Catherine Hardwicke’s ‘Haml3t’ With Emile Hirsch Won’t Happen
Did we really need another film rendition ofHamlet? Probably not, but I’d be lying if I saidEmile HirchandCatherine Hardwicke’s “suspense thriller"take on the materialdidn’t intrigue me at least a little, if only to see how it’d turn out. Alas, looks like we’ll never know. For reasons that haven’t yet been made clear, the project is no more.
The Playlistreports the news, noting that the picture fell apart and will most likely not be made. But what was the cause? Did director Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown,Twilight) and the producers have troubleworking out a wayto make the play “exciting and accessible for an audience today”, or was the film simply too much of afinancial risk?
Last year, Hardwicke sounded confident thatHaml3twould come together, happily elaborating on the conceptual structure of it withMTV:
It’s a modern-day film, set at a liberal-arts college where words matter — so people are careful and talk in beautiful language, and Hamlet tries to express himself through music. So, we’re using some of the cooler Shakespeare language, in a musical way. [My Hamlet] is like an [aspiring] rock star. He’s got six people that go to his performances, go to clubs and listen to him. It’s like an early Kurt Cobain.
Emile Hirsch, who came up with the idea, said they were hoping to shoot in Boston in the fall, but that prospect obviously never came to pass. On the casting, he had this to say:
We want to lower the ages of everyone in the cast, make it much younger and see how that affects the story. Most of the ‘Hamlet’ [interpretations] onscreen are with much older casts, so we wanted to make everybody in college, set it at a college, make it really dark and gear it more towards young adults and young people and teenagers.
That was the plan, anyway.
Perhaps it’s for the best. Within the last 20 years, we’ve already seen Hamlet adapted for the screen three times, first with Mel Gibson and Glenn Close, then with Kenneth Branagh as both star and director, and most recently with Ethan Hawke—the latter of which was in itself a modern day reimagining of the classic play. It isn’t the only one, either. Shakespeare’s work has been updated for all sorts of modern settings: The Taming of the Shrew was adapted into10 Things I Hate About You, Othello intoO, Twelfth Night intoShe’s the Man, Macbeth intoScotland, Pa, and of course Romeo and Juliet intoRomeo + Juliet. Hirsch’s idea, while not without potential, is nothing new. It might’ve been an interesting curiosity, but does anybody feel like we’re really missing anything by not seeing it?
