Ink has hit London.
Danny Boyle and his starry cast, led by Jack O’Connell and Guy Pearce, took to the BFI London Film Festival carpet for the U.K. premiere on Monday night, around a month after it opened the Venice Film Festival.
“I expect the difference to be palpable,” began O’Connell, star of Sinners and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, to The Hollywood Reporter about finally putting Ink in front of its native audience. “It’s a London film. If it doesn’t work here, it’s not going to work anywhere.”
The movie, adapted from James Graham’s stage play, depicts Pearce’s Rupert Murdoch as he enters the British newspaper scene, acquiring the then-failing tabloid The Sun in 1969. Hiring Larry Lamb (O’Connell) as editor, the two combined far-right political reporting and populist rabble to turn the paper into a dark force in British media. Murdoch would take the lessons learned at The Sun and apply them to build his U.S. media empire with The New York Post and Fox News.
Backdropped by the smoky, seedy journalistic epicentre that is Fleet Street, O’Connell said he didn’t categorize the notorious Lamb as a “bad” person. “I think he was just perhaps overly ambitious,” said the star. “I think this guy was on a pursuit, or his obsession was newspapers, and I guess he broke a couple of rules along the way. And it wasn’t victimless, but yeah, I don’t consider him an out-and-out bad guy.”
Pearce, on the other hand, told THR he’s keen to meet up with Murdoch for brunch. He said about being cast as the Australian-born media mogul: “Liz [Murdoch] told me that her dad was happy with me playing him, but I don’t know to what degree that is. I can’t really speak to that, to be honest. He might watch the film and go, ‘Eugh! Jesus Christ, what were they thinking?’” He certainly thinks that the feature “will resonate” with fans in the British capital.
Boyle, director of Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire and 28 Days Later, said the film showcases an integral origin story that speaks to the sensationalism of our current climate. “You can argue about whether they introduced this entirely or whether they nurtured something that was latent within us,” he said to THR. “But it is the beginnings of the attention economy, of the clickbait economy, of the ‘What’s next? Swipe, move on.’ It’s the very beginnings of it there, the beginnings of the fire, and now it’s a bushfire that’s all around us, everywhere. And I don’t know whether we’re going to survive it… But if you want to understand it, I think there’s a very good case for this [as] the place where it began.”
Playwright Graham concurred with Boyle’s analysis, explaining that Ink is a deeply British piece of work. “I really believe that by drilling down into its Englishness and the ’60s, the people in America, Europe, everywhere will relate to this story, which is essentially a story about how a disruptive bunch of people in the ’60s turned something around,” he said. “[The Sun] was the worst-selling paper in England and [they] made it the biggest-selling paper in the world, and I feel like people will link that to what’s happening at the moment in tech and Silicon Valley and that culture of breaking things, disrupting things, challenging things.” (Boyle actually likened Lamb and Murdoch’s achievement of out-selling The Daily Mirror to “a local pub team beating Real Madrid.”)
The screenwriter continued about the unique beast that is Fleet Street: “No other country in the world has had its newspapers on one street with all the restaurants and bars and culture, and I feel like the richness of that and the seduction of that, but also the ugliness of that specificity, really appeals to people across the world.”
British star O’Connell, who has also collaborated with Boyle on the 28 Years Later films, jokingly said the director’s “gone quiet” about their next project together, though admitted they are “inseparable.” On which film from this year he’d have liked to have been involved in, the actor coyly confessed it’d be Martin McDonagh’s CIA tragicomedy Wild Horse Nine.
The 70th BFI London Film Festival runs Oct. 7-18, and opened with the European premiere of Andrew Scott’s tearjerker Elsinore. Some of the glitziest galas so far include Wild Horse Nine, Artificial, Paper Tiger, Possible Love, Bunker and La Bola Negra. Check out THR‘s Screen Talks coverage from this year’s London Film Festival and chats with Andrew Scott, John Malkovich, Javier Bardem, Naomi Ackie, Ava DuVernay, Cynthia Erivo, Sofia Coppola and Danny Boyle.