Extracts from Richard E Grant's book The Wah-Wah Diaries and Martin Scorsese's film The Departed

Two different Hamlet sightings in as many days. I have of late been reading Richard E Grant's The Wah-Wah Diaries in which he describes the hair pulling exercise of making his directorial debut. On the 23 April 2004 he says:

23 April 2004

Read Hamlet - a man caught betwixt and between if ever there was one. His penultimate thoughts fir perfectly:

If it be now, 'tis not to come;
If it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.
Since no man knows aught of what he leaves,
What is't to leave betimes?
Let be.

5.30pm call from Marie-Catille. The film is fully financed and start shooting on 7 June! Levitated.

This is during a moment when the film could go either way. Marie-Catille is his producers and she's been something of a nightmare to deal with and because they're not really communicating the project could collapse at any minute. But I think he sense there's an inevitability that something will happen and that its beyond his control.

Then today, watching Martin Scorsese's The Departed I noticed this during a sting operations:

INT. COMMAND CENTER. CONTINUOUS

COLIN turns away from the activity.

COLIN:
Oh, my friends are still coming.

COLIN sees QUEENAN staring at him.

COLIN (CONT'D):
We'll just say lunch tomorrow. All right, bye.

COLIN ends the call. QUEENAN is there.

QUEENAN:
The readiness is all. You know the players, call the game.

COLIN:
Thank you, Captain.

He gives him the clipboard, Colin goes to the work area.

I'm not sure that the sense is thematically keyed into the scene -- but it is part of a screenplay that's replete with Shakespearean allusions both in the dialogue in the whole sense of the story. Without hopefully spoiling anything it seems to run the flip side of a problem play -- instead of slipping from tragedy to comedy, the film flows inextricably the other way.