On a humid morning in Macau, a blue-and-orange phoenix embellished with more than 60,000 flowers is hatching from an enormous pink Fabergé egg in the lobby of the Wynn Palace hotel. The haughty bird basks in the attention of onlookers as it rotates on a diamond-encrusted perch to the triumphant sound of clarions, before returning to its shell. Chancing upon this spectacle, you think to yourself, “How lucky that I was passing at that precise moment!” Stick around and you will be disabused of your sense of good fortune: the hatching occurs every 15 minutes without fail.
It is summer 2024, and Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton are guests here while shooting Ballad of a Small Player, directed by Edward Berger (Conclave) and based on Lawrence Osborne’s clammy 2014 novel about ghosts, guilt and gambling. Farrell plays Brendan Reilly, an Irish thief who affects an English accent, goes by the name Lord Doyle and hides out at the Wynn Palace, where he clings to a precarious life of enervated luxury. Having fled to Macau with a stolen fortune, he whiles away his nights betting at baccarat, a high-stakes game of chance no more complex than a coin toss. Swinton is the gauche investigator, also labouring under dual identities (one minute she’s Betty, the next Cynthia), who has been hired to find Reilly and retrieve the loot.
“The place is a bit of a headfuck,” says Farrell. “Kind of like living inside that giant Fabergé egg.” He is referring to the hotel, which reserves for its casino’s high-rollers an entire wing of elite accommodation. When I am shown around one of these opulent villas, which features in the movie and has its own private hairdressing salon, massage room, outdoor pool and butlers’ quarters, I feel as if I’m being waterboarded with Dom Pérignon.
‘Colin is a wonder of boundless energy and nonsense’ … Farrell and Tilda Swinton in Ballad of a Small Player. Photograph: Netflix
But that “headfuck” remark could just as easily apply to Macau itself. After 400 years as a Portuguese colony, this port city south of Guangzhou became a special administrative region of China in 1999. Like Las Vegas, its gambling hub carries an intoxicating air of kitsch. The Cotai Strip is lined with looming replicas of the Rialto Bridge, the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben. Parked outside the fake Houses of Parliament is a Routemaster bus in which David Beckham – or rather, his digital self – is yoo-hooing from the upper deck in his capacity as ambassador of the Londoner hotel. “Have you been inside?” Swinton asks excitedly. “There are beefeaters doing jazz hands!”
Despite what this might suggest, Macau, which has been little-seen in western cinema, is a more serious proposition than Vegas. Razzle-dazzle stage spectaculars never really took off here, and its gamblers are too stern to get sloshed. Servers carry trays of tea or milk, rather than cocktails, across the casino floors. Spirits of a different kind, though, are an integral part of the culture, as Ballad of a Small Player demonstrates. In one scene, Reilly is turned away after the management checks CCTV footage of his latest win and spots a ghost loitering behind him.
The novel likens one casino to a “Hans Christian Andersen fairy palace imagined by a small child with a high fever”. That is reflected in today’s location: the Rio, an abandoned former hotel and casino adjacent to a shop offering “coffee, plants and lifestyle”. It has been dressed by the production designer Jonathan Houlding (Poor Things) to amplify its shabby-chic grandeur: gaudy chandeliers, mirrored pillars with floral decals, archways parenthesised by tasselled, cherry-coloured curtains and potted plants.
The place is a bit of a headfuck. Kind of like living inside that giant Fabergé egg
For his first day on set, the book’s author Osborne is wearing a brimless cap on the back of his head, and pincering along on crutches after a motorcycle accident in Bangkok, where he has lived since 2012. The novelist stations himself in a canvas chair and gazes admiringly at the Rio’s interior, its gaming tables surrounded by extras whom Berger is busy whipping into a frenzy before the next take. There is a near-constant hiss as the smoke machine fills the room with its hazy breath.
The fakery feels appropriate for a movie where most of the characters are posing as someone else. “Guys I used to meet in Macau would call themselves barons and counts,” says Osborne. “No one questioned it. Like Lord Stow, who sold his egg tarts here. Was he even a lord?” He was not: Macau’s renowned baker, who died in 2006, was a Boots pharmacist from Ilford in Essex.
We watch a few takes of Farrell riding the escalator down to the casino, then weaving in and out of the baccarat tables as the extras whoop and holler around him. He is dressed in high-waisted cream trousers, a striped shirt and braces, and a spiffy tomato-coloured jacket. The alternating red and green lighting has a clashing, contradictory effect, as though warning him to stop while encouraging him to go. The colours also introduce a hint of sci-fi into the chintzy surroundings: a reminder that Wong Kar-wai shot parts of In the Mood for Love and its futuristic semi-sequel 2046 here in Macau.
The Brylcreemed hair and pencil moustache that affords Farrell a note of raffish, retro charm was inspired, Berger says, by a tradition of gentleman stars: Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, David Niven. Have they informed his performance? “No,” the actor tells me. “But I’m aware that everything I’ve seen or read or heard inevitably ends up in my work. People have asked me about The Penguin and whether I was inspired by Jimmy Gandolfini in The Sopranos. I still haven’t seen The Sopranos! But I know that every gangster I’ve ever seen has found its Rolodexian way into what I did in The Penguin. The same with Reilly, whether it’s characters with addictions or people living lives of abject artifice.”
Farrell’s own former addictions are well documented, though gambling was not among them. Some of his insights into Reilly’s psychology have come from chatting to casino managers here. “One told me the house was up $24m the previous night from two gentlemen. I said: ‘I imagine they were pretty depressed.’ He said: ‘Yeah. But when they win, they feel just as bad.’”
The next scene to be shot involves Betty spotting Reilly for the first time as he dashes among the tables. She is gazing out at him from inside the casino’s jade-green smoking room, which resembles the booth in a recording studio. Pale and motionless behind the glass, she looks like a mannequin waiting to be freed from a shop window.
Edward Berger, centre, with Isabella Rossellini, left, and other members of the cast and crew of Conclave, accepting the best film award at this year’s Baftas. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA
The character doesn’t appear in the novel. “We needed to put more pressure on,” says Berger. “So Colin is being pursued in a not-entirely serious manner by Tilda. She fits with the ridiculousness and over-the-topness of Macau, as you can see from her look.”
Well, quite: patterned stockings, pink raincoat, zany specs. “Ed was clear that he wanted Betty to be part of the madness of the visual overload,” says Swinton. “We began by identifying a silhouette that would mark her out in the throng of the chase sequences through the casino.” Her frizzy wedge of hair was inspired by the 1970s children’s cartoon Crystal Tipps and Alistair, while Swinton and the costume designer Lisy Christl came up with the nerdy ensemble. “We had fun imagining what this suburban pen-pusher might deck herself out in to blend into Macau, and all the ways in which she gets it wrong.”
How does she see Betty fitting in to Reilly’s world? “I think of her as, possibly, another ghost. A fabrication of his imagination. Who would he conjure up to nail him? Someone from the banality of where he has escaped from, but dolled up to chime with the surreality of his hunting ground. Another potentially cracked and crooked soul, half-nemesis, half-company.”
She and Farrell haven’t worked together since one of his earliest films, Tim Roth’s incest drama The War Zone, back in 1999. “Tilda plays, man,” he grins. “She’ll mix it up. She watches you and takes you in like very few other actors I’ve worked with. There’s nothing she doesn’t see. That’s terrifying in a lovely way because she’s paying attention. It’s like fencing with a close friend.” Swinton returns the compliment. “Colin is a wonder of boundless energy and nonsense, and we both enjoy being amused.”
‘She needs to save herself but can’t figure out how’ … Fala Chen as Dao Ming in Ballad of a Small Player. Photograph: Netflix
If Betty is Reilly’s pursuer, then Dao Ming, played by Fala Chen, could be his salvation. A sex worker in the novel, she has been reimagined here as a loan shark who takes pity on him. What does she possibly see in this mess of a man? “I think she needs to save herself but can’t figure out how,” says Chen. “Helping him enables her to express that towards someone else. They both need redemption. That word came up a lot in my conversations with Edward.”
Berger reflects on their relationship. “He is addicted to gambling and alcohol. But it is consumption that drives him. He needs something to fill that hole inside because he’s lost his spiritual core. When he meets Dao Ming, it helps him redefine his path towards a higher meaning.”
The director hopes this serious side will come through amid the film’s comic mayhem, its banquet of excess. “The world is falling apart, yeah? Reilly is the epitome of that, and Ballad has turned out to be very much a fable of what we are all going through: this pursuit of the individual at the expense of the communal experience and common decency.”
He is addicted to gambling and alcohol. But it is consumption that drives him
Farrell agrees. “It’s a fool’s errand,” he says. “Reilly is looking in all the wrong places for meaning and context and worth. We meet him at a time when he’s lost, but I imagine he was just as lost when he got on the plane in London to fly to Macau. The chaos was already inside him.”
Near the end of the day, I find Berger eating potato salad from a paper plate. He is seated at one of the deserted baccarat tables, so now seems an opportune time to ask about the similarities between film-making and gambling. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he says, looking mildly spooked. “But you’re right. It’s probably the most unpredictable, expensive enterprise you can go into. You can have the best actors, the best script, but it still doesn’t guarantee a good movie. It’s a huge gamble.”
To the usual risks, you can add a history of indifference to films on this topic. Croupier, California Split, Mississippi Grind and Hard Eight are all fine movies, but they hardly represent a winning hand commercially. It would take more than a little fear, however, to deter Berger. “I don’t like making the same thing twice,” says the man who came to the papal intrigue of Conclave directly from the trenches of All Quiet on the Western Front. “I want to be scared. I want to be absolutely terrified.” Should he end up with egg on his face, it will at least be the Fabergé variety.
Ballad of a Small Player is in cinemas from 15 October and on Netflix from 29 October
