‘I Was Blown Away By Sheeba Chadha’

This Hamlet and most of the film’s characters are Hindus, so there is an elaborate wedding sequence with a baraat, dholki players, dancing baraatis, and a dance performance piece, set to the qawwali Mast Qalander.

Now, the two are back with their second collaboration, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . It is a contemporary take on the classic play, set in the heart of the South Asian community in the UK.

Karia directs the new Hamlet, retold entirely from the perspective of Shakespeare’s troubled character, who is thrown into doubt and ensuing madness upon encountering his father’s ghost. Did his uncle kill his father to marry his mother and take over the father’s real estate business?

Riz Ahmed, who plays the titular character, has been working on the film for years with his writer friend Michael Lesslie (he also scripted the 2015 production of Macbeth starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard). Ahmed and Lesslie are also the main producers of the film.

Art Malik (The Jewel in the Crown, True Lies) is cast as Hamlet’s uncle Claudius. Sheeba Chadha is terrific in the role of Hamlet’s glamorous mother Gertrude, who is deeply disturbed by her son’s emotional breakdown.

This Hamlet and most of the film’s characters are Hindus, so there is an elaborate wedding sequence with a baraat, dholki players, dancing baraatis, and a dance performance piece, choreographed by British Bangladeshi dancer Akram Khan and set to the qawwali Mast Qalander.

Art Malik as Claudius wears an elegant sherwani, while the bride Gertrude is dressed in a gold sari. They take pheras around the fire.

Hamlet delivers the most famous speech in the world To Be, Or Not To Be as he drives a speeding car through the streets of London.

Hamlet premiered last year at the Toronto and Telluride film festivals, and opened in the UK in February. It is now set for a US release.

Karia chats with Aseem Chhabra over Zoom, and says, ‘When I was in school and we would go on school trips to see Shakespeare plays, I felt I was quite far away from the experience, emotionally detached from it. I would be intellectually observing the plot unfold, but perhaps I was not emotionally there.”

‘To have you riding with Hamlet, breathing the air with him, and unraveling with him’

Aneil, you made The Long Goodbye with Riz and there was an urgency in that film, the story of working-class immigrants in the UK and the racism they encounter.
The Hamlet story is 400 years old and has been represented on screen and stage so many times. Yet, you took on the challenge to make it accessible and place it in the context of the South Asian community in the UK.

The two films are disconnected. I came out making a lot of short films that were semi-improvised and have this raw, instinctive sort of feel, where the camera follows the action, the dialogue is half formed and changes with each take. That was the case with The Long Goodbye.

I had written what you would call a ‘scriptment,’ rather than a script. It had the basic shape of each scene, but allowed a lot of freedom within it.

Moving into a Shakespeare adaptation was obviously very different because the text is very precise.

But the two films share the urgency that you mentioned. We wanted to bring this propulsive, visceral feeling to Hamlet.

The kind of Shakespeare we have been conditioned to is told in a more formal, structured way.

We thought it would be interesting to bring the singular, first person perspective to it and to root the viewer in Hamlet’s mind as he unravels. That felt interesting to us.

When I was in school and we would go on school trips to see Shakespeare plays, I felt I was quite far away from the experience, emotionally detached from it. I would be intellectually observing the plot unfold, but perhaps I was not emotionally there.

The MO with this film was to flip that and have you riding with Hamlet, breathing the air with him, and unraveling with him.I know Riz had worked on this project for several years while Michael Lesslie developed the screenplay. Was it their idea from the beginning to situate Hamlet within the South Asian community?

Riz and Michael went to university together (they attended Oxford University), and had worked on a Hamlet production there. They had this idea back then. Actually, Riz has a long relationship with Hamlet going back to when he was in school. He has always known that he wanted to make Hamlet.

Riz is South Asian, so it was clear that the Hamlet he would make would be rooted in the South Asian community.

I think at one point, they were thinking of setting it in India, but then they thought the British South Asian milieu may be the right path for this Hamlet.

‘I was completely blown away by Sheeba Chadha’

You cast one of the finest actors from India, Sheeba Chadha. I spoke to (casting director) Tess Joseph who worked on casting Sheeba. Were you familiar with her work and how did you direct her?

It feels criminal to say it, but I wasn’t that familiar with her work before. We worked with Lara Manwaring, a casting director in the UK, but knew we wanted to spread the net wider, particularly for Gertrude and Claudius, and also look for options in India.

We were lucky to work with Tess Joseph, who started by collecting tapes of some interesting Indian actors.

From the first moment I saw Sheeba’s tape, I was completely blown away. She seemed to embody the role in a very lived in and physical way, that was really striking. It didn’t feel like an actor performing this grand text. It felt like somebody living and breathing it. She brought power to it, but also this vulnerability and sensibility. I think she’s a remarkable actress.

So even when I went to India to look at actors, it was hard to imagine Sheeba not playing Gertrude because of the tape I had seen.

She was such a joy to work with. She’s a wonderful person. She thinks of it so deeply, not intellectually, but she is inside it.

Riz, as you probably know, has worked with her in the Amazon series Bait.

‘Riz is a ferociously intelligent guy’

Tell us about your working relationship with Riz. How do you guys both complement each other? How do you collaborate, intellectually on the sets?

Riz is an amazing guy, and an incredible actor. But he is also a ferociously intelligent guy with an amazing mind. His mind moves at one thousand miles per hour. He’s entertaining hundreds of ideas at one moment, and a lot of them are amazing.

I am probably operating at a slightly different frequency, but he would sound all these things out. I would filter them and we would figure out which ones were worth exploring and which weren’t.

I think we would also find a physical and emotional approach to this text and these characters.

He’s drawn to acting and filmmaking, but doesn’t intellectualise it too much.

I think it’s about embodying it and trusting, going with kind of gut, with heart, and he actually strips away the intellectual aspect of it. On set, he trusts you as a director. He gives himself to the process and will be led. There’s no ego on set. There’s also not much analysis on set.