Grand Theft Hamlet: “Shakespeare had to comment on the GTA world” (interview)

Meeting with the directors of this document which takes place entirely in the world of GTA Online.

Crazy documentary on two unemployed players trying to rise Hamlet In GTA Online,, Grand Theft Hamlet won numerous prizes at festivals, before finally being visible on Mubi. Its two directors, Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, as a couple in the city, tell us behind the scenes of the creation of this unidentified film object.

First: Grand Theft Hamlet seems constantly questioning how to best represent human feelings through a 100 % digital universe. How much was the staging an issue?
Sam Crane : It would have been easy – well, maybe maybe a big word – to make a kind of stream of Gtaas on Twitch or Youtube. We partially wanted to go to this type of rendering, because it is the reality of video games, but Pinny always thought about how to balance it with something more cinematographic.

Pinny Grylls: For the film to work, it had to resume the very satirical and purely fun side of GTA Online. The pleasure, the pure joy that the game provides. But we also had to make room for Shakespeare and his beautiful language. All the object of Grand Theft Hamlet was that Shakespeare comments on the world of the game, and therefore that it is born a kind of dialogue between the text and our own lives.

SC: In addition, the film had to be able to exist in a film hall and that people agree to sit in front for 90 minutes.

PG: The challenge was immense: how to stage such a project? It quickly became obvious that one could not be satisfied with a single place, this theater that Sam and Mark find at the beginning. We quickly decided that the whole film would take place in the game, and that we were going to play with the different strata of reality. We had to get the most out of Gta And bring out the power and madness of Los Santos.

The film shows your doubts a lot and the fact that you had absolutely not understood the implications of your initial idea. When did you realize that it would be really feasible to to go up Hamlet inside the game?
PG: I would say during the hearings phase.

SC: When I saw people playing extracts from Shakespeare, it returned to me … It was fascinating, it came to life, people let their own personalities show up. But to be honest, and practically until the very end, I didn’t really think we would get there. Normally, you repeat a piece of lots of times, you are general, tests in costumes … We had nothing about it because it was too complex to set up. However, I felt that it was worth trying.

PG: It was a real circus, between this mixture of professional and amateur actors, the immense size of the space at our disposal and then these players who were constantly attacked … Find a place where we gather and repeat took an hour. It was exhausting, and then you had to go on Shakespeare … At one point, it struck me: in fact, we made a puppet show with digital avatars. The challenge was to know how to film these puppets so that they look real and lively.

Beyond succeeding in mounting the room, did you know that the simple attempt would be enough to make a good film?
SC : Pinny, I think you had this idea very early, right? When I decided that we are going to try to go up Hamlet In Gtayou immediately thought it would make an interesting story to follow.

PG : I had already made a lot of films on the theater, the ballet, the opera, the artists … I was a little fascinated by the subject. I watched Sam save his images in the game and post these little clips on YouTube, wondering how I could add a touch of cinema to all of this. My filmmaker’s eye quickly understood that the making-of aspect already offered an interesting dramaturgy, and that there was a kind of new visual language to invent.

But you are using the “director” mode very little that the game offers and which allows you to choose exactly your frame. However, it was the most logical option …
SC : No, because we wanted to capture the “reality” of the game, this online space where you interact live with other people.

PG : It’s documentary, not a fictional film. It was therefore necessary to restore a form of authenticity. For example, I decided that we were going to keep the life bar and the messages that appear on the screen. I didn’t want us to be pretending and that we were transforming what we lived in a quest for aesthetics.

SC : Using the director mode would have done pure fiction and show the cogs of the realization. Here, we are just between the two.

What type of puzzle was the assembly?
SC : Uh … the huge kind! (Laughter.)

PG : In addition it was a very hot and very long summer, I had to get into the basement of our house because it made an untenable temperature in the other rooms. In all, I had 300 to 400 hours of rushes.

SC : When you make a normal film, you start recording and you stop at the end of the catch. In our case, it was impossible: we had to capture the whole session since we did not know what was going to happen. If you have the impression that history is progressing in a very natural way, it is entirely thanks to the talent of Pinny riser.

There is towards the end a scene that stands out between your two avatars: you yell down because Sam spends all his time in the game, and you don’t see yourself when you are in a relationship and you live in the same house. Is it fiction?
PG: No way. It was a real argument, which I even shortened. It’s weird, everyone asks me if it’s staging. I don’t understand why.

Perhaps because the scene is very timely to make the film branch off and it becomes almost suspicious.
PG: I hear. In fact, Sam had really forgotten my birthday the day before, and we argued before falling asleep. I was more than grumpy, and I told him that I was not going to play the next day. When I woke up, it was already on the console, to buy planes and bullshit … so I launched the game to take it up. So, of course, the filmmaker in me said that it could make a good scene and that I had to record it in case. And then a completely objective documentary, it does not exist. If I hadn’t used the creative part of my brain, Grand Theft Hamlet would probably be a very, very bad film (Laughter.)

Grand Theft Hamlet, to see on Mubi.

Grand Theft Hamlet: the inevitable documentary that replayed Shakespeare in GTA (Critique)