Danny Boyle’s latest film “Ink” traces the rise of Rupert Murdoch on London’s Fleet Street and the takeover of The Sun newspaper. The film premieres at the London Film Festival and will open in select theaters Dec. 11 before landing on Netflix on Jan. 8 in the U.S. and Latin America. Guy Pearce plays a brash, 30-something Rupert Murdoch, with Jack O’Connell as editor Larry Lamb, the working-class newspaper journalist who helped him remake The Sun into a populist juggernaut.
Set in 1969 London, Boyle enlisted his go-to production designers, Gareth Pugh and Carson McColl, to bring his vision to life. Boyle’s brief was simple. The Fleet Street of today looks vastly different from the Fleet Street of 1969.
The Sun’s 1969 headquarters was originally located on Bouverie Street, with the print press set in the basement of the offices. In its place now stand modern buildings. They ultimately found a space in Bromley, U.K., which they could transform for filming.
The newsroom was a huge undertaking for Pugh, and McColl describes it as the “nerve center” of the film. Boyle referred to the space as a spaceship. Pugh notes, “It’s where we spent most of our time in the script.” McColl adds, “For the space to feel real, the layout was key.
In a newsroom, especially of that era, there was a daily system of way-finding — from the morning until the copy deadline at night — that would escalate into a frenzy of activity and human traffic.” He explains they worked with consultants who had experience on Fleet Street in 1969 to map out the newsroom and choreograph its flow with the cast. The set had to balance breadth and scale despite the film’s low budget, which forced the team to be both creative and resourceful. The pair had recently given up smoking, but they wanted to add an extra layer of authenticity.
McColl says, “We smoked like two packets of cigarettes, so that it smelled like cigarette smoke.” In addition to that, they found old rotary phones, typewriters and other set-pieces that immersed the cast and the film in that era. One challenge was finding the Linotype machines which The Sun relied on for its typesetting. McColl says, “They’re priceless.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
