by Gill Pringle at San Sebastian International Film Festival
Leaving behind the oppressive greys of the battlefield in All Quiet on the Western Front and the red and white robed cardinals of Conclave, director Edward Berger breaks out in a sea of bright saturated colour worthy of Baz Luhrmann with Ballad of a Small Player.
Yet, despite its neon trappings and champagne lifestyle of high-stakes gambling, Ballad of a Small Player is also filled with heady themes, specifically its exploration of addiction and the search for peace.
Set in Macau, Colin Farrell delivers a powerhouse performance as a con-man, gambling addict and boozy rogue on the run from his murky past in the glamorously sleazy casinos of the East’s opulent version of Las Vegas.
Playing in the Official Competition Selection at the 73rd Edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival, the charismatic Dubliner shares his own personal insights into addiction. “I did spend some time with some gamblers in Macau but, yeah, gambling is one affliction that never really came near to me I’m glad to say,” he confesses.
“I only ever damaged my body, my brain – not my bank account,” adds Farrell who openly struggled with addiction before entering rehab in 2005, later admitting how his addictions had taken a heavy toll, not only on his health but also on his relationships and sense of self.
When we first meet Farrell’s gaudy fake aristocrat, Lord Freddy Doyle, it’s clear that things aren’t going too well as he wakes up to a weapons grade hangover in a hotel suite littered with several days’ worth of room service trolleys.
“He’s just somebody who, like many of us on this planet, has lost his way,” says the actor.
“One of the things that I loved about this script is that I didn’t get into backstory. We just needed the character to be in the present,” Farrell says of Rowan Joffe’s screenplay based on Lawrence Osborne’s critically acclaimed 2013 novel of the same name. “He is on the precipice, just before falling into the vacuum of his own kind of insignificance, and the vacuum can be the darkness of living without any meaning or sense of worth.
“His moral compass is non-existent, and yet – like most addicts – he’s not to be trusted. He lives kind of under the banner of lies and pretense in a very extraordinary and extreme way, and through a certain set of misadventures and encounters, he comes to see the error of his ways, and that was very simply tracked for me in the script.”
For Berger, he was intoxicated at the prospect of shooting in Macau.
“It’s a gambling paradise – and also, the most electrifying place I’ve ever been to. You can have an attack on the senses,” he says.
“It’s louder, it’s more colourful, it’s more boisterous. The fountains are higher, the lights are brighter than in any other city. And I needed that to be part of the film.
“And basically, all the colours and music and everything is because of Macau, and because we thought that it’s such a world of abundance,” says the German director.
“And in this world of abundance, there’s a character who’s so lost and really needs to find his soul again, his spiritual centre,” he continues. “And so, that contrast was perfectly found in Macau. I think you can get very lost in a world that is so full of things, so full of choices.”
Ballad of a Small Player introduces us to a world where fortunes are won or lost in seconds and lives are transformed or shattered with every hand. But beneath the glitzy allure lies a darker underbelly of greed, deception and lies.
Farrell is fascinated by the differences between luck and making good choices.
We ask: Is there such a thing as a lucky person? “We all, of course, have choices. Some people would argue that there’s no fundamental choice – that by the time you realise it as a six year old or 12 year old that there’s a thing called choice – it’s already predestined to a certain degree, what choices you will make in any given environment because you’ve already been shaped by an environment that you don’t understand the power of that will live within you forever,” argues the actor.
“But let’s say there is such a thing as free choice, and we all get to make a certain amount of choices. We never can really choose how life confronts us. We can choose, of course, how we respond to that confrontation. So, with that in mind, honestly, you just meet life where it meets you, and you do the best you can,” continues Farrell.
“And somebody who lives in a 30,000 square foot mansion in Bel Air could go to the dog track someday and put $20 on a dog race and lose and say, ‘Jesus, I’m really unlucky’. So, it’s all very subjective, the idea of luck.
“You do the best you can. And you try to serve your true self and the people that you love and your community. And that’s the best any of us can do. And that’s certainly not what Doyle is doing in this film at all. I mean, he’s serving himself. Of what aspect of himself – he’s serving the lowest, ethical, moral aspect of his internal life that a person could have. So that’s not really serving the deepest and purest part of himself,” he says.
If we see Farrell’s Lord Doyle sink further and further, then Berger believes that Ballad of a Small Player is really a film about a spiritual awakening.
“It starts with a man who just feels, probably utter emptiness because of his utter loss of direction and loss of identity. He’s even changed his name – he’s thrown it away, like he’s hiding his Irishness. He’s running away from everything. And yet, in the end, it’s about a spiritual awakening, and it really affected me deeply,” says the Oscar-winning director.
“I think the film changed me and I learned a lot from being in Macau and from understanding how the culture in China embraces ghost stories,” he says musing upon the 18 levels of hell, an important part of Buddhist and Daoist beliefs in China, often depicted in temples and other cultural sites.
“In this movie, ghosts exist – just like they exist in Chinese culture. So that’s what we put in the film and that was very educational for me. It really broadened my horizon of understanding of how other cultures have different beliefs,” says Berger while his Irish leading man looks on solemnly before declaring. “Yeah, there’s not 18 stages of hell in Ireland. There’s just one – and we’re all going there!”
Ballad of a Small Player will stream from 29 October 2025
