Colin Farrell plunges into an intoxicating fever dream among the high-stakes baccarat tables of Macau casinos with “Ballad of a Small Player,” a rare major Western film shot on location in Asia’s gambling capital.
The surreal, dark and twisty drama co-stars Tilda Swinton as an investigator in pursuit of Farrell’s velvet-suited conman and gambling addict.
It was filmed over 33 days in various Macau casinos, including scenes shot on live gaming floors while surrounded by real-life high rollers.
Farrell told AFP he had spent a crazy eight weeks living in hotels “in the middle of the gambling strip…which I can’t imagine I would ever do” otherwise.
“It was all-hands-on-deck. It was a bananas shoot,” he said at the Netflix film’s Toronto film festival premiere Tuesday.
Macau is the world’s top casino hub by gross gaming revenue, roughly four times that of Las Vegas.
The tiny Chinese-controlled territory has a skyline dominated by sprawling, luxurious casinos, many themed with replicas of global landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and canals of Venice.
While gambling is banned in China, it has been legal in the former Portuguese colony since 1844.
“It’s never been really shown like that on screen in a Western film. So it felt like an adventure to me,” director Edward Berger told AFP.
Macau has appeared more fleetingly in Hollywood films like 2016 heist flick “Now You See Me 2.”
Berger’s new movie is the journey of “a fragile soul in a loud exuberant place…Macau is over-the-top so we wanted to capture that,” he explained.
“It’s the most vibrant, most exuberant, colorful place I’ve seen.”
– ‘Hungry Ghost’ –
The movie takes place during the Hungry Ghost Festival — a traditional celebration rooted in Chinese folk religion where the spirits of the deceased are free to roam — which lends the film a supernatural air.
Several key scenes are also shot in nearby Hong Kong. The film borrows the colorful and kinetic trappings of Hong Kong cinema, including the films of Wong Kar-wai, Johnnie To and Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Berger discovered novelist Lawrence Osborne’s book of the same name back in 2018.
The director kept the project on the back burner as he enjoyed smash success and multiple Oscar nominations for World War I drama “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and Vatican-set thriller “Conclave.”
As vastly different as those two films were, “Ballad of a Small Player” represents another seismic shift in tone, genre and location for the chameleonic director.
Berger said he gets “burnt out by the subject matter” after spending up to three years on each film, and wants to “just make something different.”
“I focus on the next. And it turns out it’s the opposite of what it was before.”
– Baccarat –
Berger insisted he and his cast spend time at Macau’s baccarat tables, learning the wildly popular game that is key to his movie’s plot.
“Absolutely, we had to learn! We didn’t lose any money, though,” he said.
So Farrell was never ever tempted to drop the sort of giant bets placed by his character?
