It seems only a year ago that Edward Berger was in conversation with Conclave – and maybe that’s because it is. But even by the director’s usual standards, Ballad of a Little Player This is a very fast turnaround time. Based on the novel by Lawrence Osborne, it stars Colin Farrell as Lord Doyle, a conman who hides out in the gaudy casinos of Macau, where he dreams of winning a fortune and making a fresh start.
Appearing at Contenders London alongside Farrell, the actor’s co-star Fala Chen and cinematographer James Friend, Berger traced the film back to its beginnings. “It all started about eight years ago,” he recalls, “with Mike Goodridge, our producer, who gave me the book. I read it and thought it was fantastic. It was a great basis for a film. I loved that place, Macau. I thought it would be interesting to film there and bring to our screens images that we don’t see that often. And I was fascinated by this character, this person in an environment that has so much to offer but who is so fragile inside. And when you think about fragile, I felt like the best person to express that with his eyes was Colin Farrell.
After a meeting in Los Angeles, Farrell read and loved the script. “I had seen Edward’s work with Benedict Cumberbatch and James… Patrick Melrose — about eight or 10 years ago,” he said. “I loved it. Many cross-themes are explored in Patrick Melrose like there are in this film, I mean, it’s a person who does [an escape] because of unaddressed emotional or psychological problems. And they direct it towards their own demise without being fully aware of the kind of disintegration they are experiencing, until it is almost too late. And then you discover that it’s never too late – it’s never too late to make things right. But it was a really physical role, I think, for everyone, including the team. It was an incredibly intense shoot, in a very good way, which fueled the work because the story starts very strong, it starts explosively.
Indeed, the film opens with a lush sensory overload, as if Wong Kar-wei were remaking Martin Scorsese’s film. Casino. “There’s definitely a sense of opera right from the first shot,” Farrell said, “which Macao, quite generously, lends itself to visually. It’s a short film of an hour and 41 minutes, but it’s a very rapid descent into madness. And then an ascent into a sort of redemption… But, yeah, I was a little raw at the end.”
