00:00You know, there's a story about fatherhood as well.
00:02You know, it's about the absent father, about Hamlin not knowing what does it mean to be a man.
00:07He doesn't have a template present in his life to work it out.
00:10Do you turn the other cheek? Do you fight back?
00:12That's what to be or not to be is about, you know.
00:14And it's interesting because, you know, we're doing this play.
00:20It's about fathers and fatherhood and what is it to be a man.
00:23And both of us have just become fathers.
00:25And so in a way it was like the play was confronting us in real life with like what that means.
00:32You could see that energy, you know, it's on the screen.
00:35It's in the way we were shooting.
00:37It was fast. It was rough.
00:38It was, it had a kind of like broken down energy to it.
00:43You know, it was rough around the edges.
00:45It was, it brought something.
00:46Riz, did you ever have the, the same experience when you were younger of like,
00:54I'm not sure if Shakespeare is for me or was Shakespeare always for you?
00:58I kind of thought that it was something quite stuffy and old school and establishment,
01:03but there's something really raw and energetic about these texts.
01:06And I was lucky that I had a school teacher who gave me the play when I needed it most.
01:11I was a teenager going through a kind of rough time emotionally.
01:15And he showed me this play and I met this character, Hamlet, and it was so therapeutic for me.
01:21The way I was feeling in that moment had been described with such beauty.
01:27What I mean by that is I felt like, man, the world is a really unfair place.
01:31And the world is so messed up.
01:33Am I going crazy or has the world gone crazy?
01:34And that's how Hamlet feels really.
01:37I think that's how a lot of us are feeling right now.
01:39I think that's the interesting thing.
01:40I don't think that the text itself is establishment or stuffy or pompous.
01:46I think it's our conditioning of it through, you know, the treatment of it.
01:50And the fact that sadly cultural kind of institutions like theatre have this kind of elite feel,
01:56you know, which actually was not the case in Shakespeare's time, right?
02:00The globe was like full of just such a breath of humanity, right?
02:04Yeah, it was nuts.
02:05You just saw it in the final scenes of Hamlet.
02:08Don't ruin it for me.
02:09I haven't seen it.
02:09Yeah, I've not seen it.
02:11I didn't even realize everyone just stood around.
02:14Yeah, of course.
02:15And you could touch the stage.
02:16It was like more of a mosh pit.
02:17It was more like going to a gig, you know.
02:19And so it has that kind of democratic kind of energy to it, you know.
02:24There's poetry and there's kind of really like, you know, there's dirty jokes.
02:28There's a mixture of all of these things in Shakespeare because there's a mixture of all of those things in us.
02:33And so it's very human, you know, these plays.
02:36And Neil really kind of was adamant to bring that out with a lot of key decisions he made.
02:41Was this, percentage-wise, the most night shoots you guys have ever done on a project or?
02:51I mean, there was...
02:52It was most exhausted.
02:53Yeah.
02:54A lot of these events were taking place overnight.
02:56It also felt fitting for the kind of dark and lean and febrile energy that we wanted to bring to the adaptation.
03:06Time just, like, became this fluid kind of non-entity.
03:11It became this puddle of, like...
03:12Yeah, exactly.
03:13...vulnerability and, like, exhaustion.
03:16Yeah.
03:16One thing I've learned is that a story comes into being at the time when it's most needed,
03:23when the storyteller's most needed, when the audience is most needed.
03:25And I think there's no coincidence there's been a lot of kind of Hamlet stuff in the air right now.
03:29You know, we were at Telluride Film Festival and Oscar Isaac has a documentary where his wife Elvira has made
03:35about him playing Hamlet on Broadway.
03:37You've got Jesse Buckley, Paul Mescal, Chloe Zhao doing Hamnet.
03:41You know, Tom York from Radiohead has his own interpretive dance adaptation of Hamlet playing in the UK right now.
03:47We have our offering.
03:48So it feels like there's something in the culture right now, in the collective unconscious, that needs this story.
03:53So as much as I wanted this to be made ten years ago, I think this is the moment where we all need to look at this story
04:01and look at what it's trying to present to us.
04:05And it's my hope that either through our production or someone else's, by hook or by crook,
04:11people hear the message of this play because William Shakespeare was, I think he was on to something.
04:15We're only ever with Hamlet, really.
04:16So we're experiencing everything with him live.
04:20And hopefully that brings a kind of presence and immediacy to the story, which perhaps, you know, we're not entirely used to seeing.
04:30What is the most extreme or intense, like, place you've made something?
04:37It's interesting thinking about that.
04:39I'm not sure if you've seen it yet, but there's this huge wedding venue.
04:44We would call that like a business park.
04:45Exactly, yeah, yeah.
04:47So that was what was interesting because it's so unromantic and so brutal and yet kind of just incredible and striking.
04:55And we spent a long time there, you know, and it was kind of a fascinating place.
05:00But because of the setting, because of this ring road, it had an intensity.
05:05You can't really get any kind of peace there.
05:07Even if you go outside to get some air, it's like, you know, like all these lorries rushing past you.
05:12It's quite a mad place, isn't it?
05:14And also we were shooting such mad material in there.
05:16Most intense place I filmed was a film called Centurion that did with Michael Fassbender and where we're basically Romans who are behind enemy lines in Scotland.
05:28And what that meant is we were just halfway up a frozen mountain in Scotland, covered in snow, knee deep in snow, wearing those like Roman leather skirts.
05:39And because we were wearing period Roman stuff, like they didn't have socks, they didn't have boots.
05:44So we're just like in sand, just dying, just so intense, so cold.
05:50We did a couple of takes of that and we were like.
05:52But it probably puts you right in the correct headspace.
05:56You don't have to use your imagination.
05:57That's what the director was saying.
05:58Speaking to the director.
06:00That's all right to chat, yeah.
06:01Yeah, exactly.
06:01It's all right, use it, use it, use the pain.
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