While many gamers are eagerly awaiting the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6, there’s still a ton of activity around the current iteration of the mega-blockbuster franchise. Fans are still role-playing on private servers, goofing around in the game’s online mode, or — in the case of two filmmakers — staging a film adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. Grand Theft Hamlet is co-directed by the married couple Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane. The movie was shot entirely within Grand Theft Auto Online during the global pandemic; it’s coming to select theaters in the United States and streaming globally.
The two directors of Grand Theft Hamlet were out-of-work actors playing GTA Online together during the lockdowns in the United Kingdom. After the usual amount of gunplay and antics, the two found a theatre in the game, and decided to stage a production of Shakespare’s Hamlet inside the game. The inherent difficulty in such a task is that GTA Online is a sandbox full of murderous drug dealers flying invisible motorbikes and dropping orbital strikes. Coordinating these players is a mean feat, and in the effort to do so, we can learn more about the digital worlds we inhabit and what they are capable of.
The documentary asks what is this space? How do we use it now and what else is possible inside it? Can we transport this ancient story inside a brand new one? And will it still make sense? The cinematic potential of Los Santos is immediately apparent, with its glittering, mind-blowingly detailed cityscape and surrounding countryside, the ray-traced rendering of light, ever-changing weather systems and intricate sound design. By using the in-game phone camera we were able to get intimate close ups and cinematic pans across landscapes – enabling a more cinematic visual language and moments of pathos, emotion and lyricism to exist within the chaos and violence of this undiscovered country.
There have been other notable collisions between the traditional world of theater and online gaming, such as the Wasteland Theatre Company and their plays conducted within Fallout 76. It’s always interesting to see how players find new angles and ways to interpret the world of GTA Online, or any online space, to tell their own stories.
