'It was bananas': Actor Colin Farrell shoots new movie in Macau casinos

TORONTO – Irish actor 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 British actress Tilda Swinton as an investigator in pursuit of Farrell’s velvet-suited conman and gambling addict.

Chinese-American actress Fala Chen, Hong Kong actress Deanie Ip and British actor Alex Jennings round out the cast.

The movie was filmed over 33 days in various Macau casinos, including scenes shot on live gaming floors while surrounded by real-life high rollers.

Farrell, 49, 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 on Sept 9.

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 1847.

“It’s never been really shown like that on screen in a Western film,” director Edward Berger said. “So it felt like an adventure to me.”

Macau has appeared more fleetingly in Hollywood films like heist flick Now You See Me 2 (2016).

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 said. “It’s the most vibrant, most exuberant, colourful place I’ve seen.”

‘Hungry Ghost’

The movie takes place during the Hungry Ghost Festival, which lends the film a supernatural air.

Several key scenes are shot in nearby Hong Kong. The film borrows the colourful and kinetic trappings of Hong Kong cinema, including the films of directors Wong Kar Wai and Johnnie To.

Berger discovered British novelist Lawrence Osborne’s book of the same name back in 2018.

The Swiss-Austrian 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 (2022) and Vatican-set thriller Conclave (2024).

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,” he said.

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,” he said. “We didn’t lose any money, though.”

So Farrell was never ever tempted to drop the sort of giant bets placed by his character?

“No, not for me, man,” the actor said, laughing. “One affliction I never got, gambling. Not for me.” AFP