“There Was a Fair Amount of Us All Killing Each Other”: Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls on Grand Theft Hamlet

Grand Theft Hamlet, which took the Documentary Feature Jury Award at last year’s SXSW, is groundbreaking cinema to say the least. The first documentary to win an Innovation Award at The Stage Awards in London back in 2022, the film’s production probably also marked the first time a filmmaker jumped into an online avatar and then shot her doc entirely within a video game (one in which conditions often resembled a war zone to boot). The project was born out of the UK’s third Covid lockdown in 2021, when abruptly out-of-work theater actors Sam Crane (who co-directed along with his veteran documentarian wife Pinny Grylls) and Mark Osterveen found themselves in existential distress, the former wondering how he’d support his young family, the latter physically and emotionally alone. Desperate for connection as many of us were, the two friends turned to Grand Theft Auto for camaraderie and escape, where one day they happened upon an amphitheater. Which led to a eureka moment that, safe to say, most of us never in a million years would have: Why not stage a full production of Shakespeare within GTA? Indeed, inside GTA all the world really is a stage. Which naturally only led to more questions (like how to cast a troupe. Or how to avoid getting gunned down during a soliloquy). Fortunately, Filmmaker was able to pose a few to the busy co-directors, both Oxford grads who cite Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I as a touchstone, to learn all about their inspired production process; and crafting a work perfectly balanced between the heartfelt and the poignant — while being also batshit crazy hilarious. Grand Theft Hamlet opens today in theaters from MUBI.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.