In Venice, ‘Ink’ Director Danny Boyle Defends Journalism—and Rupert Murdoch’s Complexity
It’s Larry Lamb’s world; we just live in it. Or so scream the headlines in Ink, Danny Boyle’s wickedly thrilling cinematic take on the dirty birth of modern tabloid journalism, which opened the Venice Film Festival this week and which Netflix releases theatrically on December 11 before streaming on January 8. The benefactor of this mainstream malfeasance that shook up prudish 1969 England was legendary Australian news mogul Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce). But his secret weapon was slighted newspaper editor and cocky Yorkshireman Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), who took gleeful aim at the dozen or so national newspapers legendarily packed onto one sliver of London real estate: Fleet Street.
Goaded by Murdoch to embrace his gut instinct, feed his appetite for edgy entertainment and quench his thirst for revenge against the self-satisfied establishment, Lamb succeeded spectacularly. In 12 months, they turned bombing British broadsheet The Sun into the highest-selling daily in the world.
“This isn’t a film about tattoos!” grinned director Danny Boyle at the Ink press conference hours before its world premiere. “It’s about Britain, and it’s about Fleet Street, though no one knows what Fleet Street is anymore. We feel like we updated it to make a connection to the modern world.”
With his signature mix of kinetic editing, meaty performances, breathless pacing and keen sense for deep-cut needle drops—in this case, anachronistic post-punk bangers—Boyle has made a delirious dynamo drama that shakes off its dated constructs and feels as fresh as the morning news. As Murdoch booms in the film, “Let’s make something loud. Something dangerous. Something fun!”
That line and many others came straight from James Graham’s celebrated 2017 play Ink, which premiered in the West End before transferring to Broadway in 2019. “It started in a theater of 300 audience members,” said Graham. “And now it’s here at Venice. It’s extraordinary.”
Boyle was so enthralled with Graham’s writing that he made sure to bring him along for the film. “People say, ‘How do you adapt a stage play?’ And what you do is you don’t cut the dialogue, because the dialogue is fucking excellent. So you get more of it. You ask for more of it from the writer, and that’s the way we approached it.”
The composite Jules Davies (Claire Foy) is based on various female reporters from Fleet Street, and she becomes the film’s conscience as The Sun slips deeper into morally murky waters. “It was a fabulous way of rebalancing these two extraordinary figures, Larry Lamb and Rupert Murdoch,” added Boyle. “James invented this character to sit between them, to leaven what this disturbingly male ecosystem had done, and you then have a chance to make a film about the modern world.”
“It’s a really intoxicating world,” said Foy. “I felt quite jealous. It’s a camaraderie that the journalists all shared. They have power at their fingertips. What they wrote would be what people read and what people believed, and that gave them immense power.”
Few know about Lamb these days, although renowned billionaire businessman Murdoch—still kicking at age 95—is infamous for his unique and surprisingly durable brand of populist conservatism that birthed Thatcherite England in 1979 and runs straight though the modern era of Fox News-inflected MAGA Republicanism.
“The stage play doesn’t monster-ize Rupert Murdoch—which of course, I think a lot of people do,” said Boyle. “But he represented, at the time, a breath of fresh air in what was a very rigid society. He’s dealing with a lot of prejudice against him as an Australian, and he particularly had a loathing for the British establishment, which I personally share as well. So actually it begins with something that’s great fun and different. And he offered a kind of freedom with a different voice, really.”
Graham recalled that Murdoch came to see the play twice—once in London and again in New York. “I remember him really enjoying the sequence that we replicated in the film of hot metal press and the steam and the filth that used to go into making a daily paper on a daily basis. He was really charmed by that.” Murdoch was also charmed when he heard that Boyle was casting a fellow Aussie for the role. “I had some messaging with Elizabeth, his daughter,” said Pearce. “And she said, ‘Dad is very happy that you’re playing him.’ But he hadn’t seen the film at that point. So we’ll see.”
Seductive is the best word to describe the impulses that Ink depicts, an underdog world of misfits that the paternalistic, elitist newsrooms of the late 1960s spurned. That rejection inspires them to fill The Sun with the things that, deep down, people really want to read about: television, violent sports, horoscopes, boobs and bums, pubs and clubs. They also want their current events with a sensationist spin—especially the murder-rape-theft crime blotter. And once Lamb and his staff lean into the baser instincts of the reading public, they find an insatiable appetite for journalistic self-destruction.
“Compared to the stage play, the darkness is reported off stage,” said Boyle. “And yet I knew in cinema, you would see it. And then the journey is taking you into the darkness. And that was Jack’s unique gift, in my mind.” Boyle last used O’Connell as the villainous Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal in 28 Years Later. “He was an utterly reprehensible character who was still fascinating and interesting,” he said. “He’s got that ability to take you into dark places with him—like Pacino in Godfather Part II.” The director was so serious about the Pacino comparison that he even told production designer Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh to make Lamb’s office at The Sun feel like Michael Corleone’s.
Ink is both a time capsule and a warning for the future, a clarion call that the form of news content evolves constantly and quickly—sometimes radically so. “Journalism is one of the great uprights of any civilization,” said Boyle. “To have those people in society is really important, to stand up to power and speak truth to power. And the danger is that the tech giants, obviously, will be able to replace it with A.I. They’ll have an A.I. journalist who’s much more efficient. And will A.I. journalists speak truth to the power that’s created it? That’s going to be very interesting.”
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