Danny Boyle appeared at Deadline's Contenders Film: London on Sunday to discuss Ink, his Venice Film Festival opener about Rupert Murdoch's 1969 acquisition of The Sun. The director spoke frankly about the production's difficult path to the screen.
"It was very difficult to raise the money," Boyle told the audience. "We had a siege mentality while making it." The film, written by James Graham and adapted from his Tony-nominated play of the same name, was ultimately fully financed by Studiocanal, which also partnered with Netflix on the release.
Ink stars Jack O'Connell as Larry Lamb, the editor who helped Murdoch build The Sun into Britain's most-read newspaper, Guy Pearce as Murdoch, and Claire Foy as Jules Davies. O'Connell said he hadn't seen the original play and didn't know who Lamb was before reading the script. His grandmother, he noted, still buys The Sun every day.
Boyle said the team was conscious of the tabloid's divisive legacy and wanted to resist making a film that felt superior to the paper or its readers. Graham framed the paper's defining question, "what do people want?", as the same model the internet still runs on.
Ink opens in US cinemas December 11 via Netflix, with a UK theatrical release through Studiocanal on January 8.
