Director Aneil Karia and Riz Ahmed chat about personal connections to their film 'Hamlet' at THR's TIFF lounge at the 1 Hotel Toronto. While also dissecting how they were able to reimagine Shakespeare's 1623 play in the present-day context and culture.
00:00You know, there's a story about fatherhood as well.
00:02You know, it's about the absent father, about Hamlet 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 can 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.
00:46It was really hard to think.
00:50Riz, did you ever have the same experience when you were younger of like, I'm not sure if Shakespeare is for me or was Shakespeare always for you?
00:57I 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.
01:07And 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 and the world is so messed up.
01:33Am I going crazy or has the world gone crazy?
01:35And 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 the treatment of it and the fact that, sadly, cultural institutions like theatre have this kind of elite feel, which actually was not the case in Shakespeare's time.
02:00The globe was full of just such a breath of humanity.
02:04It was nuts.
02:05You just saw it in the final scenes of Hamlet.
02:08Don't ruin it for me. I haven't seen it.
02:09I don't know.
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.
02:20And so it has that kind of democratic kind of energy to it.
02:24You know, there'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.
02:37And 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?
02:49I mean, there was...
02:52I was exhausted, I think.
02:53Yeah.
02:53A 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.
03:10Like in this puddle of, like...
03:12Yeah, exactly.
03:13Vulnerability and, like, exhaustion.
03:16Yeah.
03:17One 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 10 years ago,
03:58I think this is the moment where we all need to look at this story and 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.
04:17So we're experiencing everything with him live.
04:19And 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'll call that like a business park.
04:45Exactly.
04:46Exactly.
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.
05:17Most 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.
05:29And 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.
05:53But it probably puts you right in the correct headspace.
05:56You don't have to use your imagination.
05:58That's what the director was saying.
05:58Speaking to the director.
06:00That's the director chat, yeah.
06:01Yeah, exactly.
06:02Yeah.
06:02It's all right, use it, use it.
06:04Use the pain.
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