Danny Boyle Talks Returning to Telluride and Fighting to Make His Tabloid Sensation ‘Ink’

Danny Boyle remembers his first Telluride Film Festival in 2008, when “Slumdog Millionaire” had been unceremoniously dumped by Warner Bros.

“You think it’s not good enough to be released,” Boyle said. “It was part of an economic decision that had been made, and after all the work that we put in, I was heartbroken. A third of it was in Hindi. There’s nothing to compare it to. There’s no real prospects. And then suddenly Searchlight picked it up, and to be at this festival, which I’d never been to, and to have the sense of people, not just appreciating it, but being hungry for it, because that’s what happens here if people pass on the word. You could feel that.”

I interviewed him for the first time at Telluride that year. And “Slumdog Millionaire” went on to win eight Oscars including Best Picture and Director.

Boyle feels similarly about “Ink,” which debuted well in Venice and then came to Telluride. “I didn’t think anybody would see this film,” said Boyle at Netflix‘s Telluride condo. “It’s a passion project. This one we couldn’t raise enough money for. StudioCanal, God bless them, did give us money. Nobody else would.” Netflix will put the movie theaters on December 11 for 30 days.

“Ink” was adapted by playwright James Graham from his hit West End and Broadway play about Fleet Street, the central hub of the British newspaper industry, in the 1960s. “What does an international audience know about Fleet Street?” said Boyle. “Who is ever going to see this? Tessa Ross gave it to Julie [Huntsinger] ahead of time to have a look at. Then Julie picked this film. It was that boost again, because I knew what it meant to actually be here. It meant you had a profile, that intelligent, interesting people from world cinema were going to see it. You have the platform.”

Boyle is sticking to his instincts of late, working in the U.K. again after directing sequel “28 Years Later” and producing the follow-up “The Bone Temple,” which both starred Jack O’Connell as a rip-roaring cult leader who loves the ultra-violence. “I’m stronger when I work on material that I feel is a battle to get made,” he said. “I like to sell something to people. You want people to see it like you see it. It’s mad, really.”

Kinetic and visual, “Ink” should play equally well at home and in theaters. Boyle saw the play, about how Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch bought The Sun and hired Larry Lamb to turn it into a tabloid sensation, on the West End in 2019. “Everybody was applauding Bertie Carvell as Rupert Murdoch,” he said. [He won the Olivier.] “And I remember thinking, absolutely clear as day, ‘It’s not his play, is it? This is the other guy’s play.’ So when James sent the screenplay years later, I read it and I knew Jack was Larry Lamb.”

‘Slumdog Millionaire’ ©Fox Searchlight/Courtesy Everett Collection

Boyle had to fight for both O’Connell and Australian actor Guy Pearce. “I begged Guy to hang on,” said Boyle. “I apologized to Guy because it wasn’t like I’d offered it to him, but I’d said ‘I want you,’ and bless him he hung in there for us. And then we got Claire Foy, who was more surprising than anyone.” Foy’s journalist represents all the women in media who had to cope with the misogyny of the period.

Boyle has fun with the set details of noisy printing presses and typesetting machines. But the central show-stopper takes place in a restaurant booth when Murdoch sells Lamb his new job. “We have a little rig,” said Boyle. “It’s poor man’s ‘Matrix’ bullet time. You use 20 iPhones in a little ring round the table, and they’re all filming at the same time, and you film a bit of the action.”

Boyle wanted to reflect the film’s subject, tabloidization, with his camera. “You’re trying to make your subject matter, your form, equal your content,” he said. “How is the camera seductive and pleasing and easy and makes you feel alive? As Murdoch says, ‘Don’t you want people to feel alive when they read their newspaper in the morning?’ So you’re trying to use some of the techniques of the tabloid to literally sell the film in cinematic terms.”

None of this will work if “you don’t have the central performances locking it,” he said. “You tire of it quickly.”

Pearce is restrained but powerful as the ultra-conservative Murdoch who is uncomfortable with some of Lamb’s more outrageous tactics. It’s O’Connell who goes big as Lamb, who throws away his integrity to chase the lowest common denominator. Murdoch goes along with him as long as he’s churning out cash. “Murdoch is also known, apart from being at bottom a businessman,” said Boyle, “as somebody who is romantic and old-fashioned about journalism, and believes he can bring those two forces together—the economic and the preservation of the journalism.”

But Lamb goes all the way to grab readers. And O’Connell is as magnetic as he is repulsive. “Actors are few and far between where they can take you into a problematic character and take you with them,” said Boyle. “They are repelling, but you remain drawn to them. It’s that double opposite magnetism. Not many people have it, and Jack’s got it, and he’s skillful. You’re inside his mind. Lamb is hollowed out by the end. He would have preferred to be acknowledged for being a great popular journalist, and he’s not. His legacy is not that he created the biggest selling newspaper in the world, which he did. His legacy is the Page Three [with topless models], so it comes back to haunt him.”

‘Ink’Anthony Dickenson

The movie uses about 30 seconds of AI to animate a few photographs. “We couldn’t afford to recreate Fleet Street,” Boyle said. “You have to use photographs and animate them, because it’s gone. And we brought Margaret Thatcher to life with a bit of AI. I didn’t want an imitation Thatcher. I wanted Thatcher herself because she did used to go to Murdoch’s office, and she did drink whiskey with her shoes off, curled up on his couch, and she did give him a knighthood.”

Boyle also animated a photograph of gangsters the Crays. “I wanted those two moments to be absolutely real,” said Boyle, “and not consult their estates about their use. It’s fundamental for the story because you begin to move towards the truth, the facts. These real things happened as a consequence of The Sun, and we’re all responsible for this. I’m not blaming other people. We’ve decided on individuals, and the village has been abandoned. The pillars of the village are gradually being deconstructed. Journalism, one of the pillars of any free, humane society, that journalists can speak truth to power, is being dismantled.”

While filmmakers may want to continue to save money by using AI as a tool, Boyle knows that it is controversial in many ways. “Sadly, it’s not going to matter what you or I think,” he said. “What matters is what 20-year-olds think about it and what they’re going to decide to do about it. So it’s good we express an opinion. The elders should, and it’s important to fight to make sure it doesn’t replace jobs. So we had an actor playing Thatcher for that whole sequence. We paid an actor and then just replaced the head. So we never tried to replace anyone. AI now works with visual effects. But it’s hard, isn’t it? Because for every Chris Nolan, there are thousands of filmmakers who can’t raise money. What are they going to do? How are they going to tell their stories? Maybe they won’t.”

‘Ink’Nick Wall

Next up: Boyle wants to set up “Antarctica,” about two men crossing Antarctica on solo trips, written by John Hodge. He is also trying to do an adaptation of his film “Yesterday” into a stage musical. Richard Curtis and Emma Freud are writing. “A musical is a huge technical exercise,” said Boyle. “You have to be humble.”