Chris Connor chats with Ballad of a Small Player screenwriter Rowan Joffé…
Fresh off its gala screening at the London Film Festival, we spoke with Ballad of a Small Player’s screenwriter Rowan Joffé about the challenges of bringing Lawrence Osborne’s acclaimed source material to life. The film like the novel, follows Lord Doyle a down on his luck gambler on the run from a mysterious past that catches up to him in the gambling dens of Macau. Joffé spoke of the changes from the page to the screen, working with actors of the calibre of Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton and working with director Edward Berger after the gargantuan success of both All Quiet on The Western Front and Conclave…
When did the novel first come on to your radar?
It first came on my radar in late summer 2020, which was at the height of Covid as I remember it, and my own life and other people’s I’m sure were reckoning with this horrible new reality, and in the turmoil of all of this, my agent Nick Marston gave me a book to read that his brother had recommended would make a great movie and that Mike Goodridge was attached to produce. I read it in one sitting; it was like a very heady cocktail. I consumed it too quickly and greedily. Lawrence’s prose is so cleverly wrought and witty and odd and distinctive and fun and profound all at the same time. I got to the end of the book and I thought “how on earth do we turn this into a movie anyone will actually make?”.
You could almost put the novel straight on screen, and it would be this wonderful arthouse film and would find an audience. I just didn’t think anyone would put any money into making that. So I set out to as lovingly as I could, turn it into a three-act movie structure that kind of does some of the things we expect a movie to do with a ticking clock and stakes without harming that beautifully delicate and pungent ecosystem in the novel.
You’ve done a great job of keeping the core essence of the novel, but with some additions. Can you talk us through some additions like Tilda Swinton’s character?
Yes, 100% there’s a couple of additions. One is really funny, but I’ll get to that in a minute. So, for the Tilda Swinton addition, I felt early on that one of my biggest anxieties, especially as a writer, is money. So I think that sort of terror, that highly relatable terror of, “how am I going to pay for all of this?” Whether it’s the rent or, in Doyle’s case, this enormous hotel bill. So, I thought that would be a great engine. I thought if the hotel manager gave him three days to pay the bill, then I’ve got this lovely rule of three, and I’ve got a ticking clock.
It felt really practical, and also closely allied with what I imagine to be the nightmare of a gambler, which is settling the debts that you’ve accrued. And how do you do that? The answer is, you gamble more, and the horror of that is, will you accrue even more debts that way, and how do you get out of that incredible vicious circle?
So that was one addition, and then the next addition was, well, if he’s stolen this money… Because Lawrence Osborne is often hailed as a kind of, I’m not going to say antecedent, because that’s completely the wrong way around, but somebody who has inherited the legacy of Graham Greene. I thought, well, what would be a suitably Graham Greene-like character, a working-class English private detective who’s somewhat embittered about the glamour and immorality of and decadence of Doyle’s lifestyle, and who delights in exposing him. So that’s how the Tilda Swinton character of Cynthia Blythe came about.
Then the third addition to the which isn’t in the book is, although there’s the Adrian Lippitt character in the book, he doesn’t at the end appear in the guise of Prince Lorenzo De Firenzi which just popped into my head one day when I was on a zoom with Ed and Jan, our producer, and Mike, and it made them laugh. I was just offering it up as a crazy idea, and they were like, “no, no, this is great. Let’s have Prince Lorenzo De Firenze in there”. I spoke to the humour at the heart of Lawrence’s world, and also just the flamboyance and insanity of our story and of Macau, which is so extravagant you could easily imagine a prince Lorenzo de Medici flying in from Monaco and shedding a few million.
You mentioned Lawrence. How involved was he in the process? Did you talk to him about the adaptation at all?
No, we didn’t. As is customary in my most limited understanding. Situations where the filmmakers buy the rights to a novel, they kind of part ways with the novelist, respectfully and affectionately, because the interests, creatively and practically, and I suppose to a degree commercially, behind filmmaking are so divergent, from the interests creatively, culturally and commercially behind many kinds of novel making, that it would be a conflict of interests.
In the interests of movie making, they handed the reigns over to me. I felt like I had a relationship with Lawrence creatively through his work, through trying to be as referential to his novel as I could. So I didn’t want that personal relationship with Lawrence, because I knew at some point I would have to be forensic and ruthless with it, with his story. It’s a bit like a surgeon not wanting to get to know his patient to well because you’ll have to cut bits out.
You mentioned that when you read it, you thought this would be difficult to adapt. What were the biggest challenges for you moving it from the page to the screen?
Well, I suppose, how do you preserve the whimsy and poetry? And by the way, when I say whimsy, that sounds really disrespectful. It’s probably quite inaccurate, because I suspect there’s no whimsy in Lawrence’s writing at all. I have a feeling that for him to construct throws that carefully and to land as beautifully as he did in this kind of liminal space between magic and myth and gambling addiction, an almost pungently, grittily real account of Macau that he must have worked incredibly hard. In fact, I hope to go to the Macau Literary Festival with Lawrence next year. And I know Lawrence loves the movie, and I can’t wait to kind of have a relationship with him now, but, but how do you stay true to the whimsy and the magic and the poetry of that novel, but still deliver a three-act structure?
I’m perhaps quite an old-fashioned storyteller, but I agree with Aaron Sorkin that character is quest, and I want a character whose quest I can sink my emotional teeth into as an audience member and go, right. I’m invested. I know what my character wants, and I know why it matters if he doesn’t get it. Then I believe in old-fashioned things, like an act to low point where your character might not die but gets as close to dying as it’s humanly possible to get. Then act three is a kind of phoenix rising from the ashes. How do I gently massage and rearrange and reformulate all the elements of Lawrence’s novel without killing them or without hurting them?
In the film version, Doyle turns out to be an Irishman, of course played by Colin Farrell. Was the role written with him in mind, because obviously, in the novel, he’s not Irish originally.
No, that’s quite right in the novel, he’s English. Which probably better reflects Lawrence’s cultural background. He’s a working class Englishman, sort of lower middle class whose dad died, leaving him and his mum in debt. So I think that’s where the character’s career in finance, and then his addiction to gambling first has its roots, in the fear of not having enough.
So early drafts of the script weren’t written with Colin in mind, because we didn’t have Colin, but from the moment that we did have Colin and multiple drafts were written from that moment on, Ed and I thought we should write with an Irishman in mind. That would give Colin a sort of automatic key to naturalism and to a certain sort of biographical intimacy with that character’s backstory. I’m English, but I lived in Dublin for a couple of years, and I just tried to call on my memory of how people from Dublin talk and not flower it or over egg it and plant a few seeds here and there that would give Colin something to navigate the switch by. By the switch I mean the moment where he slips out of Lord Doyle and into his own personality.
In the novel, there are some sequences that explore Doyle’s background and life before we find him in Macau. Were you ever tempted to frame any sequences that they’ve explored that?
Well, you know, like anyone reading this who’s a screenwriter will know that almost inevitably, when you’re telling a story in a screenplay, one nut you have to crack is, how much backstory do I need? Then a secondary knot that follows on from that is, if I need a lot of backstory, do I need to have flashbacks? Then a tertiary knot that follows on from that is, if I’ve got a lot of flashbacks, do I need a dual time frame narrative, you know? So the point I’m trying to make is like these things can run away with you.
I think early on there was a feeling, certainly for me, that I wanted as minimal backstory as I could so that I wouldn’t end up in that tertiary nutdom that I’ve just sketched out because it’s a scary place to be. So I thought “okay, how can I distil the essence of these historical parts of the novel into something that might crop up in the story?” As it is we have this confessional moment between Dao Ming and Doyle where they smoke opium and she says “let’s play a game and you tell me the truth”. For someone who’s consistently used to lying is probably something of an adventure to go on, an adventure into telling the truth about myself, which is what they both do.
You mentioned that this came onto your radar during Covid. Obviously, Edward Berger’s career has taken off since then. So you must have been delighted to work with a director of Edwards calibre, especially after the recent success he’s had.
Yeah, absolutely. I think we were halfway through developing the script when All Quiet on the Western Front started gathering Academy momentum, both here and in the US. Then he was actually editing the film when Conclave also gathered a lot of award traction, and I suppose somewhere in the back of my head, being a bit of a doomsayer, I had this sort of voice of my mom almost going, “well, he can’t have three big hits in a row, so brace yourself, Rowan, yours won’t be one,” but, that sort of comedy aside, yeah, it’s a real privilege to work with people of Ed’s calibre and Colin’s calibre and Fala Chen’s calibre and Tilda Swinton’s calibre. Even some of the Chinese cast, the actress who plays Grandma is a huge star in her own country. I just feel very blessed and privileged because, you know, one of the great pitfalls of screenwriting is, you can get paid to write screenplays that never get made, and so to see your words come out of the mouths of actors like Fala, Tilda and Colin well, I think it’s probably as good as it gets.
We’re coming off London Film Festival where the film had a gala showing. How have you found the festival circuit?
Well, I was so thrilled. Back in I think it was March of this year, I was running a writer’s room for a TV show I’m currently shooting, and I just I saw the list of festivals we were going to, and it was like a dream come true, especially since I’ve been to San Sebastian quite a few times as a tourist and noted that they have a film festival there. It was always my dream to have a movie at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Obviously, the London Film Festival, because I’m a Londoner, and Toronto, because it’s kind of one of the biggest festivals in the world now. Telluride because it’s the high-brow festival in the US. So, you know, to be at all those places was incredibly gratifying, satisfying and exciting.
Many thanks to Rowan Joffé for taking the time for this interview. Read our review of Ballad of a Small Player here.
Chris Connor
