It seems like only a year since Edward Berger was in the awards conversation with Conclave — which is perhaps because it is. But even by the director’s usual swift standards, Ballad of a Small Player is a hell of a quick turnaround. Based on the novel by Lawrence Osborne, it stars Colin Farrell as Lord Doyle, a conman hiding out in the garish 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 movie back to its inception. “It started about eight years ago,” he recalled, “with Mike Goodridge, our producer, who gave me the book. I read it and I thought it was fantastic. It was a great basis for a movie. I loved this place, Macau. I thought it would be interesting to shoot there and to bring images to our screens that we don’t see so often. And this character fascinated me, this person in an environment that has so much to offer but who’s so fragile inside. And when you think of fragile, I felt like the best person to express that with his eyes is Colin Farrell.”
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After a meeting in LA, Farrell read and loved the script. “I had seen Edward’s work with Benedict Cumberbatch and James — Patrick Melrose — about eight, 10 years ago,” he said. “I loved that. There’s a lot of cross-referential themes explored in Patrick Melrose as there are in this film, I mean, he’s a person who’s making [an escape] because of unanswered emotional or psychological issues. And they’re making it be aligned towards their own demise without fully being aware of the kind of heft of disintegration that they’re experiencing, until it’s almost too late. And then you find out that it’s never too late — it’s never too late to course-correct. But it was a really physical role, I think for everyone, including the crew. It was an incredibly intense shoot, in a really good way, that fed into the work because the story starts very loud, it starts in that bombastic way.”
Indeed, the film opens with a lush sensory overload, as if Wong Kar-wei were to remake Martin Scorsese’s Casino. “You get a sense of opera from the opening frame, really,” said Farrell, “which Macau, generously enough, just visually lends itself to. It’s a short film, an hour and 41 minutes, but it’s a very quick descent into madness. And then an ascent out of that towards a kind of redemption… But, yeah, I was a bit raw by the end of it.”
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