Edward Berger continues his streak of artfully ushering books to the screen with Ballad of a Small Player. After his Oscar-winning films All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, the German director turns to Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel, adapted for film by Rowan Joffé (28 Weeks Later, The American), and starring Colin Farrell.
Read on to find out more about Ballad of a Small Player as the game heats up.
Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) is laying low in Macao – spending his days and nights on the casino floors, drinking heavily and gambling what little money he has left. Struggling to keep up with his fast-rising debts, he is offered a lifeline by the mysterious Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a casino employee with secrets of her own. However, in hot pursuit is Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton) – a private investigator ready to confront Doyle with what he is running from. As Doyle tries to climb to salvation, the confines of reality start to close in.
Farrell inhabits the casino floors of Macao alongside a cast of local stars and expat British talent, including:
Berger enlisted a talented group of craftspeople to bring the story to the screen, including two of his Oscar-winning collaborators from All Quiet on the Western Front, director of photography James Friend and composer Volker Bertelmann. Joining Berger on Ballad of a Small Player are producers Mike Goodridge (Triangle of Sadness) and Matthew James Wilkinson (Yesterday), production designer Jonathan Houlding (Poor Things, The Martian), makeup & hair designer Heike Merker (All Quiet on the Western Front, Cloud Atlas), costume designer Lisy Christl (All Quiet on the Western Front, Conclave), and editor Nick Emerson (Conclave, Lady Macbeth).
The film borrowed its setting — Macao, China — from the Lawrence Osborne novel that the film is based on. The Macao that director Berger came to explore is a place of contradictions. “Our film is set in modern-day Macao, which is a small island, just an hour’s boat ride from Hong Kong,” he says. “You have a lot of the lush, tropical vegetation, and amid that, the Portuguese colonial architecture contrasted with the glass and steel of modern-day, Vegas-style casinos, with fountains exploding and music playing everywhere. It’s an attack on all your senses.”
For actor Chen, Macao lived up exactly to what her director envisioned. “Edward has always been referencing this film to an opera,” she recalls. “He wanted it to be grand. He wanted it to be a little heightened and poetic, and I think there’s no better place to film than being physically in Macao and showing these dazzling casinos. For us actors, it really felt like acting on the Met Opera stage with all these beautiful, grand, surreal locations.”
As Oscar-winning cinematographer James Friend discovered, it wasn’t just the exterior locations that provided grand landscapes against which the story could unfold. “Edward and I visited about six months prior to shooting just to soak it in through osmosis, the vibe and the scale of the place,” he says. “That’s one of the things that struck me from the very beginning: when you go into some of these casinos and hotels, they’re so vast. They’re cities in their own right. And they go underground. It’s quite a breathtaking environment and lends itself beautifully to filmmaking.”
Yes, you can! Check out the trailer here to enter into Doyle’s world.
Ballad of a Small Player is now streaming on Netflix globally.
