How the New ‘H Is for Hawk’ Movie Brought its Goshawk Stars to the Screen

From its very first moments, the movie H Is for Hawk shines its spotlight on the beauty and power of the goshawk. The film’s opening credits roll over softly lit close-ups of a goshawk’s feathers, showcasing their intricate patterns and delicate movements. Throughout the film, the camera follows as Mabel, the main avian character, soars across fields, dives through dense woodlands, and interacts closely with the film’s human cast.

Watching the movie, you might not realize that the breathtaking Mabel is actually played by four different birds, all captive creatures recruited to share the lead role. And as the production team discovered, bringing goshawk actors to the screen is no easy task. “There’s no more difficult bird to work with for filming than a goshawk, period,” says Lloyd Buck, who worked as a hawk handler and consultant on the production. “They have zero tolerance of anything they don’t like.”

The movie, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last year and is now playing in select U.S. theaters, is based on Helen Macdonald’s bestselling 2014 memoir of the same name—a true story of grief, healing, and high-intensity falconry. After the sudden death of their father, Macdonald, a Cambridge professor who’d raised raptors since childhood, became obsessed with the idea of training a goshawk. The forest predators, which have made a comeback in the wild in Europe after nearly going extinct, are popular falconry birds but infamously difficult to tame. “They have the reputation in falconry as being kind of murderous psychopaths,” Macdonald says.

Both the book and the film trace Macdonald’s process of training Mabel as a hunting hawk, following the daily ins and outs of the author getting to know the bird at home, teaching her to fly to the glove, and eventually running along as she soars across fields to hunt wild pheasants and rabbits. Meanwhile, Helen experiences a less linear emotional journey of connecting with, and obsessing over, Mabel while pushing down the grief of sudden loss. “It’s a memoir about the boundaries between life and death,” as Macdonald describes it.

To bring that story to the big screen, the first step was finding the right cast. The movie stars Claire Foy as Helen and Brendan Gleeson as her father—and, in the role of Mabel, a team of four Eurasian Goshawks, each with their own strengths and personalities. “You couldn’t do it with any one hawk,” says Buck, who worked with his wife, Rose, to manage the hawks on the film; the two have built a business raising and handling birds for movies and TV. “They were all essential to tell the story.”

For the scenes of Mabel flying and hunting, the production relied on the Bucks’ own goshawk, Lottie, a veteran screen actor who’s been featured in a number of wildlife films. The couple has hand-raised the bird for years, training her to respond to specific cues—such as chasing after yellow lures on camera. “From the very first time we started feeding her, as soon as we got her at 14 days old, we fed her on a yellow plate,” Buck says. “So the color yellow becomes food.”

Meanwhile, to capture some of the film’s quieter moments of the hawk at home, the production borrowed a goshawk named Jess from the Loch Lomond Bird of Prey Centre in Scotland. Unlike most of her species, Jess is “extremely laid-back,” Buck says, making her a perfect fit for showcasing the intimate bond that eventually formed between Helen and Mabel.

To round out the avian cast, the Bucks brought on two young goshawks, dubbed Mabel 1 and Mabel 2, who were bred in captivity by a friend in the area. Though they were sisters, the pair “were like chalk and cheese in character,” Buck says, using a Britishism to describe their notably different personalities. The skittish Mabel 2 took the lead for the early part of the film, when the relationship between Helen and her bird was still touchy—while Mabel 1, the more calm and confident of the pair, shined in the later training scenes.

For the film to work, though, a lot rested on the chemistry between these birds and their co-lead, Foy. The actress (best known for her role as Queen Elizabeth II on The Crown) had never handled raptors until a couple weeks before filming was set to start. When she came out to the Bucks’ home to get familiar with the Mabels, all were nervous to see how the goshawks would take to her: “If they don’t like you, they don’t like you,” Buck says.

Luckily, Foy turned out to be a natural falconer, Buck says, and soon formed a close bond with Mabel 1 and Mabel 2 in particular. Macdonald, who spent some time on set, credits the successful match to Foy’s ability to closely read and adjust to the birds’ body language. “It’s not a relationship based on domination,” the author says of the bond between a falconer and their hawk. “It's a relationship based on the slow development of a respectful partnership.”

As it came time to start filming, the production team knew they’d have to be doing things a little differently to help their avian stars shine. “Everything was done around the welfare of the hawks,” says director Philippa Lowthorpe. “They were put first.”

Much of the film is set in Helen’s apartment as Helen and Mabel grow to trust each other. To capture these intimate moments, “quiet on set” took on a new meaning: Crew members ducked behind couches, hid around corners, and dressed in dark colors so as not to distract the goshawks. “When the hawk came on set, it was a hush,” Lowthorpe says. “And there was an awe around the hawk, a proper awe of this wild creature.”

On the other hand, for the scenes of Helen flying Mabel along the moors and fields, the crew was determined to capture the real speed and power of the species. “We actually storyboarded all of those scenes, like you would an action sequence,” Lowthorpe says. The team would send Lottie flying after a lure—yellow, of course—while wildlife cinematographer Mark Payne-Gill filmed with his long lens camera, or a drone took to the skies to zoom along next to the bird.

To achieve some of the movie’s most impressive shots, which track alongside Mabel as she darts through dense forest, the crew even constructed a special gimbal system to keep pace in real time with the goshawk’s explosive power, reaching 40 to 50 miles per hour. All of it required meticulous planning, down to measuring the amounts of chopped-up meat that the goshawks would get after each take to keep them at the proper weight. “It’s a bit like an athlete preparing for a race day, or a boxer for a fight night,” Buck says.

Yet in the end, there was also a healthy dose of luck involved. “It’s like all the best things in life,” Macdonald says. “Preparation and chance.”

The film’s opening scene, for example, features a pair of goshawks performing courtship displays over the forest—quite a rare sight in the wild. But after getting a location tip from a local birdwatcher, Payne-Gill quickly came across a pair over a nearby forest; within a couple days, he’d captured the film’s dramatic footage of them tussling, calling, and dipping their wings.

Another serendipitous moment came in trying to capture a pivotal scene from the book, when Mabel feels so comfortable at home that she starts playing with Helen, throwing paper balls back and forth. No one was sure the scene would work, Lowthorpe says, since it required the right mood—and a great deal of trust—from the goshawk. But sure enough, when the cameras rolled, Jess started tossing paper with Foy and peering affectionately through a cardboard tube. “You couldn’t have scripted that,” Buck says. “You couldn’t make that happen.”

All in all, despite the challenges—“I don’t think we’ll ever do anything so difficult again,” Buck says—the crew agrees it was worth the effort to capture the authentic nature of a goshawk on camera, wildness and all. “We really wanted to make it as real as it could be,” Buck says.

Watching the film back, Macdonald says it never felt like their original Mabel, who died years ago, had fully returned, since “these hawks were so clearly themselves.” But the author felt the movie captured the emotional truth of their early days with Mabel—including the feeling of hunting with a hawk, when “your heart is somehow twisted up with the bird as it flies,” as well as the deeper emotional link. “It's a kind of interspecies, deep respect and love that I don't think has ever really been captured in a film before,” Macdonald says.

While helping the film portray that cross-species connection, Buck was also experiencing it for himself. The night before Lowthorpe called him with the news that the movie was greenlit, Buck had experienced a sudden cardiac event and learned he’d need major open-heart surgery. That meant during the months gearing up for filming, he was not only working to prepare the hawks, but also struggling to recover his own health. Yet even when he could barely walk, he’d take his mobility scooter down to see the goshawks every day, since he knew that keeping up that relationship would be essential to make the movie work.

As he struggled through, Buck found solace in one of the birds in particular: Mabel 1. “She was such a focus through that really horrible time,” Buck says. “I feel a huge connection to her.” After filming wrapped, Buck brought Mabel 1 home for good. He’s continued to fly her near their home, but says he doesn’t plan to put her to work in a film ever again. “She’s just a really special bird,” Buck says. “I just let her enjoy flying.”