Grand Theft Hamlet, a movie set entirely in the world of Grand Theft Auto Online, following the story of actors as they try to put on a performance of Hamlet within Los Santos and San Andreas, gives us a whole new look at filmmaking and storytelling within a game.
In a press junket with co-directors Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, we got the chance to ask about their opinions on storytelling within the games themselves, and whether they'd had their eyes opened to any great gaming stories through working on the film.
"There's so many different forms of storytelling," Crane said. "We've become more aware of video games and what you can do in them and what has been done in them. There's obviously some incredible kind of narrative-driven story games that do that really well, you know, like The Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption."
"But I guess we also really discovered the kind of possibilities of storytelling in online games," he continued. "You know, how they can be used for storytelling, you know, as a kind of platform storytelling and kind of community storytelling."
"The thing that online games offer you is, certainly in documentary work, is access to all this incredible variety of people," Grylls added. "And you can just meet every kind of person, really, in the same space."
Grand Theft Hamlet is available to stream now on MUBI.