UK director Danny Boyle raised his concerns over the future of journalism in the age of AI as he touched down at the Venice Film Festival with opening film Ink on Wednesday.
Adapted from the 2017 stage play by James Graham, the feature follows the rise of the UK’s notorious tabloid newspaper The Sun in the 1970s under the editorship of Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), after he was poached from the Daily Mirror in 1969 by then budding media mogul Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce).
Boyle, O’Connell, Pearce and co-star Claire Foy received an enthusiastic welcome as they arrived at the press conference in a sign the film has gone down well with the Italian and international press corp in Venice.
The director was asked whether he thought the printed press celebrated in Ink would survive into the future under the pressure of digital media and AI.
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Boyle said it was debatable noting how one of the last prints works in Watford, used as a location for the film, had shut down as they were wrapping Ink. He added that a more worrying concern for him was rather the future of journalism in the age of AI.
“Journalism is one of the great uprights of any civilization… within that bunch of people, there lots of different people… there are those who stand up to power and speak truth to power, and to have those people in society is really important,” he said.
“The danger with the tech giants and their AI is that they will be able to replace journalism. They’ll be able to have an AI journalist who’s much more efficient, cheaper, etcetera, ecetera, and will that AI journalist speak truth to the power that created it?”
Boyle said Ink had not been an easy film to get over the line. Alongside thanking Studiocanal for getting behind the production, he also voiced his gratitude to Venice and its artistic director Alberto Barbera for the invite.
“We made it with not a lot of money and it wasn’t easy for all sorts of reasons. And then you think nobody’s going to see this, it’s about Britain and it’s about Fleet Street. Nobody knows what Fleet Street is anymore. You say to everybody you’re making a film called Ink. They say, ‘Is it a film about tattoos?,’ said the director.
“Then Alberto rings up and says, ‘Do you want to be in the Venice Film Festival? And not only that, ‘Do you want to open the Venice Film Festival?’ And it’s like pride doesn’t kind of get close, gratitude gets close, proper gratitude, like the gratitude of friendship, and there should be that friendship between filmmakers and film festivals because they’re under threat and are such an enormous boost to anybody making a film.”
Pearce recounted how Boyle had arranged for the cast to meet with real-life journalists and print workers who had worked on The Sun during its heyday.
“It was really great to have them come in and recount some of their time… It made it real and vivid, and you could actually see their enthusiasm in remembering the time and the living on the edge experience that they all had,” he said.
“The thing that you have to remember as well is that the workload was incredible, the turnover, it’s daily. There’s a lot of work to be done to try and get a paper out, which is obviously very different today, just getting a sense of that from the people that had actually worked there at the time was fantastic.”
