The 83rd Venice Film Festival got off to a rousing start Wednesday evening with the warmly received world premiere of Danny Boyle’s propulsive Rupert Murdoch drama Ink from Netflix.
As the lights came up inside Venice’s Sala Grande, with stars Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy seated alongside their director, the black-tie crowd rose for a four-minute standing ovation in a warmly-received moment. After the cast exited, there was a bit of drama near the front of the theater as an unidentified man was suffering from a medical emergency and personnel were called in for help. As of press time, his condition was unclear.
Set in 1969, Ink chronicles Murdoch’s acquisition of the struggling British newspaper The Sun and his recruitment of editor Larry Lamb to reinvent it as a populist tabloid capable of overtaking the dominant Daily Mirror. Pearce plays Murdoch, with O’Connell as Lamb and Foy as Jules Davies. The film traces the creation of a formula built around sensationalism, celebrity, sex and an instinctive feel for readers’ baser instincts — an approach that would transform The Sun into Britain’s bestselling newspaper and presage many of the forces that later reshaped global media in the Murdoch model.
A still from Ink featuring Pearce and O’Connell. In his review, THR’s chief film critic David Rooney calls it an “irreverent and inventive recap” of what Murdoch created.
Courtesy of Netflix
Boyle’s film is adapted by James Graham from his acclaimed 2017 play of the same name. It also marks a surprising first for the Oscar-winning British filmmaker. Despite his lengthy career spanning Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire and last year’s 28 Years Later, Boyle had never previously brought a movie to Venice. He described the occasion as his “baptism” on the Lido, saying he was drawn to Graham’s account of how Murdoch and Lamb created a new breed of populist journalism decades before Fox News, social media and clickbait would fundamentally reshape the press and politics.
Speaking to reporters in Venice earlier Wednesday, Boyle and his cast addressed the film’s parallels with today’s divisive media environment. Boyle explained that he was careful, as with the stage version, not to “monsterize” Rupert Murdoch “because he represented at the time [a] breath of fresh air in what was a very rigid British society. It begins with something that’s fun and different, challenging a rigid order… It was important to us that the audience feels complicit.”
For her part, Foy said she savored diving into ’60s tabloid journalism as a “really intoxicating” plunge. “They had power at their fingertips. They knew what they wrote would be what people read and what people believed,” she said.
Pearce, who plays Murdoch, said he received some second-hand confirmation from the man himself that he gave a thumbs up to the casting choice. “I had some messaging with Elizabeth [Murdoch], his daughter, and she said ‘Dad’s very happy that you are playing him.’ But he hadn’t seen the film at that point,” Peace noted in today’s press conference.
Earlier in the evening, George Clooney brought the house down with a heartfelt speech as he accepted an honorary Golden Lion from his longtime friend Laura Dern during the festival’s opening ceremony. The Oscar winner took a walk down memory lane to detail how many artists and collaborators lifted him up on his journey while also taking aim at authoritarianism.
“Stories are always dangerous to people who peddle in fear. The people who are afraid of books and music and stories, they’re never the heroes in history. So yes, movies don’t stop wars. They don’t lower inflation. They don’t fix elections, but they do do something remarkable. They remind us that a stranger is never a stranger and that he might just be the hero in somebody else’s story,” he said. “And if we can still sit together in the dark and care about people that we have never met, I think maybe we’ll be OK.”
Ink is the first of the 21 films competing for this year’s Golden Lion to hit the screen. Other anticipated premieres coming in the next 10 days include Robert Pattinson thriller Primetime, Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, Florian Zeller’s Bunker and the Gaza documentary NAZA. A seven-member jury headed by Maggie Gyllenhaal will choose the winners, which will be revealed at Venice’s closing ceremony on Sept. 12.
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