The film opens with an intense meeting where Murdoch is trying to woo Lamb to run the newly purchased Sun and make it the greatest paper in the world
The film opens with an intense meeting where Murdoch is trying to woo Lamb to run the newly purchased Sun and make it the greatest paper in the world. That happened to be in 1969, the same year of the Apollo 11 mission. Says Boyle, “I really do believe that that meeting between them had more of an impact on our world than the men landing on the moon.”
Boyle succeeds in making a thrilling, propulsive movie using his signature kinetic filmmaking style of quick cuts, unconventional camera angles, and a frantic pace. This is no sleepy play adaptation, but what’s most striking is the way it captures one of the most powerful men alive. Boyle and Graham lean into what audiences think they know about a figure of this stature, then upend it, asking who was really pulling the strings. “You think Murdoch is going to arrive into the story fully formed,” says Graham. “But he’s still developing and he’s still learning, and it’s this other guy who you’ve never heard of, who is using all of his disgust, anger, resentment, passion for the news to invent something new.”
British playwright James Graham has written scripts about many real-life figures including British football manager Gareth Southgate, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr., a teenage Margaret Thatcher, and Tammy Faye Bakker. With Ink, he found himself fascinated by the duo of Murdoch and Lamb and the paper’s meteoric rise. “In that one single year it transformed from being a completely failing entity, like in a sports movie, getting lots of underdogs and rejects together to try and make something out of it, and then becoming, eventually, the biggest-selling paper in the English-speaking world,” says Graham.
The play was a huge success—racking up four Olivier Award nominations in 2018 and winning two Tony Awards after it hit Broadway in 2019. After Graham adapted it into a script with producer Michael Ellenberg, Boyle jumped at the opportunity to come on board to direct. “He’s somehow managed to make it a Danny Boyle movie with all that energy and that punky spirit and that kineticism,” says Graham, “and yet also he’s really honored the soul of the play somehow.”
When the play was running, Murdoch got a lot of the attention and headlines as such a major figure in business and media. But Boyle felt the more fascinating character was actually Lamb, who arrives in London as a northern outsider with something to prove. Boyle, who grew up near Manchester, related to the chip on Lamb’s shoulder. “We carry it our whole lives about southerners and about feeling like the outsider and the underdog,” says Boyle. “We’ve always got that with us.”
