Edward Berger On His Colin Farrell Movie ‘Ballad Of A Small Player’

EXCLUSIVE: After following his Oscar-winning muddy World War I epic All Quiet on the Western Front with the Vatican for Conclave, director Edward Berger has taken another radical turn, this time to the gaudy glitz and desperation of the Macau casinos for Ballad of a Small Player. A Rowan Joffe-scripted adaptation of the Lawrence Osborne novel, the film gets its world premiere at Toronto Film Festival next month, followed by an international premiere at Zurich and a limited theatrical run before landing on Netflix in late October.

Colin Farrell plays Lord Doyle, a gambler whose losing streak at the baccarat tables in Macau is the kind that leaves some taking actual nosedives from balconies high up in the glassy glitzy towering casino hotels that dominate the strip. Lord Doyle’s being pursued by an uptight watchdog (Tilda Swinton) sent by those holding the bag on his considerable debts, and his salvation may come from a mysterious ghostly gorgeous benefactor (Fala Chen) who stakes Doyle when no one else will. Baccarat is a game of chance and superstition over skill, and the payoff here is what Farrell does with his sweaty, sartorially-challenged character of dubious royal lineage as he circles the drain, which seems to be the closest he come to a royal flush.

Up for an Emmy for The Penguin, Farrell’s performance should put him in the Oscar conversation, as it might for Berger. Though not one for the gaming tables himself, the director here discusses his high-stakes gambles in spurning sure bet franchise jobs like Ocean’s Eleven and James Bond for movies that on the surface bear little resemblance to each other.

DEADLINE: Last time we saw each other, you were premiering Conclave in Telluride, and rumors were flying that you would direct the next James Bond. Hard not to notice that your protagonist here is a baccarat player in Macau, but instead of a cool 007 veneer, your protagonist is a con man marinating spectacularly in anxiety, self-basting in flop sweat as his losses mount and his ruse catches up to him.

EDWARD BERGER: He might be trying to look as cool as James Bond, but he’s obviously failing.

DEADLINE: What’s also striking is how different this movie is from All Quiet on the Western Front, and Conclave. Is there any connective tissue between these three films?

BERGER: I have come to believe you don’t pick these films; they pick you. This movie felt ready in terms of what I wanted to say, what I felt inside, it just comes out of you It, it’s what you feel like saying right now. But I realize in hindsight these films that I’m picking, or are picking me, are not too dissimilar. They are all told from a single perspective, following one person and really creeping into this person’s brain and really taking the audience on a ride of what this person’s feeling on a path. They’re all on a path of, in a way, toward liberation or to find some kind of haven of peace. Felix Kammerer found in death in All Quiet, Ralph Fiennes rediscovered his faith in Conclave.  

DEADLINE: Though you spent years paying dues, your progression in the past couple of years has made stars want to work with you, something that can only get better after they see the performance you helped coax out of Colin Farrell here. Though you did not take on the next Ocean’s Eleven film, your next, The Riders, will be a vehicle for Brad Pitt, and you’ll bring Matt Damon’s amnesiac assassin back in a Bourne Identity film after Universal just made a massive deal with the Robert Ludlum estate. You’ve got a time travel film with Austin Butler, and there should be no shortage of actors raising their hands to play Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent who spent a year in a Russian jail on bogus spying charges. How did you get Brad Pitt for your next film?

BERGER: All you’ve mentioned is development, but the one thing I’m sure of is that early next year we’ll shoot The Riders with Brad. The script is ready, the financing is there, and Brad is ready. It’s just a beautiful journey, that movie.

DEADLINE: I watched F1 at its Radio City Music Hall premiere and Pitt always reminded me a bit of Steve McQueen, an actor who held the screen so well. After Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood and F1, Pitt is right there. The miles have worn well on him, and he still has his hair.

BERGER: The Riders is a real character piece. We’ve got, I would say, the biggest movie star in the world, making a real character movie and really going for it. In this film, we pick up his character on a journey that starts with him building a house. He’s a real man, man. He’s not like me. This guy can build a house. We meet him as he is building a house for his family, he’s the real provider, the real traditional man, and then he is on the journey to find his wife who’s gone suddenly. And all this manhood, all this masculinity just strips away and falls apart and all we are left with is a heap of a human being, a small human being with all his frailties. To dissect this person through Brad Pitt, I think is a beautiful task. To really see someone unravel and everything he’s relied on up till here as a character is suddenly taken away from him. And just the core of his being is left behind, and he needs to find what that is. I think that’s a great journey that touches on the history of Europe. We take him from Ireland to Greece, to Brussels to Amsterdam and back to Ireland. It’s a massive odyssey throughout Europe, during which he falls apart. And I can’t wait to see Brad do that.

DEADLINE: Since his small but electric turn in Thelma & Louise, Pitt always seemed to be trying to prove he was more than handsome, that he was a real actor. He was validated by his Oscar for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and probably doesn’t have much to prove.  

BERGER: I don’t think that’s true. Everyone has to prove something to themselves, always, unless you want to allow yourself to get tired, and Brad never gets tired. I think it’s beautiful that he chose our movie to prove that side of himself. It’s harder for him to find those challenged and I’m thrilled he has chosen this challenge.  

DEADLINE: You’ve been on the other side of this, after All Quiet on the Western Front got nine Oscar nominations and won Best International Feature. Suddenly, you’re the pretty girl everyone wants to ask to the prom. Now you’re doing the same thing with the likes of Colin Farrell, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, whose slots are coveted. How did you get him to say yes?  

BERGER: Two things. Remember when we spoke last year and you revealed I was going to do Ocean’s and I tried to guide you that I was not doing it, and don’t print it?

DEADLINE: In my defense, your guidance was very subtle and it was a helluva good rumor…

BERGER: You still did because you had too many sources telling you that I would. We were talking at that time, Brad and I, and yes, was I seduced by the thought of making something like that. I’m from a small place in Germany. I’ve never had those opportunities. And suddenly Brad Pitt and George Clooney and Julia Roberts and Matt Damon, I would be able to make a movie with them. Ballad of A Small Player was a hard movie to make, and I felt like, wouldn’t it be great to make a studio picture? The studio needs that movie, the stars want the movie,  as does the audience. Everyone needs the movie. It’s a franchise. I can pay my crew. I can have fun with them. It’s a temptation. But deep down inside I knew it’s not my movie, it’s Steven Soderbergh’s movie. He invented that, beautifully. He made them, and I’m just following in his footsteps. What is new for me?

I love those movies, but in essence, I don’t know what to add to what the great Steven Soderbergh did. And so in the end, I had to sleep eight hours. And I think maybe when I met you, I’d slept a week. But during the shooting of Ballad, it was tempting because I was so tired. And then I wrapped, I went to bed, slept eight hours, and realized, it’s not me. I called Brad because we had talked a bunch of times. I knew he was open to doing something, and I basically said, I’m sorry, I don’t want to do Ocean’s and hope I haven’t offended you. But I have this great script that I would love you to look at because I think it might be a challenge for both of us. He was shooting F1 in Abu Dhabi at the time, I think reshoots or pickups, because of the strike and the pandemic and everything at the circuit, the F1 shoot went on forever. He read it in two days and called back and said, I want to do it. It’s the best script I ever read.

DEADLINE: Wow…

BERGER: He was in, that quickly. It took no time. He was very gracious about the Ocean’s thing and very fast in reacting to this. And then I met him, and Cully is described in the book as not the most handsome guy, more like a brawler, kind of an ugly guy with a scar in his face. I don’t quite know how to talk about Brad Pitt’s looks, but I sit across from him, and he’s obviously a really gorgeous man. I look at him and I approached the stuff in the script, where it says, he’s kind of not so handsome, he has the scar in the face. He says, yeah, to me it just means wounds. That means healing. And he has this really simple way of cutting right through it. Let’s not talk around the thing. Let’s just cut straight to the chase and make it simple. What do you call that part of the country, Missouri? It’s no bullshit.  

DEADLINE: Turning down the Ocean’s movie reminds me of the story you told me about finishing film school, knocking on the Good Machine door, working on Ang Lee’s films, and then turning down a full-time job there because it would have been the easy path….

BERGER: Oh, it’s the same thing. You’re right. Full circle. I always keep doing that. I’ll see Ocean’s and have a great time, have my popcorn, but hopefully I’ll be thinking, I wasn’t the right guy to make this.

DEADLINE: Back to Macau and Colin Farrell and his towering character arc.

BERGER: It’s an emotional journey of a man stripped of all the facades and what he thinks of himself. It’s him at rock bottom. What does he do? If all those characters –Felix and Ralph – are on a path to liberating themselves from their past, where Colin starts out is…he’s utterly, completely empty, in the spiritually emptiest place on earth, in search of a small haven of peace. That’s not too dissimilar to Ralph’s journey in Conclave, but in a very different environment, with very different technical challenges. I felt like an urge, after the controlled architecture of Conclave, to really have in a way a pop opera that is colorful and bold and humorous and tragic all at the same time. And find a genre that doesn’t really exist in the world and make something that is really different from anything I’ve done before, or anything I’ve seen.  

DEADLINE: I’ve covered Colin’s trajectory since he came off the stage in Ireland to be touted as the next big male star, making $5 million for movies like SWAT, and probably more for Minority Report, Alexander and the Total Recall remake. That superstar trajectory didn’t happen, and he got caught up in the excess that often faces young actors. I saw him in In Bruges and thought, Martin McDonagh knows how to pull a performance out of him, and did it again with The Banshees of Inisherin. He goes for broke in your movie, and it might be the best thing he’s done. How did you know?

BERGER: We know what we know about Colin from the newspapers and from his past. I don’t know more than you do, and I don’t intend to pry. It’s his private life, but he’s very open with it and so he’ll tell you the same thing. So he’s obviously had his past with addiction. We never talked about it, I didn’t say, oh, maybe you can put your past experience to this movie. I assume he takes a lot of what he has to do from his past. You don’t need a history of addiction to be a great actor, to be able to inhabit a part like this; a person without a history of addiction could do it as well if they identify with this character, because we all have that inside of us. We all have that. There was an emptiness that I was feeling at the time.  

DEADLINE: Why? You came out of nowhere with All Quiet on the Western Front, and knew what you had with Conclave. You made a movie about the election of a pope, and visually it was sumptuous and there was highly dramatic twists and turns, with fabulous performances. I mean, why empty?

BERGER: Maybe because of all that? I really don’t know. I can’t analyze myself, but I think maybe it’s because, and this is kitchen sink stuff I’m almost embarrassed to say, and I haven’t really thought it through. But I had worked a lot, and that tends to make you feeling empty when you don’t have a balance. And secondly, when you suddenly, I’d been locked inside of German television and film industry for a long time. In a small place. And when you break out and suddenly are there where you always wanted to be, but never thought it could be possible, you realize, oh fu*k, but I’m still Edward. I’m still just that same guy with all the same faults, and nothing actually changed. You don’t find happiness in making Conclave; you’ve got to find happiness within yourself. That’s what you realize. It’s not reaching the big goal, making Conclave and Ballad and making the next movie with Brad. That is wonderful, but I’m still going to have to deal with it. I’m just Edward like you are just Mike, with all my flaws and shortcomings. That won’t change. And so you’re going to have to find happiness within that. And I think that’s probably where the emptiness came from at that time.

That emptiness is probably not too dissimilar in a much, much smaller and undramatic and not cinematic way that you could film to what Colin’s Lord Doyle or what any other addict must have felt in that time. I don’t believe that you need Colin’s history to be able to play this part. But what I did learn from Colin, and I really mean learn by watching him, just being around him and observing because he never taught me…is what an artist this perfectionist is, what incredible gift a person like that has. Colin is probably the warmest, most big hearted, empathetic, generous person I’ve ever met. And so the movie ended up being a love letter to him and to his performance, and to his dedication to making himself vulnerable and open. He was so open to undressing emotionally in front of everyone, and baring his soul. And it’s very difficult to do. I did learn from Colin, I’ve never learned from anyone else how hard it’s, but what a true artist is and what a true beautiful artist this man is.

DEADLINE: He purports to be of royal lineage, but he is ducking hotel staff, and struggling to turn his luck at the baccarat tables. You’ve got all these fascinating characters swirling around him. Tilda Swinton as this uptight investigator sent by his debt holders and closing in on him, with secrets of her own, Fala Chen playing this mysterious benefactor who herself seeks redemption for staking the wrong degenerate gambler.  While most of these gambling movies shoot in Vegas, Macau is that on steroids and a most fascinating location you maximized visually.   

BERGER: So a lot of times, this is just instinct, not analytical. I don’t sit there and go like, oh, this is what I want to do. And then I realize while I do it, or actually while I edit it, or even when I talk to you about what it is all about and why it drove me there, in a way some silly therapy. But you are right that it is a little bit of a reaction to the last movie, the  a controlled, slow paced, deliberate environment with conclave. I wanted to explode that, burst that open, hit that in the face with a baseball bat. I read this wonderful interview with Bruce Nauman, the artist who coincidentally had a show in Hong Kong that I saw when I was shooting there. He said, I want to make art that hits or try to make art that hits people in the face with a baseball bat. This is what Macau is; it kind of hits you in the face with a baseball bat. There’s loud music there, fountains, an explosion of money and luxury. There’s too much of everything, and it’s overwhelming. That felt like a great contrast to Conclave. Life and instinct guides you to these things, where you go from the darkly serene world of the Vatican to this utter chaos. My favorite scene is the one where Colin eats all this food at once, just gorges himself, and it’s not enough to fill the void. It felt very resonant to me because suddenly, first of all, it was something I felt inside and I felt like, oh, how do I build this? And secondly, I felt it’s what the world feels like. We’ve got everything we are when a world completely out of a world that’s completely out of whack. So it is with capitalism, and that is just rampant in places like Macau and with societies that have lost its compass. That’s basically what the movie’s about. It’s Colin’s journey. I was thinking, I set out to make a movie, but this one guy who’s lost his compass, lost his purpose in life looking for a small haven of peace.

That’s actually what we all are right now; money everywhere, opportunities everywhere, luxury everywhere. But not for everybody, only for a very few. And when you have it, what do you do with it? Nothing. It doesn’t make us happy. And so that’s suddenly, suddenly, that’s what drew me to it deep down inside.

DEADLINE: Farrell’s work as the title character in The Penguin has him up for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Anthology Series or Movie, one of 24 Primetime Emmy nominations that show has gotten. He has spoken a lot about the arduous task of nature of sitting in a makeup chair for three hours a day. How much of a delight was it for him to make this movie, where the prosthetics come from inside him, and it’s all acting chops, a culmination of what he learned since he was a kid coming up and on the Irish stage age and then in Hollywood, to hit this high-water mark with you?

BERGER: That’s great to hear if you perceive it that way. I think he really enjoyed it. He enjoys any role. What is amazing to me with The Penguin is, he has like 10 pounds of prosthetics on his face, and you still feel the vulnerability in that guy’s eyes. It’s amazing how he does it. And here he didn’t have it, and it’s beautifully put. He just has it inside, and from all those movies, but it is just him, right? It’s just him. no one else there. And I think it’s quite a burden, but also quite a pleasure.