Colin Farrell plunges into an intoxicating fever dream among the many high-stakes baccarat tables of Macau casinos with “Ballad of a Small Player,” a uncommon main Western movie shot on location in Asia’s playing capital.
The surreal, darkish and twisty drama co-stars Tilda Swinton as an investigator in pursuit of Farrell’s velvet-suited conman and playing addict.
It was filmed over 33 days in numerous Macau casinos, together with scenes shot on reside gaming flooring whereas surrounded by real-life excessive rollers.
Farrell instructed AFP he had spent a loopy eight weeks residing in motels “in the middle of the gambling strip…which I can’t imagine I would ever do” in any other case.
“It was all-hands-on-deck. It was a bananas shoot,” he mentioned on the Netflix movie’s Toronto movie competition premiere Tuesday.
Macau is the world’s prime on line casino hub by gross gaming income, roughly 4 instances that of Las Vegas.
The tiny Chinese-controlled territory has a skyline dominated by sprawling, luxurious casinos, many themed with replicas of world landmarks just like the Eiffel Tower and canals of Venice.
While playing is banned in China, it has been authorized within 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 instructed AFP.
Macau has appeared extra fleetingly in Hollywood movies like 2016 heist flick “Now You See Me 2.”
Berger’s new film is the journey of “a fragile soul in a loud exuberant place…Macau is over-the-top so we wanted to capture that,” he defined.
“It’s the most vibrant, most exuberant, colorful place I’ve seen.”
The film takes place throughout the Hungry Ghost Festival –- a standard celebration rooted in Chinese folks faith the place the spirits of the deceased are free to roam — which lends the movie a supernatural air.
Several key scenes are additionally shot in close by Hong Kong. The movie borrows the colourful and kinetic trappings of Hong Kong cinema, together with the movies of Wong Kar-wai, Johnnie To and Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Berger found novelist Lawrence Osborne’s e book of the identical identify again in 2018.
The director saved the mission on the again burner as he loved smash success and a number of Oscar nominations for World War I drama “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and Vatican-set thriller “Conclave.”
As vastly totally different as these two movies had been, “Ballad of a Small Player” represents one other seismic shift in tone, style and site for the chameleonic director.
Berger mentioned he will get “burnt out by the subject matter” after spending as much as three years on every movie, and desires to “just make something different.”
“I focus on the next. And it turns out it’s the opposite of what it was before.”
Berger insisted he and his solid spend time at Macau’s baccarat tables, studying the wildly common recreation that’s key to his film’s plot.
“Absolutely, we had to learn! We didn’t lose any money, though,” he mentioned.
So Farrell was by no means ever tempted to drop the type of big bets positioned by his character?
“No, not for me, man,” the actor laughed. “One affliction I never got, gambling. Not for me.”
© 2025 AFP