Can you both introduce yourselves and share a little bit about your backgrounds?
Pinny Grylls: My name is Pinny Grylls and I’m a documentary filmmaker. I’ve been working in the industry for about 15–20 years, making lots of short films, mostly about theatre and performance. This is my first feature film.
Sam Crane: And I’m Sam Crane. My background is as an actor; I’ve worked a lot in theatre. This is also my first feature film.
G: We’ve never collaborated before, so this is the first time we’ve worked together – and we’re a married couple.
What sparked the idea to stage Hamlet in the world of GTA?
C: In March 2020, I had just started rehearsing for the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, playing Harry Potter. It was really exciting – we rehearsed for a week – and then the pandemic happened. Lockdown began, and everything shut down. Like everyone else, we were in this limbo of not knowing what was going on. For people in live performance, there was this real sense of existential crisis for theatre as a whole and for us as individuals.
G: As time went on, we thought it was going to be over, and things opened up briefly, then closed down again. Theatres never quite got going properly. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, this is bad. This is going to go on forever.”
C: Meanwhile, we were at home with our kids, trying to get out and go for walks. We’d ask them about what they were watching on YouTube or what interested them.
G: They were 10 and 12 at the time, on screens all day – either for school or hanging out with friends.
C: Our son told us about this YouTuber called Dream, who was doing storytelling in Minecraft on something called the Dream SMP, a multiplayer survival server. And he was doing these ongoing fictional narratives inside Minecraft. The fact you could do this in an online computer game blew my mind.
I started going down the rabbit hole of looking at role-playing inside online gaming, and discovered there were a lot of people doing similar things inside GTA. I started playing GTA with my friend Mark, who’s also an actor, and we thought about ideas for role-playing projects. We stumbled upon this in-game theatre and thought, “Why not stage a performance here?” There was something instinctively Shakespearean about the world of GTA.
G: It’s the rotten state of Denmark! Los Santos felt like the perfect setting for Hamlet. The themes of theft, betrayal and chaos all felt so fitting for the story.
C: There was this element of chaos that was really exciting. Me and Mark began experimenting, starting with the opening scene of Hamlet. A few people turned up – it was absolute carnage, but also really fun. That’s when we thought, “Let’s do a full production, find other people in the game, hold auditions, rehearse and see what happens.” Around that time, we realised this could also be a fascinating documentary to follow the process and see what happens.
G: With my background in making films about theatre and performance, and behind the scenes documentaries – I’ve made films with the National Theatre, Royal Opera House, BBC – I was already interested in that as a subject. It was a story that was literally boiling in my lap.
How did you adapt Shakespeare’s work to fit the digital environment of Los Santos?
G: Initially, they rehearsed in a space that was like the Hollywood Bowl – a kind of in-game theatre. But eventually, we thought, “We’ve got the whole game to explore!”
C: The game has such a rich environment with incredible locations – we wanted to use the game for what it had. We didn’t want to restrict ourselves to one theatrical location, amazing as it was. So then we decided to make it a promenade, site-specific production. That opened it up and it was a lot of fun using all of the game’s vehicles.
G: One standout scene was the ghost encounter. In the play, Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, and we decided to put it on top of a blimp.
C: One of the actors talks about it being the equivalent of doing a billion-dollar production of Shakespeare that could have only been done in the real world if Elon Musk decided to do it. It’s funny; you think Hamlet and GTA are poles apart, but there are real connections between them.
G: In the game, there are non-playable characters (NPCs) that act as background artists. We used them almost like audience members in the film, watching the performance. They’re quite emotional and vulnerable.
C: They’re just watching us perform, have discussions and arguments.
G: It is a documentary about us trying to stage our own personal lives. It isn’t just about Hamlet. I think people get mixed up about that.
Can you walk me through the process of creating a machinima-based documentary?
G: The film is shot entirely inside the game. From the start, we decided not to film anything outside or from our real lives. My favourite scene from my childhood is in Mary Poppins when they jump into the chalk picture and enter into this completely different world. I thought it was the most magical thing I’ve ever seen. This is what I wanted to do with the film.
But, of course, if you’re going to make a documentary inside a game, you need to make it cinematic. You need to make it engaging. The avatars are like puppets being manipulated by real people. We had to find a way of making them emotive and relatable.
Inside the game you have various options: you can either film yourself in the scene in front of you as an avatar with the other avatars, or you can do a first person view. The other thing you can do is use the game camera on your phone, and that allows you to make close-ups so you can develop a cinematic language and introduce something that feels like it goes beyond a YouTube video or footage of people playing games. I think that wouldn't have been very interesting for 90 minutes.
What were the most significant challenges during production?
C: When you're in the interior spaces of the game, you can't use your weapons and you can't kill anyone. There’s a scene where Hamlet has to kill Laertes. So we had to find a location that had a feeling of being inside, but wasn't. There were funny little things like how to have a fight between Hamlet and Laertes, where they don't actually kill each other – we wanted to be able to punch each other, but not actually die. We had to make sure we both ate enough snacks before that scene. In terms of the filming, though, I think the biggest challenge was the editing process, just because of the sheer volume of footage we had to get through.
G: We were filming absolutely everything; we were recording myself and Sam's game feed and sometimes Marks as well. And that meant that we had lots of choices. But in a way, we had too many choices. It was just a lot of footage to watch. I edited the film over the long, hot summer, and we had somebody help us as an edit assistant. There was a lot of chaotic footage that was mushed up and difficult to watch, so it was quite difficult to to find footage that told a story of what we were trying to do.
Why did you choose Hamlet specifically for this unconventional medium?
G: It was very much this place – the “rotten state” of Denmark and Los Santos that felt right for this staging.
C: There's also the fact that both Hamlet and GTA are both these huge cultural phenomena that mean something to people, even if they haven't seen them or played them. So people have these preconceptions about both. It's interesting to play with that and put the two together.
G: And to eradicate this hierarchy of high art and low art. We wanted to show that video games are incredible, and GTA in particular is very satirical, sophisticated and beautiful in the way that the light and landscapes are designed. It’s not just about speeding cars, there are so many layers to the game. We all know that Hamlet is a layered play and has many different kinds of interpretations and people write about it endlessly. But why can't we bring it together?
C: We wanted to challenge people's preconceptions and say that these are both equally valid cultural artefacts.
What do you hope audiences take away from the film?
G: The film is a lot of fun to watch. A lot of people have said to us that they didn't expect it to be so emotional and make them think about male mental health as much as it did. “Many watch it because they don’t know what it is, and I think they are really curious. If they haven’t played the game before, I hope they see games differently and the communities within them. And if they have a preconception about Shakespeare, I hope they feel differently.
C: I hope that maybe people can think about it, and see you’re doing a Shakespeare production inside a video game, and think okay, that's very technological, very contemporary. When Shakespeare was first performed, it was popular entertainment, it was very rough and bawdy, and there was reverence to it. I hope that people can take away some of the reverence that’s attached to Shakespeare, and people can see it for something that’s fun and a bit naughty.
Grand Theft Hamlet is out now in UK & Irish cinemas, released by Tull Stories, then streaming globally on MUBI in early 2025.