Festival

EXCLUSIVE: Riz Ahmed was after the Crown Jewels. Along with filmmaker Aneil Karia and screenwriter Michael Lesslie, he wanted to take Hamlet, the most iconic of British plays, and do it about Britain today from the perspective of South Asian Hindu culture.

It’s their up-to-the-minute version of Shakespeare’s centuries-old tale about a troubled Danish prince who is visited by the ghost of his dead father who asks him to avenge his death and follow the trail of blood all the way to his supposed favorite uncle, Claudius.

To cap it all, Claudius has gone and married his late brother’s wife.

None of that’s new. We know that story. We’ve seen the stage productions. Some were godawful, but in my time, I have seen Jonathan Pryce, Kenneth Branagh, Ben Wishaw, Rory Kinnear and a handful of others excel. Benedict Cumberbatch starred in what was known as the “Barbican Hamlet” at the Barbican in London. 

It was a production of such gargantuan proportions that the poetry was squeezed out of it.

This film adaptation is the complete antithesis. It’s lean, mean and dangerous. The filmmakers have stripped it back so that cinemagoers will see only what the title character does. Lesslie assures that, while the tale has been set in an area of London inhabited by those from the global south, the verse has not been tampered with. This was strictly adhered to when I visited the set on a snowy, freezing-cold day way back in late December 2023.

For starters, the ensemble was made up of top-flight actors who knew their way around the Bard’s verse. 

Ahmed’s Hamlet was challenging his mother, Gertrude, played by Sheeba Chaddha, about her seemingly sudden decision to marry Art Malik’s Claudius. Then he was having a go at Timothy Spall’s cunning Polonius while Joe Alwyn’s smooth Laertes was waiting to wade in.

We were in this ugly, sprawling mansion located on the outskirts of Guildford, Surrey. Away from the main property was a pool house reached via brick steps covered with grit to prevent us slipping on any icy bits. This reporter, in a most ungentlemanly fashion, did go — as one crew member put it — “Arse over tit.” I jumped right up because the last thing a reporter wants to be on a film set is a dickhead invalid.

In any case, there was something appealing about being in this Succession-like, almost Trumpian estate. It made sense because in this version, Hamlet’s father, Old Hamlet, is a reviled real estate tycoon who founded the Elsinore Construction Group. Old Hamlet’s retainers acquired crumbling public housing estates turning out occupants enabling them to build showy apartments for cash buyers.

Both Ahmed and Karia spoke of family members having seen ghosts at funeral ceremonies, which made sense of the visitations Hamlet’s father makes after death.

Lesslie notes that the juxtaposition of “heightened spiritual poetry and the banality of everyday London” makes perfect sense when key characters are of South Asian backgrounds.

Living in an area of London, as I do, where there’s representation from all parts of Asia, the film reflects a city of vibrancy with menace not far beneath the surface. 

For instance, the character of stately soldier Fortinbras has been upended by BAFTA winner Jasmine Jobson. Now Fortinbras is the leader of the militant opposition to Elsinore Construction Group’s lack of concern about making thousands homeless.

In the late ’90s, says Ahmed, sitting in the pool house between scenes, he won a place at a private school. It was a time, the actor recalls, “where you had this generation of children of immigrants entering institutions like that. And there were these growing pains and there were these clashes.”

But there was a teacher — ”a Jewish guy from Wolverhampton who spoke Punjabi” — and he took Ahmed and two other pupils under his wing for English. They studied Hamlet, and Ahmed related to the idea of how “a lot of people kind of develop an obsession with his play in their adolescence because it’s about how it feels to be misunderstood and having to compromise and live in a kind of corrupt society or system, or be surrounded by values that are not aligned with your own.

“And for whatever reason, the world that I’ve grown up in is one where that conflict still remains, I think, for me and for many other people,” he explains. “Just how connected I felt to it emotionally, how much the themes of the play connect to some of the societal struggles we’re seeing where people feel like we’re in a system that is not responsive to our needs, that is corrupt, that we need to push back against.”

There was, he adds, “that personal thing, that societal thing, but then also a cultural thing came in for me where for a lot of these classic, these canonical stories, it’s actually immigrant cultures or cultures in the global south that can bring them to life in the most immediate way.

“Because for us spirits of your dead relatives, that’s real. We grow up within those belief systems of who you can and can’t marry based on their family background, which is the thwarted romance of Romeo and Juliet or of Ophelia and Hamlet. That’s real for people today.”

And to the point of the play’s narrative where Hamlet’s uncle Claudius marries Gertrude, Ahmed states that he knows “people who’ve married their sister-in-laws after their brothers have died. It’s a cultural tradition. It’s how you take care of the kids.”

The version of Hamlet that’s been bubbling inside Ahmed since his senior school days receives its world premiere Saturday at the Telluride Film Festival. 

Ahmed and Lesslie both were at Oxford but barely knew each other during their college days. However, they linked up when legendary theater producer Thelma Holt was the Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford, and she sent a group to Japan to perform Shakespeare. Several years later, Lesslie’s play The Prince of Denmark, a prequel to Hamlet, opened in London to great success. 

Ahmed saw it and decided that he wanted to collaborate with Lesslie on a Hamlet film.

Originally, it was set up at Netflix. This was before they had a production hub in London.  

The deal fell through following a change of personnel at Netflix in L.A. The new people there weren’t interested in a costume drama “with verse,” Lesslie explains.

The rejection, Lesslie insists, did them a favor. That’s when they approached BBC Film and the BFI. Not long after, Ahmed made the Oscar-winning live short The Long Goodbye with Karia.

It was his use of handheld cameras and direct, in-your-face style that appealed to Ahmed and Lesslie. 

Karia also knew about ghosts. “That was a breakthrough,” the director says. “I went to many more Hindu funerals than I did British funerals when I was a kid.”

It was during a ritual at a house, “and it was the moment the soul was supposed to be released, and a cousin of mine felt that the spirit had actually taken house inside her, and it was a very intense experience for her.”

Karia didn’t share the years-long obsession with Hamlet in particular and Shakespeare in general. “I thought it felt British, I thought it felt establishment. It felt impenetrable in its sort of complexity and language.” But when he revisited Hamlet later, it didn’t feel so uncomfortable.

He liked how amazing the screenplay read and “found myself connect to it in a very different way.”

Karia says that as he read the script he was pleasantly surprised how “relevant and modern” it was in its themes.

“Here’s someone who’s coming back, who feels estranged from their family, where the corruption and grubby ethics of it all feel so shamelessly out in the open.”

Also, it was “quite useful” that Karia didn’t have that “reverential relationship with it. I could be a little bit carefree in my suggestions.”

It took them awhile to come up with the cinematic language that allowed a sense of a camera showing us what Hamlet saw and not scenes that he hadn’t witnessed himself.

One of this Hamlet’s signature moments is the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy.

All three of them — Ahmed, Karia and Lesslie — came up with a variety of ways of staging that moment.  

Ahmed says that sometimes “we can fall into the tradition of the traditional way of doing things.”

He cites the famous essay “The Quality Most Needed” written by the extraordinary American stage and silent-screen star Laurette Taylor in 1914, where she dared thespians to use their imaginations and not to overly concern themselves about physical beauty or personality.

Actors often can fall into the patterns of doing things how they’ve been done before. “So what we end up doing,” says Ahmed, “is paying an homage to the way that things are done rather than really, really getting back into the DNA of something. … There’s so many incredible interpretations of this character, of his story that continued to inspire me. But my own interpretation was, it is not so much a soliloquy. That’s an introspective moment of ‘should I live or not?’“

A year spent studying Shakespeare under Rob Clare at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama allowed him to poke around the text and fully comprehend the “To be, or not to be” scene. 

I won’t spoil what they’ve done with it, but it’s an electrifying moment. BBC Film chief Eva Yates was on set the day I visited. We shared a vegetarian curry on the train home with set publicists from Premier Communications, and Yates told me to look out for what the filmmakers had done with “To be, or not to be.”

It’s certainly an unforgettably hair-raising sequence. It works too. I saw the film back in London and I’ll see it again here, but I’m fascinated to see it again with a younger audience in the UK, to see how they react not just to “To be, or not to be” but to the film overall. It’s not for old codgers who expect conformity and cardboard stiffness.

We talk about Baz Lurhmann’s Romeo+Juliet and how that cut through the stiffness. 

There’s something in “the DNA of these stories that is so mythic and timeless and potent and powerful that if you can really kind of step into it, it can really speak to people and speak to our time. He mentions that when Romeo+Juliet came out, the No. 1 album in the world was Spice Girls’ Spice. 

“And now today we are making Hamlet,” he says as we ate snacks in the pool house near Guildford. “I remember when we finally got the green light to make this, the No. 1 album was Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale &  the Big Steppers. And it kind of spoke to me about a kind of cultural shift whereas back then, Romeo + Juliet and the kind of poppy romantic feel of it was the Zeitgeist feel, but like now we are in a time that is more introspective, that is perhaps brooding with discontent and wants to find a place to put that and push back.”

I ask Ahmed to comment on Hamlet’s family and how his father is this greedy developer and how that might come across. In short: Old Hamlet’s a bad guy when, perhaps, he could have been painted in a slightly less harsh way.

As soon as I’d made my point, I realize how soft it sounds.

“ I’d like to think that all these characters are so nuanced,” Ahmed responds. “That’s the thing about stepping into material like this. This would be a more three-dimensional, complex portrayal of characters of  color. … I certainly don’t think it’s about goodies and baddies. 

“I think that this material is much more rich and much more layered than that,” he argues.

“But speaking to your point of immigrants climbing a greasy pole, climbing a ladder of corruption in order to enrich themselves and maintain their own status at the expense of others like them, is that something that is real sometimes for some people. … Is it because they’re evil people or is it because we’ve created a system whereby your own safety and security is often premised on denying someone of their own of theirs? I think so, yeah. “

He feels there’s a critique of the heart of this play. “Hamlet is full of his own self-criticism. It’s a critique of our own moral compasses. It’s our own inability to act. It’s a societal and systemic critique. But I think a question really at the heart of this version — and I think that’s really alive in the play — is, to what extent are you complicit in the stuff that you disagree with?”

Well, that’s why I love Shakespeare. His work can fit into any age and any culture. And now and again, it’s good to see a movie where I imagine folk are going to have differing points of view. Yeah, let’s fight — sorry, argue about Hamlet.

Hamlet is a BBC Film and BFI production and producers include Ahmed, James Wilson, Michael Lesslie, Allie Moore and Tommy Oliver.