Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle makes his Venice competition debut with a film about the media mogul’s early years and his takeover of the British tabloid The Sun, played by Guy Pearce.
Danny Boyle had never competed at the Venice Film Festival before, but his arrival at the press conference was met with the same enthusiasm usually reserved for major Hollywood stars such as George Clooney.
The Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire director opens the competition on Wednesday evening with Ink, a chronicle of the extraordinary rise of Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Based on James Graham’s acclaimed stage play, with Graham also writing the screenplay, the film focuses on Murdoch’s acquisition and transformation of The Sun in 1969. With Larry Lamb, played by Jack O’Connell, taking over as editor, Murdoch, portrayed by Guy Pearce, overturns the established rules of Britain’s newspaper industry.
Scandals, sensational headlines and large photographs of topless women became part of a formula that shook up the British press, then dominated by two very different models: the Daily Mirror and The Times.
It was the beginning of the infotainment era, when news increasingly became entertainment.
“Graham’s play really struck me,” Boyle said. “It goes beyond the mythology surrounding Murdoch. But for me, the heart of the story was Larry Lamb, a true outsider, someone who comes from the north like me, with a desire to challenge an establishment he felt excluded from. That’s something I understand very well.”
The same outsider status also applied to Murdoch in his early years, when he was kept at a distance from the British publishing establishment.
“We didn’t portray him as a monster,” Boyle said, reflecting on the influence the media mogul continues to have on global affairs, particularly in an era dominated by Donald Trump.
“Today, the big question is what truth actually means, and how technology and the powerful people who control it are shaping our present. But demonizing Murdoch would be too easy. We have to keep asking ourselves what role we — journalists, filmmakers and the public — play in preserving spaces for criticism and freedom.”
Boyle describes Ink as a film about the past that is ultimately intended to raise questions about the present.
“At the time, the arrival of Murdoch and Lamb on the scene with such force was a breath of fresh air. They disrupted a stagnant system. But we know the other side of the story.”
He points to the significance of 1969, the year when humans first landed on the Moon.
“1969 was the year we first landed on the Moon, but it was also the year Rupert Murdoch and Larry Lamb launched a newspaper that would go on to change the world even more.”
Long before Fox News, clickbait and Truth Social, and decades before Twitter, Facebook, Google and OnlyFans, the two men created a new kind of tabloid that, against all expectations, became the world’s best-selling newspaper.
“Brash, irreverent and audacious, the exuberant Sun challenged the establishment and reshaped our world for the modern age,” Boyle said.
Today, however, the challenge is increasingly tied to the impact of technology.
“Artificial intelligence is a tool that further challenges our understanding of truth. Journalism, made by free human beings, is essential.”
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