What Makes Amazon Prime’s ‘Hanna’ Different Than the Saoirse Ronan Film?

Amazon’s newest drama Hanna is more than merely a reworking of the 2011 Joe Wright film. It’s a dark and twisted look at adolescence, set in a harrowing world of killers, liars, spies, and innocent bystanders. Even though the set up of the series is largely the same as the film — a secret agent goes rogue and raises his daughter to be a world-class killer in the woods, and later she embarks on a cat-and-mouse game with a vicious spy — director Sarah Adina Smith brings a terrifying touch to the story and newcomer Esme Creed-Miles imbues Hanna with a vulnerability that feels boldly transgressive.

Smith told a roundtable of reporters at Winter TCA that they worked hard to make the show its own thing apart from the movie. “The character of ‘Hanna’ in the movie has this wonderful alien quality and it’s more like a fairytale,” Smith said. “We decided to make the series to do a more grounded, real, gritty ‘Hanna.’ We wanted to make her fully human.”

Even though she spends much of the show murdering people with just a few quick movements, Esme Creed-Miles told reporters that she’s a “very unviolent person” and that she had to consider Hanna’s perspective as someone who grew up in the violent natural world.

“Hanna is discovering her morality for the very first time. So it’s this juxtaposition of coming from this wilderness where killing is kind of the nature of survival, but it’s beautiful as well,” said Creed-Miles, “and coming to the modern world where she’s discovering her morality for the very first time and discovering the consequences of that and the emotional trauma that comes as a result of killing things.”

“She’s wrestling with her own power,” said writer and producer David Farr. “There’s a moment in episode two where they’re in a very high stakes situation and her instinct is to murder and the other girl’s suddenly horrified. Her best friend is suddenly a monster. That moment crystalizes the whole show, in terms, ‘Who are we?'”

Farr was also the screenwriter for the original Hanna film and he explained that there were many elements of the story untouched by the movie, including the mystery surrounding Hanna’s backstory. He wanted Hanna’s story to also be a coming-of-age tale meets political thriller. It also, coincidentally, has morphed into a show about gender roles.

For Farr, Hanna represents a character who has grown up free of the constraints put on young women. “It’s a bigger theme for the series, actually, that hopefully we can go on to explore more about young women specifically and what young women are expected to be, for who, how,” he said, explaining that for Hanna, raised in the woods, “You’re a girl who’s free of all the shit that young people are told constantly about who they should be, how they should be it. It’s all gone, it’s not there for her.”

Yet, Smith and Creed-Miles couldn’t help but inject their feminine voice into Hanna’s story.  “One thing Esme and I have talked about a lot is that there’s this trope right now of the ‘strong female hero,’ where you take a girl and make her fight like a man and kill a lot of people and then suddenly you have a ‘strong female hero.’ We were sort of tired of that notion,” Smith said noting that Creed-Miles focused on Hanna’s emotions as much as she did the training.

“She’s a girl who’s never been exposed to the world and I think Esme has done such a beautiful job of tapping into that,” Smith said. “Yes, she’s been trained by her father and is incredibly smart and observant and strong. But she’s also incredibly vulnerable and we see that as an essential female strength.”

Creed-Miles said, “It was important to me to provide a character that — obviously, she’s really weird and on the surface of things not relatable — but she was someone that could empower young women in terms of empathy and in terms of being isolated and the female condition and being exposed to the world for the first time and seeing all these things that women have to go through every single day.”

Hanna premieres on Prime Video tomorrow, March 29, 2019. 

Stream Hanna on Prime Video on March 29th