An existential crisis triggered by the pandemic led the couple formed by the filmmaker Pinny Grylls and actor Sam Crane, both British, to enter the world of video games online and weigh the possibility of setting up a play inside of one of them. And not any work and not any game: Hamlet in Grand Theft Autoat various levels two icons of culture arising in the United Kingdom. The result of this adventure is the documentary Grand Theft Hamletwhich can already be seen on the MUBI platform and that was recorded entirely inside the video game.
It all started with a talk with his 12 -year -old son during a walk through a park. He told you about the YouTuber Dream, who made a kind of live presentations within Minecraftanother of the popular video games online. Together with actor Mark Osterveen, Sam created his avatar and went to explore Grand Theft Autovideo game created in 1997 and that is one of the most popular, controversial and well qualified by critics and gamers.
“The theaters were closed and there was no way to make movies that we could see. And in our various professions it seemed that we had to do something to fill this emptiness – says Pinny in an interview. And I suppose we were also interested in knowing what people were doing online. It seemed that there was a potential to do theater inside computer games. And Sam has been theater actor for many years and has interpreted Shakespeare a lot; He feels a great love for Shakespeare, just like Mark. And he simply said: ‘Why not? Let’s try. Even if I give myself, I could also do it. ‘ I had nothing to lose with the pandemic. ”
Sam captivated the freedom that is experienced in the game in which it is basically about making a career in the fictional criminal world in which it develops. “Personally I felt that immense sense of freedom, that feeling that you can do anything,” says the actor who plays Harry Potter in Harry Potter And the Cursed Child in the West End–. It was a kind of counterpoint to how we felt in real life when you could not do anything. There were so many current restrictions. And suddenly you are in this world and all kinds of possibilities seem to open. And then we see this theater space. And you just think, well, we can do it. This is amazing. This freedom and opportunity that exists within this world. ”
Mark and Sam, recorded by Pinny’s avatar, gave themselves the task of looking for locations, found the theater and even summoned a casting that surprisingly came interested. And although they had to fix them to avoid the attacks of other players and the video game, they formed a theatrical company within the game, they made tests and made the virtual assembly in 2022.
Sam says there were many reasons to choose Hamletone of William Shakespeare’s classic works. “The way Hamlet expresses in the work and how he thinks about the world seemed to coincide with what he was seeing in the world of Grand Theft Auto. You see these types of beautiful sunsets there. And he made me think of when Hamlet says ‘this majestic roof adorned with golden fire’. And then you turn the corner and someone explodes a truck with a role -playing game. And it is like ‘this pestilent congregation of vapors’. Seemed very similar to Hamlet. Words seem to flow very naturally in this world. And I think there is also the fact that GTA It is such a massive cultural phenomenon. Everyone knows. Everyone has an idea about it, even if they have never played it. And I think that the equivalent of that in literature, in the theater, is Hamlet. It is the most famous work. So it was really interesting to join these two things that seem to have the same cultural weight, although opposite ends of a cultural spectrum are considered. ”
They recorded the game with a capture card that allowed them a high resolution recording. However, they faced the challenge of having 300 hours of recording because they captured everything. “This is not how a movie is normally made,” says Pinny, co -director of the project that took between 18 and 24 months to be carried out. “You usually decide in advance, you know, these are the scenes that I want to capture and I will film during two or three hours and I will edit that scene. And then you have a plan about what you need for your story. But we were literally filming everything we were doing. ”
So they worked with very chaotic images, saturated with voices and sounds, and in the meantime they looked for those they had, says more poetry. “And it was really quite difficult to find those moments in history.” He adds: “Sam had separate challenges when he was riding the production of Hamlet, but most of the time he discovered that the restrictions were actually very creative, that he had to work with the restrictions and that meant that he could find solutions that may not be They had happened before and that they did the most interesting work. ”
Grand Theft Hamlet It can already be seen in Mubi.
*Javier Pérez He reports, chronicle and interview, as well as film critic and coverage of cultural issues. Directs Hole. Nobody wants to accompany him to the cinema: he does not stop eating popcorn or talking about anything else.
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