that pull towards adventure (small and large). I get the sense from my friends that they stayed at home until they were ready to go out on their own, have a bit of money saved up, protect themselves from any potential falls and, I suppose, I understand this instinct (it’s a practical logic; why pay for things when you don’t have to? Why take risks when you’re seemingly safe?). But there’s something scary and life affirming about having to figure it out on your own, to take risks. I’m not saying it’s a common choice in the modern era, but I am saying it was Hanna’s choice.

The family with whom Hanna intersects creates an interesting subplot. In a way, don’t they represent what a ‘normal’ family might be, giving Hanna a chance to model that kind of life?

I think you’re right from an audience perspective: here’s a normal family for Hanna to interact with, this is the way things should be. But from my perspective, they’re society. Her exposure to them (to society at large) creates a level of self-consciousness Hanna has previously not experienced. Her “culture” in the forest, her “self” identity, if “self” is defined by the people around you, was a reflection of Erik’s pride (he was the only human being she could see herself reflected in). This new “self” in our world, the one defined by “normal” society, is the beginnings of something we’re all exposed to when we first enter the social environment. So it’s less a model of hope — here’s a family she can be “normal” with — and more a quiet tragedy — here is a society that looks upon her as abnormal, therefore she begins to believe she is abnormal. This group, this family, will never be able to understand and love Hanna for who she truly is and, I think, we all, to some extent, know what that feels like.

More particularly the teenage daughter Sophie, isn’t she a kind of Hanna in reverse: soft, urban, chatty, caught up in contemporary culture, again someone against whom Hanna can measure herself?

Again, this analysis is more accurate from a hyper-textual view (from the audience’s perspective). We can compare and contrast Sophie and Hanna and measure their differences (Sophie’s obsession with Hermes vs. Hanna’s obsession with rabbits). What I think is happening with them, on an inter- and intra-personal level (the micro vs. the macro of society at large) is a melding of personalities (something I think happens between two intimates, BFFs, what have you, as they fall in love). So it’s less Hanna or Sophie consciously measuring themselves against the other and more about Hanna and Sophie becoming connected through the influence each has on the other. Now, as a viewer (not as the author; this is an important distinction every writer must make once he/she releases his/her work upon the world), I see Hanna and Sophie each as the products of the worlds in which they were raised. But they’re clay and they are constantly being shaped by every new experience. Hanna shapes Sophie. Sophie shapes Hanna. Life is lived.

Tomorrow in Part 4, Seth talks about why he chose a girl for the Protagonist in Hanna and answers some craft questions.

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