Grand Theft Hamlet tells the story of a small crew trying to do a big thing in the strangest of places. Now streaming on Mubi alongside a limited theatrical run, the documentary follows Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, two 40-something British theater actors out of work due to the pandemic, as they try to stage an entire production of Hamlet within GTA Online’s sprawling digital simulacra of Los Angeles, known as Los Santos. We watch Sam, Mark, and Pinny Grylls, a documentarian (and Sam’s wife), as they try to explain the concept to online strangers, hold auditions, scout locations, run through rehearsals, and grow increasingly obsessed with the production — all while dealing with a Los Santos full of players contextually conditioned to kill everyone they see.
What transpires is a charming and deeply affecting snapshot of making art in a universe seemingly designed against the notion. It’s also a documentary about the texture, beauty, and comedy of life in digital worlds, a quality underscored by Grand Theft Hamlet being entirely composed of in-game footage, Machinima-style. At one point, for example, Sam and Mark encounter ParTebMosMir, a chaotically inclined player who doesn’t really speak the same language as the crew or seem to understand what they’re trying to do. But for some reason or another, he helps the production out anyway. There’s something poignant in watching strangers come together over a community-art project in an unlikely space. Hilarious, too, because those strangers often embody bizarre avatars; look at ParTeb, who takes the form of a suggestive-looking green alien. “Honestly, we weren’t trying to be funny,” says Crane. “We were very sincere about what we’re trying to do. We were desperately trying to make this work.”
Grand Theft Hamlet opens in January 2021 as the U.K. was enduring its third lockdown, and things were dire. We get some of this in the doc, but could you tell me more about where your lives were at the time?
Oosterveen: We were in a worried place. Sam and I had been actors for about 15 years. We mainly worked in theater, which obviously closed during the pandemic. There were tentative reopenings, but by the time we went into the third lockdown, there was this feeling that this space where we got the majority of our income was possibly going to be shut off indefinitely. I was also going through a difficult time personally. My father had passed away a year or so before that, and I’d been dealing with the fallout. My New Year’s resolution in 2020 was actually to get back on with life. Then the funniest thing happened in February 2020, you know? So in short, not great.
Crane: Things were looking pretty good for me before COVID, actually. I was just about to start rehearsals for this massive West End show. I was playing the lead. Then boom, everything collapsed.
Grylls: Once the pandemic started, it was difficult to see how a documentary filmmaker could operate in this new world. I had made films about the arts — theater, ballet, performance — so I wasn’t sure what I could do next. Then I started watching Sam and Mark mess around inside Grand Theft Auto. They were making little experiments. They found the Vinewood Bowl Theater, and they did the opening scene of Hamlet to the couple of guys who tried to blow them up. They were kind of just playing around with this idea. They started recording quite early on what they were doing, which is why there’s some footage from before I joined them.
I remember looking over Sam’s shoulder and was like, “Are you actually going to do Hamlet, the whole show? Maybe we could follow this and make it into something.” So we pitched it to BFI Doc Society, and bizarrely, they gave us a small amount of money to make a short film. Of course, once we started shooting it, we were like, “Well, actually, this feels like a longer story.”
So you were already recording stuff?
Oosterveen: Yes. We had seen videos of streamers playing video games online, and I figured there was something we could do. Maybe YouTube skits or something like that. We tried this whole football-analysis show in GTA.
Oosterveen: We did a modern dance piece.
Crane: We were just messing around. A lot.
Oosterveen: We had no deadline at that point. No looming performance date. We didn’t have to take anything seriously — we’re in lockdown, so we thought we might as well just dick around for a while.
Grylls: You all were having so much fun, too, just finding random people and going up to them and asking if they wanted to do something Hamlet. It was kind of a joke at first, if I’m honest. And then it got serious.
Was there a specific moment that convinced you this was an interesting experiment?
Oosterveen: It was when we first did that scene at the Vinewood Bowl and the police started interrupting. When you do live theater, there’s electricity in the room if you’re performing and something goes wrong. Your heartbeat quickens. Everybody onstage and in the audience is suddenly like, Oh shit, what’s going to happen? But you have to continue.
Crane: That’s when I started talking to Pinny about it, and she immediately thought it could be an interesting documentary.
Grylls: I just knew I hadn’t seen anything like it before. Also, we all lost our jobs. If it doesn’t work, so what? That’s such a rare thing for an adult to feel. When you were a kid, or in college, you could play these imagination games. You can do silly things without feeling like it could be the end of the world. For a moment, we had that again, which was one of the weird gifts that the pandemic gave us.
Crane: I totally agree. One of the few things the government did well at the time was initiate some support for freelancers and people who were laid off from work. It took too long, and it was not available for everybody, but we were lucky in that we were given a small amount of support. That meant we didn’t have to think, How am I going to buy food for me and my family this month? This is actually an argument for universal-based income, and certainly an argument for having support in place for artists so they don’t have to immediately think about how to make their work economically successful. Because that’s not the way to make original ideas and ways of doing things.
One of the things that fascinated me is how it’s basically a story about trying to make art in a world that’s designed to be rotten and violent.
Grylls: That’s exactly why it was so exciting to try making theater like this. Because, literally, during Shakespeare’s time 500 years ago, they were less reverent about theater. You would’ve done a performance at the Globe and someone would be lobbing apples at you if you weren’t any good. So you had to be really good. It was also really violent at the time. People would be fighting and killing each other in the background.
Crane: It’s a very basic challenge when, as a performer, you have to think, Is this person going to shoot me?
Grylls: The moment I felt this was going to work was when Lizzie Wofford, who plays Gertrude, auditioned. She’s a professional actress and a voice artist, but she’s also a gamer. I had doubts, to be honest, about whether it was possible to do voice work while controlling the avatar, because you have to work with a limited list of emotes and gestures. So I thought it wasn’t going to work because they’re not going to move their avatars while voice-performing Shakespeare at a high level — but she did it beautifully.
Tell me more about the technical aspect. How does performing actually work? How tightly did you script it?
Oosterveen: Scripting is all we did in rehearsals, actually, which you don’t get to see much of in the documentary. We’d get actors in, go through the script with them, and try out different things while Sam and I would figure out what worked from an audience perspective.
Grylls: I regret not putting more of the rehearsal elements in the film.
Oosterveen: The performance is a lot like puppetry. That style of acting, you’re often told to forget acting completely and just focus on the puppetry movement. If you’re a good actor, the acting will seep into the motions you’re doing. Nick, have you played GTA before?
Oh yeah. What seems extra hard to me is how the avatars, in general, are really hard to control with any precision.
Oosterveen: Yes, it’s very loosey-goosey. So you really need to be on that. And in particular, the emotes, the little gestures, are difficult because you can only do one of them at any fixed period. To change it, you need to go into a dropdown menu, scroll down to the right emote, and then manually scroll across for a different emote. While you’re performing your lines. It’s crazy.
There’s also the challenge of figuring out the camera work for the doc. How did you approach that?
Grylls: It was about figuring what options you had. I wanted it to feel authentic, as if you were in the game, but I wanted to also have a stillness to some of the imagery. One of the most useful things Grand Theft Auto allows you to do is get a first-person point of view, so you can get rid of your avatar while allowing a certain amount of movement. I found the best way to do that was to use the in-game phone, because it had a camera feature that lets you choose the size of the shot. So you can do closeups, which introduces a certain intimacy. I think what makes it a film, rather than gameplay footage, is how we can switch between different-size shots and also different moving shots.
Oosterveen: I think I filmed some of the best stuff, personally.
Grylls: I’m sure. When I actually get down to making an edit of the actual performance, I’m going to be looking at your footage, and I’m sure it’s going to be amazing.
Oh, so you’re cutting together the actual performance? That’s great, because I couldn’t find the original production online.
Crane: It’s on our list of to-dos. We really want to make it available as an educational resource so people can watch it as a production. Say you’re studying Hamlet at school or university, you could watch, say, the Laurence Olivier film, the Kenneth Branagh film, and then our performance as well. I think that’ll be really cool.
Grylls: The performance was up on YouTube for a bit, but due to negotiations over the sale of the film, we had to take everything down.
I wanted to ask about a specific choice. While most of Grand Theft Hamlet is documentation of what’s happening in-game, there were scenes that involved real-world happenings: Sam calling the National Theatre, for example, and also bits that convey how there was some conflict in your marriage, Sam and Pinny, because of Sam’s obsession with the production. Some of those scenes tracked to me as maybe a little staged, or as if they were reenactments. What was the approach there?
Grylls: The National Theatre scene was a bit of a joke on our part: obviously, he wasn’t calling them using a phone in the game.
Oosterveen: We used the real audio from that call. We just showed something else onscreen, which is something every documentary does … that’s what editing is in-game, right?
Grylls: Stuff like that pisses some people off, but I think it’s a really interesting part of the filmmaking: There’s a texture where the film is about different layers of reality. There are scenes that are genuinely real, like Mark talking about the meaning of Grand Theft Hamlet. That happened as we were having a long chat about what he was going through. All the auditions were real. My argument with Sam — a lot of people think that wasn’t real, but it was. It was a continuation of an argument we’d had in real life the day before, because he’d been in Grand Theft Auto all day, and then when I went into the game at seven in the morning and he was still on even though I told him off the day before because he missed my birthday, you know? So that was a real thing. I think people are a little bit suspicious sometimes when they watch it because it feels like it’s an animation film or something, and they think it can’t be real.
Crane: As Pinny mentioned, this whole thing is about the different layers of reality. There’s the reality of Hamlet in medieval Denmark. There’s the reality of Shakespeare writing in 16th-century England. Los Santos is a digitally created world, but it has its own reality. And then there’s the reality of us in the pandemic, and all these things feed together in a messy way.
So Grand Theft Hamlet is really funny in a rather particular way. I was wondering if you could describe the texture of its comedy?
Oosterveen: I have a pretentious answer: It’s very Shakespearean. Almost all of Shakespeare’s plays have literal comic characters whose entire purpose is to come on and be funny. Often it’s two people, and if it’s two people, they are always one thing and another thing: tall and short, rich and poor, smart and stupid. The contrast is the whole point. So I think a lot of the humor in Grand Theft Hamlet comes from this: You have two posh-sounding English people trying to do Shakespeare while somebody comes up and goes, “Motherfucker, I’m gonna kill you.” And you’re like, “Whoa there.” Then there’s a quality where it’s a clash between what’s perceived to be high art (Shakespeare) and low art (violent video games), cultured and uncultured, very old and very new. We didn’t do this deliberately, but it is a very Shakespearean device.
Crane: I don’t know. We were having fun doing it, but we weren’t trying to be funny. We were actually very sincere about what we’re trying to do. Maybe that’s why it’s fun. We were desperately trying to make this work.
Grand Theft Hamlet ends with the production being recognized at the Stage Awards. Then, of course, the doc itself goes on to get into SXSW, where it gets this huge response and wins the top documentary prize. How do you feel about all this?
Grylls: It’s all a bit surprising. Winning the prize at SXSW was very surprising.
Crane: We thought the film we made was really fucking great, but we truly didn’t know if anyone else was going to like it because it’s quite weird.
Oosterveen: I liked seeing two disparate groups appreciating the film for different reasons. People who were into Shakespeare with no knowledge or, let’s be honest, respect for video games leave with a newfound appreciation. People coming as gamers who maybe came in because they were impatient for GTA6 thinking Well, this Grand Theft Hamlet thing will do for now, then coming out with, like, Hey, you know what? I used to hate studying Shakespeare in school, but this made me think about him differently. I love that.
Grylls: One thing that stuck with me is someone who came up to us after a screening and said, “Hey, my son is autistic, and he plays games all day, and I never really understood why he enjoys himself so much. I never really understood he had those friends in the game. Then I saw your film and realized I should talk to him about gaming differently.”
I have to ask about ParTeb. Did you ever meet in-person?
Crane: There’s this thing, right, you play games like this and have relationships with people in the game, and it’s a very real relationship that you have with people — and it exists in its own right. I’ve never met ParTeb in real life. Maybe one day we will, but I don’t know. In some ways, I feel it’s enough. What we had in-game was so beautiful and special.
Oosterveen: I don’t ever want to meet ParTeb. I thought he was a nightmare to work with. He comes across really well in the film, and everyone remembers him because he’s so funny, but what a pain in the ass.
Grylls: I’d love to meet him.
Oosterveen: You guys can hang out with him.