{"id":45626,"date":"2026-09-06T01:40:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/45626\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T01:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T01:40:09","slug":"john-malkovich-werner-herzog-and-danny-boyle-show-up-big-in-italy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/45626\/","title":{"rendered":"John Malkovich, Werner Herzog, and Danny Boyle Show Up Big in Italy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhy am I wearing this?!?\u201d said director Danny Boyle, hurling translation headphones off his ears after realizing he was the only one speaking. The excitable Brit auteur was at the press conference for the Venice Film festival\u2019s opening night selection\u00a0Ink, the director\u2019s exhilaratingly overheated take on the Swinging-Sixties origins of Rupert Murdoch\u2019s tabloid sensation The Sun. He couldn\u2019t wait to start talking about his new film, even before any questions were piped through his headgear.<\/p>\n

No matter \u2014 Boyle was more than happy to launch into a breathless monologue as soon as he sat down. \u201cYou say to everybody you\u2019re making a film called Ink. This isn\u2019t\u00a0a film about tattoos!\u201d he said. \u201cYou make a film like this for not a lot of money. It\u2019s about Britain, it\u2019s about Fleet Street. No one knows what Fleet Street is anymore!\u201d<\/p>\n

Fleet Street was, in fact, both the location and the mythic identity of the British national newspaper industry. More than a dozen papers famously nestled cheek-by-jowl in office buildings along that short London thoroughfare \u2014 bookended by the courts of justice on one end and St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral on the other. \u201cThe Law and God,\u201d said Ink\u00a0screenwriter James Graham. \u201cAnd then, between them, the news.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Guy Pearce as Murdoch and Jack OConnell as Lamb in Ink. Anthony Dickenson \/ Venice Film Festival<\/p>\n

The Oscar-winning Boyle, best known for adrenaline-pumping, thrill-ride dramas like\u00a0Trainspotting\u00a0and\u00a0Slumdog Millionaire, might seem an odd choice for a movie about newspapers. But he was smitten with Graham\u2019s 2017 underdog play about how Murdoch (Guy Pearce) hired brilliant but stymied editor Larry Lamb (Jack O\u2019Connell) to revolutionize a failing outlet like The Sun by pumping it full of low-brow journalism that readers secretly relished, upending patriarchal norms of propriety and arguably trampling on any responsible notions of morality itself.<\/p>\n

In the 12-month process, the sleepy broadsheet Sun transformed into the tabloid-turbocharged \u201csuper, soaraway Sun\u201d \u2014 and became the highest-selling newspaper in the world. It was also, in Boyle\u2019s view, the Big Bang that begat our current online chaos of fake news, addictive clickbait, and weaponized social media outrage.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all set in the period of 1969,\u201d explained Boyle. \u201cBut we feel like we updated it to make a connection to the modern world. I mean, that\u2019s a pretty exciting palette for a director to work with. You know, so you can get up every morning and feel like you\u2019ve got a great day of work to do. And then you get invited to the Venice Film Festival,\u201d he said. And then added with a chuckle: \u201cFor a film about\u00a0tattoos!\u201d<\/p>\n

Oscar buzz started immediately after the\u00a0Ink\u00a0screening, especially for Boyle\u2019s muscular direction, Graham\u2019s wickedly sharp script, and devilish performances from O\u2019Connell and Pearce. But the awards chatter got even more deafening after the following night\u2019s premiere for Martin McDonagh\u2019s hilariously bleak\u00a0Wild Horse Nine.<\/p>\n

A meditation on the guilt-wracked consequences of a ruthlessly amoral career, the caustic comedy follows two CIA operatives stationed in 1973 Chile who are also unlikely best friends: loose cannon Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) and jaded professional Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell). Taking an unlikely two-week break from planning the assassination of democratically elected left-wing president Salvador Allende, the pair fly to Rapa Nui, more famously known as Easter Island, on a trip with ulterior motives.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was killing people before you were born,\u201d Carlisle says blithely to Chesterfield on the flight. \u201cI\u2019ve killed people in countries you can\u2019t even spell.\u201d His loose-lipped, fuck-it attitude makes more sense once the film reveals that Carlisle has a terminal illness. And at that point, Wild Horse Nine becomes a perfect showcase for Malkovich\u2019s virtuosic performance: tender, regretful, defiant, devastated, strident, cruel and, ultimately, heroic.<\/p>\n

\"\"John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell in Wild Horse Nine. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can already start writing your acceptance speech for the Oscars,\u201d said a Swedish reporter at the press conference, after the room exploded with applause for Malkovich. \u201cHow do you feel about that? Finally getting the Oscar you deserve after such a long and prestigious career?\u201d<\/p>\n

Ever the pro, Malkovich dodged with expert tact. \u201cI\u2019ve had really spectacular collaborations with directors, writers, and actors,\u201d he said. \u201cI never feel in competition with any of them, because generally I love what they do. For me, it\u2019s a very nice thing. But the nicest thing is that the film gets attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

Getting attention for its oddball premise was iconoclastic director Werner Herzog\u2019s wildly eccentric character study\u00a0Bucking Fastard, in which real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara star as Jeannie and Joannie Holbrooke, siblings who dress, walk, and act exactly alike. In a hypnotic surreal twist, they even talk in almost perfect sync. When the two sisters fall into a torrid physical relationship with next-door-neighbor Gareth (Orlando Bloom), they do it together. And when Gareth jilts them, they both wreak a fiery revenge in unison that gets them a restraining order.<\/p>\n

This obsessive mirroring, seemingly a superficial gimmick, is Herzog\u2019s opportunity to explore more profound ideas about identity, desire, and companionship, in a story that feels more like a magical fable.\u00a0\u201cWe did existential rehearsals with the two sisters,\u201d said Herzog at the press conference. \u201cBut they were so good instantly, that after five days we stopped. I had complete confidence in them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first, it was very daunting,\u201d Rooney said. \u201cBut we found pretty quickly that having a lifetime together there was an unspoken world between us that we didn\u2019t have to create at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kate agreed. \u201cOnce we figured out the rhythm of our speaking in unison, it almost felt like a song,\u201d she explained. \u201cWe had this unspoken rhythm together. It happened quite naturally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Set in Ireland, the movie starts in Killarney, moves to Dublin, and eventually ends up in a fictional countryside defined by a peculiar mountain range of various caves. It\u2019s there that the sisters strangely convince themselves that their only way to find true love is to mine their way deeper into the caves.<\/p>\n

The location is actually in Slovenia, where the caves are more than 20 kilometers in size. \u201cThe caves were co-writers of the film,\u201d said Herzog. \u201cIt is the landscape of the soul. A landscape of imagination.\u00a0There\u2019s nothing realistic about it. And that\u2019s the beauty of it. It is poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWhy am I wearing this?!?\u201d said director Danny Boyle, hurling translation headphones off his ears after realizing he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[27573,4817,28393,14496,29413,29414,28390,29415,5,28389,29416,28382,28386,28392,16768,6437,29417,29115,28391,28383,29418,14443,19644,29419,28377,29420],"class_list":["post-45626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-bucking-fastard","tag-cinema","tag-danny-boyle","tag-film-festival","tag-film-industry","tag-fleet-street","tag-guy-pearce","tag-ink","tag-italy","tag-jack-oconnell","tag-james-graham","tag-john-malkovich","tag-kate-mara","tag-martin-mcdonagh","tag-movie-news","tag-orlando-bloom","tag-oscar-buzz","tag-rooney-mara","tag-rupert-murdoch","tag-sam-rockwell","tag-the-sun","tag-venice-2026","tag-venice-film-festival","tag-venice-film-festival-2026","tag-werner-herzog","tag-wild-horse-nine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}