Danny Boyle on his tabloid chronicle Ink: “The attention economy, clickbait, the dopamine economy – this is its hatching point”

When Australian newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch offered Daily Mail northern editor Larry Lamb the editorship of the Sun in 1969, neither foresaw the seismic impact the appointment would have on British life. Quickly, the Sun became the talk of Fleet Street, where most of Britain’s newspapers were published and printed until the 1980s. In a few years, the relaunched and reinvented newspaper would use a dizzying mix of sex, violence, sport, giveaways and fun to sell 5 million copies a day and become the most-read English newspaper in the world. It’s no wonder Ink, director Danny Boyle’s 15th feature, rushes at you like a snappy tabloid headline. It mirrors the excitement of the Sun’s vertiginous rise, while exposing the morally dubious decisions Lamb’s team made in achieving its popularity.

Boyle – a man whose strongest films, including Trainspotting (1996) and 28 Days Later… (2002), share Ink’s breakneck speed – works from James Graham’s fast, furious adaption of his own play, dramatising it with a gusto the late Lamb (Jack O’Connell on screen, and very much on form) would surely have admired. The young pre-billionaire Murdoch is played with imperious power by Guy Pearce, while Claire Foy is Jules Davies, a character invented for the film based on an amalgamation of female journalists of the time.

We spoke to Boyle about adapting Ink, the origins of tabloid culture and the links between Fleet Street’s revolution and today’s attention economy.

Lou Thomas: When did you first come across the material and what did you think?

Danny Boyle: I saw the play in 2018 when it transferred to the West End. It was a riotous evening, very celebratory, very Murdoch-based. Bertie Carvel’s performance was pretty out there. He picked up an Olivier and a Tony. I wasn’t thinking about adapting it then, but I remember thinking that it was curious that it was not Murdoch’s play. It was actually the other guy’s play. He’s the protagonist.

I wrote to James saying I really enjoyed it. Years later, he sent me a draft of a screenplay, we started to do some work on it, and it was a chance to develop a film. Even if you kept it exactly like you’d done it on stage, I knew a film would focus on a different character, because it’s about an interior mind that you then can investigate with film, no matter how rambunctious it is; whereas on stage you’re celebrating a live communal event.  

It felt like the touch paper or the ignition point of the modern media where we are now. I could see clearly it traced back to the establishment of what you’d call true – if that’s the right word – tabloid vocabulary and behaviour. The attention economy, clickbait, the dopamine economy – this is its hatching point. It’s evolved to where we are now, and if that was what you thought [would happen], well, that’s wild. But wonderful to make a film about.

Did you do anything else to get more insight into the Fleet Street of the time?

We met journalists and printers who’d all worked on Fleet Street or very close by. They were fascinating talking about the culture of the street generally, then the Sun itself. Those who remembered Larry Lamb or had worked for him at some point are quite elderly now – the three particular people who were thanked at the end of the film, Eve Pollard [one of the UK’s first female newspaper editors], Roy Greenslade [former Daily Mirror editor] and Roger Alton [former editor of the Observer and the Independent]. Eve’s not very well apparently so she hasn’t seen the film, but I know Roger saw it on Sunday and really enjoyed it.

What comments did they have?

They were typical journalists. “All those typewriters are wrong.” They were like, “They would be all Olivetti 2s in 1969.” These were Olivetti 3s and they were the only ones we could get. But I remember them hearing Jack was doing Larry. They overheard a scene. They went “Oh. That’s his accent! That’s him.” It was a spontaneous trigger memory of, “I remember that vividly.” Jack did put a lot of work into that. It’s a northern accent, but with refinement, poshness in it. Or an attempt to assimilate himself into the posh world. 

What did the printers say?

We met printers who run a little museum around the back of St Bride’s, the journalists’ church, which is an amazing institution. They allowed us to film in it, which was wonderful for the memorial scene for Muriel McKay [the kidnapped wife of Murdoch’s deputy]. That’s a wonderful thing, that church. There should be a proper museum built beside it, because that street was not just the centre of British newspapers, it was, for a time, the centre of world news. Its influence has been disseminated, and the tabloid influence has gone out from there, as well as more noble traditions from the street.

At what point did you decide on the high-energy approach the film takes?

If you’re going to make a film about the establishment of the tabloid vernacular, then you’ve got to make some gesture in your filmmaking towards that, and I’m inclined that way anyway. I like popular movies that connect everyone. I don’t want to exclude people by making them, I want to make them accessible. The key trade-off of Murdoch’s Faustian bargain at the beginning is he’s talking about ordinary people and their tastes. I have that within me, as well.

That’s a community I come from originally, and I feel the loyalty to it, and it also connects with cinema, which is a mass medium at its true origin. That’s how it began, with workers coming out and watching railway trains, rushing towards them on screen and screaming. It began with the great silent films, and they were popular. Not that there’s anything wrong with the other side of it, the more exclusive material and the use of the form for other purposes, but that’s my own inclination, within a British context.

It’s funny you say within a British context, because there’s not been a film tackling the way that things happened here with newspapers. In America, there’s things like His Girl Friday [1940] or All the President’s Men [1976]. As part of your preparation, did you watch any American films tackling the news industry?

I didn’t, because I thought the [influence of] Citizen Kane [1941] will come through anyway. You can’t avoid it. It’s in all of our thoughts, all of us carry it and there’s a couple of shots that are reminiscent. You can’t help that. No, this was a stage play, and how do you convert a stage play to cinema? We know that a lot of them are a bit dodgy and feel like they haven’t moved mediums. That was a problem. It was one of the things that hindered us in financing, because there’s a trepidation. Is this going to work in the cinema? My obsessions were actually Amadeus [1984] and Dangerous Liaisons [1988], both of which began as stage plays and both of which were converted by their original dramatists – Peter Shaffer and Christopher Hampton – into wonderful films.

I was much more obsessed with making sure I converted it into a piece of cinema that worked, because it’s a wonderful script and I didn’t want to lose the dialogue, because the dialogue is the meat and potatoes of it. If you give this material to three great actors, they’ll adore it and that’ll be a cinematic experience in itself.

You told one reporter that you’d met Murdoch once, because you made him a lot of money off the back of Slumdog Millionaire [2008]. Has he seen Ink and have you had any word what he might think?

We know he saw the stage play because James told us that. He saw it twice, so he obviously liked it. I’m not sure he’ll feel the same way [about the film], but I as far as I know, no. We are in a mixed relationship with The Sun: they have given us permission to use the material that was in the play, and we’ve used some additional materials at the end; they [also] denied permissions, and we’ve had denials off Fox News. [Some of the unpermitted materials show] headlines that I think they’re answerable for – some of which are brilliant, some of which are disgraceful – [including] “The Truth”, the Hillsborough one.

Kelvin MacKenzie, who was editor when the Sun published “The Truth” front page, comes into the film towards the end, and he’s the real villain of the piece for many people.

Editors in those days tended to be – as apparently film directors were back in the day – autocrats. Finally, progress has caught up and they aren’t allowed to behave like that anymore. Film directors aren’t. Yes, he was known for that, and people speak about him very entertainingly but also fearfully. He was responsible. He’s very much in the lineage of Larry Lamb. None of these people would have existed without Larry Lamb. This is the origin.

Why was Guy right to play Murdoch?

What’s interesting about the depiction is that it’s an attempt to have a fresh reset at the origins of Murdoch. We’re so weighed down by the ‘monster’ baggage we surround him with now, which he obviously deserves. If you’re going to make a film about the truth, and the film is partly about that as a concept, then you’ve got to tell the truth. And in the early days all our research confirmed he was conflicted about some of it, as you see in the film.

He’s not sure about it, morally, feels a bit queasy about it. I thought that’s amazing, because people won’t realise that. They’ll just assume he thought up page three [the Sun’s long-running topless model page]. He didn’t, but he didn’t change it because the figures spoke. It’s always with him. Even though he’d love to be known as a lover of the press, that’s not as true as the bottom line. 

The Sun became the most-read English language newspaper in the world through its mix of sex, violence and fun, but the film isn’t judgemental. It doesn’t say these people who created it are fundamentally awful. There is an argument that they only gave readers what they want. Do you think they went too far in what they did?

The really interesting question is, were they aware of what they were doing? A thing we never even get close to, because we couldn’t work out a way to do it, is the incessant repetition of what they’re doing. They have to publish a paper every fucking day. We stop as dramatists and go, “This is an interesting scene.” We stop over a story. They’d be moving on. That edition’s done. When you have that kind of incredible velocity, you’re not gonna be taking an overview going, “Is this the right thing?”

There’s that daily operating principle of it, which I’m sure was helter-skelter. There’s also another thing involved. It didn’t get to 4 and 5 million people because it’s a bad paper. It clearly worked. There is brilliance within it; any of us can see now. Just headlines alone. To be able to distil into a phrase, a pun, something that’s slightly intangible out there, and to crystalise it, is a genius skill, and they probably got paid the best money. That is the unique skill. There are many things in it that you think, well, that’s incredible. And people did love it.

It’s got these contradictory impulses. It appears to be full of sexism, but a lot of women like reading it, that’s one of their defences. The page three girls all love doing it, that’s one of their defences. But there are other questions which finally bore on the page three girl, which is Clare Short’s campaign, because it wasn’t about the models being happy – they clearly were – it was about what the schoolgirls think when they get on the bus and see all these men with pictures of breasts on them going on their way to school in the morning. That eventually was the tipping point that went, “This is wrong. We should stop this.” And it stopped, like, overnight. They fought against it for a bit, one of their models changed their name to Clare Short, so that they could appear as a page three girl. They even did that, which is typical. But actually the campaign was successful. That was an improvement in girls’ lives, without a doubt, [there] not being a naked presence on page three of a national newspaper every day.

There’s clearly a lot of amazing things in it. A lot was just instinctive and in the huge escalating daily car crash that is publishing: you’ve gotta get it out and get it done. The film makes that clear that they did know and did pursue it and were more interested in the end in their own egos than they were in some idea that they’re servicing society. They’re on victory, success; revenge is executed. All those factors satisfied them more than feeling, “We’re servicing something noble in our lives.”

You used generative AI in the film to create Margaret Thatcher’s face and once to create some mice. Can you tell me about that? 

It’s a tool that’s part of the VFX kit now. It can be contained and used for a reasonable purpose like animals. I’ve worked with animals – you’re working with a tiger. It’s not funny, It’s distressing.

We used it responsibly in Ink. It’s only about 30, 40 seconds altogether in it. And the Thatcher thing was very important to me because she did go to his office and she did drink whisky with him late at night and she did give him a knighthood, and I wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like a turn, like an impersonator, because that would slightly underwhelm how real that moment is, even though it’s a dream thing. It helps move the film towards real people that you see at the end of the film as well. It suddenly begins to become an actual world rather than just Jack as Larry Lamb, Guy as Murdoch. These are real people who have real influence on our lives, and it’s not entirely a benign influence.  

You’ve tackled the ugliness of British life in films such as Trainspotting and more triumphant depictions with, for example, the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. This film is like a midpoint, a celebration but with darkness. Would you like to delve into other areas of British life?

When you make films, if you have a bit of success with them, the way the industry operates is you’re immediately offered America. I don’t know anything about America. I don’t know what car a character would drive. I don’t know what school they would go to. Why would I do an American film? I want to make British films, ’cause I know what car a character would drive and which school they’d been to.

I feel confident enough to know, this is it, these are our lives. This is what we think about Farage or this is what we think about the home secretary, or this is what we think about migration, and see what people think. I know both sides of it, all sides of the arguments, because I live here and consume everything here. I’d love to make another film about Britain. 

We’re trying to make a film about a British guy. He’s half of it. There’s an American guy as well, and it’s set in Antarctica, but half of it is absolutely about Britain. I’d then love to make a film about the enlightenment in Britain, so there’s lots I’d love to do. But whether I get to do them or not, it’s very tricky at the moment. Finance is very difficult. And your age catches up with you.

Ink screens at the 70th BFI London Film Festival. It’s in UK cinemas from 8 January.