A Conversation with Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls (GRAND THEFT HAMLET)

Grand Theft Hamlet is a groundbreaking documentary that follows 3 out-of-work British actors who, during the depths of the COVID-19 lockdown, attempted something unprecedented: staging Shakespeare’s masterpiece within the chaotic virtual world of Grand Theft Auto Online. Directed by Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, the film captures their ambitious journey to transform the game’s Vinewood Bowl amphitheater and the streets of Los Santos into a stage for the Bard’s most famous tragedy, recruiting an unlikely ensemble cast from GTA’s notoriously unpredictable online community.

The film, which premiered at SXSW 2024 to critical acclaim, artfully balances humor with unexpected poignancy as it explores themes of artistic expression, human connection, and the power of theater to transcend even the most hostile environments. Through Grylls’ skillful direction and editing of over 300 hours of in-game footage, the documentary captures both the absurdity of performing Shakespeare while dodging rocket launchers and the genuine moments of beauty that emerge when art finds a way to flourish in unexpected places. It was great to speak with Sam and Penny in the following conversation edited for length and clarity.

Hammer To Nail: What unique challenges did you face filming entirely within a video game environment? The camerawork is often erratic in game, could you talk about that process?

Penny Grylls: I had never been a gamer. I had no preconceptions going into the game. I was aware of my children watching game footage on youtube and it being quite hectic. They would just watch these endless streams of people playing games and it would always make me feel a bit sick. Maybe that was because I was old. When we jumped into the game one of the first things I thought about was how we could make it more contemplative, cinematic or just slow things down a bit. I became fascinated by the NPCs and wanted to film them. GTA allows you to go from third person to first person. It is easier to control the camera when you are in that first person mode. We needed a variety of shots though, so we used the in game camera that every character has on their phone. That way we could do close ups. Both Sam and I recorded footage and when we would review I would say, “Why are you always swinging around like that?!”

Sam Crane: I was trying my best! She was very mean to me all the time about it haha.

PG: We shot everything on the playstation. Nothing was modded, it was all very authentically game footage. Some of the footage they recorded before I got involved and they found the Vinewood Bowl was very much pure game footage, which I liked.

SC: The game is very chaotic but it is ultimately a beautiful world. In order for the audience to appreciate that beauty we needed to find this way to get a bit more contemplative with the shot making.

PG: We made this movie for people who do not like gaming as well. Anyone who has preconceptions like , “Oh it’s just a silly game that teenage boys play where they murder people and pick up prostitutes.” Yes, they do that but the world is so much more sophisticated than that. It’s very much a fan made film. We wanted to showcase just how amazing this show is.

HTN: Something I was really struck by was how this film revolves around Isolation and connection during COVID – yet it’s delivered through one of gaming’s most infamously hostile communities. Was that irony something you guys thought about?

SC: You do have this impression that it is a very hostile environment and you get a lot of people causing problems, but, what’s amazing is that you actually find community in there. Within the game there are people that want to support you and get involved with what you are doing. It is a way to connect with people.

PG: There was something deeply poetic about trying to get people to put down their weapons and listen to 500 year old poetry essentially. There is something lovely about that because it is the most hostile environment. It is such a distracting, hectic and crazy space and yet, we could deliver these lines and people would stop and listen.

SC: It is hopeful for humanity. If you can do that in the most hostile environment there is, maybe we can do that in the real world as well.

HTN: There’s a fascinating tension between the limited emotional range of game avatars and the depth of Shakespeare’s language. What was interesting to you guys about that contrast?

 PG: In a way they became like a Greek chorus; witnesses to what we were doing. They would turn up, hang around and obviously cower when we would mess around. I actually found them to be deeply emotional and tried to capture that a bit. You are right though, there is something interesting about their mouths not moving correctly. I do get a little annoyed when people comment about the mouths not lining up because that is exactly the point. It is not meant to be an animated film. It is not meant to be perfect.

HTN: The audition process is unlike anything you guys have been a part of.  What surprised you most about the people who showed up to participate?

SC: People’s personalities really came through. Everyone had something really different. You could get a sense of the real person behind the avatar.

PG: The Finnish Tunisian man who turned up, he spoke Arabic and did not want to give us any Shakespeare. He wanted to read from the Quran which was a beautiful thing. He was posturing and enjoying his alien suit. He was enjoying being someone else and now we are asking him to then perform from something.

SC: He was causing a lot of chaos and interrupting everyone and suddenly, when he was watching Lizzie’s audition he was completely transported. He was genuinely moved by it and we could see the impact the work was having on some of the attendees.

PG: We did not think there would be that many gamers who were also Shakespeare performers, but a few professional actors came around. They could control the avatar really beautifully. When we saw the auditions that was what gave us faith that this might actually work.

HTN: Los Santos is this incredibly detailed but fundamentally artificial space. How did staging Hamlet there change your understanding of the play’s themes about performance, reality, and madness?

SC: So often, people’s immediate response when they hear about this is to say, “oh that’s crazy.” Putting these two things together that are seemingly entirely separate and a total culture clash. There is an element of that but, there is also a lot to discover about the play through doing it in this world. Thematic things like revenge and people pretending things that they are not, stealing each other’s property etc.

PG: There was a young person who came to a screening of the film in London and he looked like a gamer because he had a lot of the GTA merch, and he had this tiny book of Hamlet in his pocket. I assumed he was there because of GTA, but he was this massive fan of Hamlet. He was so excited to see the play within the game. He was coming up with things that I had not even thought about like, Hamlet accidentally kills Palonious and in GTA that kind of thing happens all of the time. It was really strange doing the play within the game haha.

 

HTN: Can we talk about the music, it’s lovely and really drives home some of the emotion of this film. How did that process work?

PG: I am so glad you say that because we worked with composer Jamie Perera and he was so great from the very start. He asked us what movies/cultural references were most influencing the project. He was trying to get a hold of what the music had to be. Withtnail and I was one of the first references I gave him. I saw Sam and Mark as these two guys who were just trying to cope. They were confused in their lives not knowing where to go or what to do. He gave us a very beautiful soundtrack that was based off of that. We wanted it to feel like Thom Yorke/Radiohead while remaining British.

SC: It was a very collaborative process.

PG: I told him to look at Sunglasses Kid on youtube. He makes these 80s style songs and we wanted it to feel like an adventure from that time. He was very fast to come up with stuff and was just so creative.

SC: We did not want it to be standard to a documentary film as it is not at all a standard documentary.

 PG: I have been making documentaries for 15 + years. I always try to get creative in terms of what a documentary can be. One of the major themes is obviously layers of reality. A documentary is a representation of what really happened. There are a few cheeky scenes that play with that. When Sam calls the national theater and tries to email various people, we staged that in the game, but the call was real.

SC: We wanted to have fun with this world. It is a game and that is what games are for.

PG: We wanted people to watch and be confused as to what was real and what was not.

HTN: Definitely do not want to ask what was real what was fake as that takes away from the magic of this film.

 PG: The story is absolutely true though. The emotional reality of what we were going through was real. The struggle of doing the movie within the game and meeting all these new characters was very odd.

HTN: The artificiality of the game world seems to heighten rather than diminish the emotional authenticity for the topic of covid. Were you surprised by how real moments could feel? At what point in the process did you know this could work?

 PG: There is a moment where Sam and Mark are working out what t ‘to be or not to be’ means as a speech. Sam is desperately trying to find props/costumes to support his speech. Eventually he went into a dive bar and gave the speech off the cuff.

SC: I had been looking for a trick to find my way into it. Suddenly seeing all these NPC’s and their fear of us, them struggling with their lives and it became instinctive.

PG: The game became a mirror for what we were going through in our emotional lives. It was also a mirror for trying to put on a show and really connect with it.

SC: Having listened to Mark speak quite vulnerably about what he was going through.

PG: I remember Sam got home and I was like, “let me show you what I have been working on!” He watched and said, “That is the heart of the film.” The night before that I was really struggling with the edit. It was quite hard.

HTN: The way avatars move in GTA has this very specific weightless quality – almost dreamlike. How did you work with that unusual physicality to convey emotion when traditional acting tools weren’t available?

 SC: You could see having restrictions as quite frustrating, however, it also offers something special to that world. It is a representation of reality but it’s not real. There is something about it that makes it almost more real though. It’s like watching a puppet show. You can see the string and the herky-jerky movements and yet, the audience engages with the puppet all the more.

PG: That is why I kept the mouths of the actors not matched. I wanted there to be a dissidence in that.

SC: the surrealness of it all allows you to think on a higher level.

PG: David Lynch passed recently, I was a massive fan of his. We grew up watching and being absolutely gripped by Twin Peaks. His films are all about layers of reality, strangeness and dissidence, however, there is something very emotional about them! We wanted that.

 – Jack Schenker (@YUNGOCUPOTIS)