Riz Ahmed

This is about who you can and can't marry.

This is about everyone squabbling over the family business.

This is about the reality and lived experience of spirituality, ghosts and spirit possession, which is par for the course.

It's part of our lived experience culturally.

And this is also actually kind of pivots on a story point of marrying one's sister-in-law if your brother dies, which is a cultural tradition.

I think it's actually a Jewish tradition and an ancient Hindu and South Asian tradition.

I've actually grown up with people who've had to do that.

If their brother has died tragically, they themselves are unmarried.

with the consent obviously of of their sister-in-law and of the conversation that they have they go shall we get married it's a way of protecting the orphans and protecting the widow so this didn't feel like this antiquated kind of slightly um out of touch piece to me i was like if you put it in my community in my experience this is right now this is completely vivid and completely urgent and it was then at the age of 17 that i very precociously had the idea that man i want to

I want to make a movie of this one day and I want to set it in that place.

And in doing so, I hope to kind of render this story more vividly in a more urgent, modern way than maybe I've seen it and make it just make it feel real because all those things are so real in that environment.

You know, I really believe that the amount of time it took was kind of quite divinely guided in a way.

And that's because I feel that...

this is the moment for this story.

You know, it's a story, Hamlet is a story and it's a character who is grieving the illusion that the world was ever a fair place.

And I think that's how we're all feeling now.

We're all grieving and reeling from this realisation that, OK, I knew the world was unfair, but now the shameless, brazen unfairness of it is just kind of laid bare.

And it's about...

Grieving that illusion.

And it's also about feeling powerless in the face of how unfair it is.