Grand Theft Hamlet interview – Shakespeare’s magnum opus brings GTA 5 to cinemas-Henry Roberts-Entertainment – Metro

Who said there’d never be a GTA movie? (Tull Stories)

A performance of Hamlet in GTA 5, with input from fans from around the world, is the subject of a new documentary in theatres now.

Remember that project you started during lockdown? The novel that didn’t manage to get past chapter one. Or the screenplay that’s still sitting unfinished on the laptop.

Whilst the rest of us were baking banana bread and doom-scrolling Twitter, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane were doing something very special. They mounted a production of Hamlet within the world of Grand Theft Auto 5. And, if that wasn’t impressive enough, they documented the whole process and turned it into a feature-length film.

Suddenly my banana bread doesn’t seem so impressive.

Grand Theft Hamlet was born in lockdown. Written and directed by Pinny and Sam (who are also married), the documentary follows Sam and his friend Mark Oosterveen, as they walk around the streets of a make-believe version of Los Angeles, attempting to perform Shakespeare’s most famous play in one of the world’s most iconic games.

‘I was incredibly trepidatious about it,’ Sam admits. ‘First of all, because I thought, what if no one comes?’

Getting a play onstage is tricky enough at the best of times, but mounting Shakespeare’s longest play in a virtual space during a pandemic, and trying to get players from around the world to participate and commit to rehearsal schedules? The whole idea sounds too ridiculous to be true.

‘But then one person turned up, and then two people,’ Sam told me. ‘It was kind of amazing. It was like, wow, people want this.’

It’s fair to say Pinny and Sam’s lockdown was more productive than most. (The only person I can think of who had a more creative quarantine was Shakespeare himself, who supposedly wrote both King Lear and Macbeth during the plague epidemic of 1606.)

Granted, this was hardly the couple’s first artistic project. Pinny is a documentary filmmaker and Sam is an actor (you may have seen him in The Crown or playing Harry Potter on the West End in The Cursed Child). Nor was it the couple’s first foray into the world of Hamlet. The first time Pinny laid eyes on Sam was at university, when Sam was playing that most famous and stubborn Danish prince.

Cut to January 2021. When lockdown reared its ugly head yet again, the creative couple found themselves out of work, but not ideas.

Though admitting lockdown was largely awful (he was out of work and worried about how to support his family), Sam found the creative freedom liberating. It was time, he said, to stop ‘caring about getting things right and to start playing.’

The play was certainly the thing, and it paid off. Not only was the production of Hamlet they launched a success (it won The Stage’s Innovation Award in 2023) but the resultant film – all shot entirely in-game – far exceeded the filmmakers’ expectations.

‘It’s been amazing,’ Sam admits. ‘The film’s been at festivals, it’s won awards, it’s going to be released in cinemas … that was never remotely on the cards when we were making it.’

Maybe they can do Macbeth in GTA 6 (Tull Stories)

Grand Theft Hamlet isn’t the first movie to be made from video game footage. Machinima – a category of film made using video game graphics – has been around for decades at this point.

Hardly Working, from 2023, focuses on four characters from Red Dead Redemption 2, exploring the alienation of late-stage capitalism in just over 20 minutes. Another film that used Red Dead Redemption, The Grannies from 2022, is about a group of players seeking out glitches in the outer edges of the game’s playing space.

But Grand Theft Hamlet is unique in its scale and its collaborative nature. Players from around the world joined the production of Hamlet and we see the trials of the rehearsal period in the final film. Moreover, whilst there are lots of videos online of gameplay, Grand Theft Hamlet feels more akin to traditional filmmaking than simply recorded video game footage.

Pinny used her documentarian brain to structure the project into something that could sustain a feature length running time. There are plenty of recordings of video games online, but Pinny felt these films are only fun to watch for 10 or 15 minutes at a time. ‘We wanted this to be a cinematic documentary,’ she said.

The challenge, therefore, was to balance ‘having something that was cinematic, but also a true representation of what it’s like to play that game,’ she said.

One creative decision, to mirror the experience of playing GTA, was keeping the map of the gameplay in the corner of the screen. Although there is a ‘director mode’, where you can remove the map, Pinny decided to keep it in, not wanting the audience to forget that this project was taking place in a game. Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.

The world of Middle Ages Denmark and the pixelated Los Angeles/Los Santos of Grand Theft Auto may seem alien to one another, but the two are closer than you might initially think. Both are worlds where the main currency is violence. Both are obsessed with reputation and prestige. Both expose the fragility between life and death. In many ways, Grand Theft Auto is the perfect setting for Hamlet. Something is rotten in the state of San Andreas.

The documentary’s creators having a virtual selfie (Tull Stories)

Whilst playing the game, Sam found parallels between the animated visuals and Shakespeare’s text. ‘I remember, quite early on playing the game, seeing these incredible, beautiful sunsets, and thinking, this is what Hamlet said! ‘This majestical roof red with golden fire’ … like, this is it! Here in this world!’

Violence and isolation aside, the multi-layered world of Hamlet (which famously contains a play within the play) is well-suited to the online world of avatars and non-player characters. ‘Hamlet is about pretence,’ Pinny said. ‘It’s about masks, it’s about not being what you seem. You have the non-playable characters, who are sort of like a Greek chorus, and they’re audiences to our story. That was really interesting for me.’

Shakespeare and GTA are surprisingly well-suite, but will audiences make the connection? Particularly when the film’s two biggest camps – gamers and Shakespeare fans – are often siloed from wider pop culture. After all, both creators admitted to not being big gamers before undertaking the project.

‘I definitely wasn’t into gaming, in fact I was very negative about gaming,’ Pinny confessed.

But the couple is keen to dismantle many people’s prejudices about both theatre and video games: namely, that one is high art that must be revered and the other mere mindless entertainment.

‘The idea that Hamlet is the greatest example of British culture is ridiculous,’ Sam said. ‘I mean, I personally love it. I think it’s an amazing play, but it’s very problematic. It’s misogynistic, actually.’

As well as not wanting to put Shakespeare on a pedestal, the couple also want to dismiss the notion that gaming is a lesser art, a snobbery often perpetuated in self-appointed cultural circles. ‘The experience of playing Grand Theft Auto is extraordinary,’ Sam said. ‘It’s an incredible piece of art. And yes, it’s problematic in some ways, but I think it’s basically down to a snobbery about the respective media that people consider one low art and one high art.’

Grand Theft Hamlet is an ambitious and impressive project, inviting the viewers to reconsider preconceptions of cinema, theatre and video games. Proving once again that Shakespeare’s humanism can be adapted anywhere, the film is a visual and emotional whirlwind. Nowhere else will we see an animated avatar deliver To Be or Not To Be before getting blown up by a rocket.

Grand Theft Hamlet opens in select UK cinemas from Friday, December 6

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder (Tull Stories)

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