movies
‘Ink’ Finally Hits Its Native U.K. Audience at London Film Festival
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.
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Ben Affleck has determined that filming Justice League was a “low point” in his acting career.
The actor-producer-director made a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, where he opened up to host Josh Horowitz about why making the movie was such a negative experience. Affleck played Bruce Wayne/Batman in the 2017 superhero pic.
“The truth is, the experience of Justice League for me was so, so negative for lots of different reasons,” he admitted. “Some of which having to do with where I was personally, some of which having to do with the tragedy that happened during the time, and also the fact that I really saw how not to make a movie like that when the studio is at odds with the filmmaker. You’re really making a mistake. That was what really doomed that.”
After 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice became a major critical disappointment and didn’t meet Warner Bros.’ box office expectations, the studio wanted Zack Snyder’s Justice League to be a lighter tone, despite the filmmaker’s darker creative vision for the film.
During post-production, Snyder stepped away from the movie following the death of his daughter. Warner Bros. then brought in director Joss Whedon to oversee extensive reshoots, which ultimately lightened the tone.
“Boy, that was shitty,” Affleck said. “Him being taken off that movie, and the reshoots that we did — if you want the low point of my career, [it] was that.”
Horowitz also asked the Animals star and director if he had any kind of “epiphany” while working on Justice League as he saw “this film kind of collapsing in front of you.”
“Somebody’s death by suicide, that eclipses everything,” Affleck replied. “And the way in which that was, I thought, frankly, used as an excuse… I just thought that was one of the shittiest things I’ve ever seen. It was so gross. And then the whole environment and vibe, much of which I wasn’t privy to, but that I sort of heard about secondhand in terms of Ray [Fisher] and Gal [Gadot] and other people’s experiences. It was just like, ‘Wow, this is about as gross as it gets.’”
Several years later, fans finally got to see Snyder’s version of the film. A Justice League director’s cut was released in 2021 on HBO Max following a global fan campaign, a strategy shift for the streamer and Warner Bros. investing $70 million to finish visual effects and editing.
“I was really glad and gratified that Zack got to release [his cut], and he did it in a very kind of canny way… manipulated his way into getting his thing released, which was fucking great,” Affleck said. “I was really happy for him.”
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A federal judge prohibited the Trump administration from banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote in his opinion that the news outlets “are likely to succeed not only on their due process claim, but also on their two First Amendment claims.”
But he added that “no one should interpret the Court’s decision to suggest that President Trump’s concerns about accuracy and fairness in the media’s reporting are unfounded, or that the government is powerless when its true aim is to protect national security when classified information is unlawfully disclosed.”
More to come.
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James McAvoy recalls his first day on the set of Band of Brothers and says a co-star bullied him.
During a visit to Bravo‘s Watch What Happens Live while playing “Spill the IMDb-tea,” McAvoy made the revelation while keeping mum about the names.
After being shown a photo of the HBO series, McAvoy took a closer look at the image and said, “Hold on, let me just see, is he in there? No, I don’t think he is in there. Ah, yeah, he is.”
“All right, so, I’m not going to tell you who it was,” he added. “[But] … one of the guys in that picture decided to bully me, on my first day as a professional actor out of acting school! So he got him and his buddies to just stand and point at me and laugh at me, for like three minutes.”
McAvoy explained that the scene he was shooting involved “a ton of actors,” adding, “It was one of those scenes with everybody in it, and we’re in a bar. And I had a scene, and all these guys were, like, in it for nine, 10 months, and you get one line in one episode and one line 10 episodes later. They were all pissed. And I come in for one episode, and I’ve got an arc and scenes. I’ve got tons of lines.”
The actor noted that his co-stars Dexter Fletcher and Robin Laing reached out to him and told him, “Come hang with us, man.”
McAvoy rated his experience on the Band of Brothers set saying that “a part from that day it was a nine, but that day it felt like a two [out of 10].”
Bravo host Andy Cohen said he would get the tea from McAvoy during the commercial break but the actor said that he would not confirm who it was. However, McAvoy did not that it was not David Schwimmer as he was not in the photo the put up on screen.
The photo in question featured Donnie Wahlberg as Carwood Lipton, Kirk Acevedo as Joe Toye, Scott Grimes as Donald Malarkey, Philip Barantini as Wayne A. “Skinny” Sisk, Neal McDonough as Lynn “Buck” Compton, Adam James as Cleveland O. Petty, Frank John Hughes as William “Wild Bill” Guarnere, and Ross McCall as Joseph Liebgott.
Band of Brothers was a 2001 drama series created by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and based on the Stephen E. Ambrose’s non-fiction book of the same name.
Watch McAvoy’s interview in the video below.
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