Macau, China, Nov. 10, 2025 (Lusa) - In "Ballad of a Small Player", Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell), a compulsive gambler, is the voice of his own creator, Lawrence Osborne, author of the book that inspired the Netflix film, told Lusa. It all began in a remote Chinese monastery.
In one of the first scenes of "Ballad of a Small Player", Lord Doyle - this is how Brendan Reilly, a conman who fled the UK with a stolen fortune, makes himself known - descends the long escalators of the (fictionalised) Rainbow casino for another baccarat session.
And it's on this descent into hell that the inveterate gambler, with millionaire bills to settle, first meets Dao Ming (Fala Chan), from the Chinese countryside, working as a loan shark in Macau and a possible avenue to redemption (and credit).
Dao Ming is, in fact, the starting point for this nocturnal ballad, even before director Edward Berger ("Conclave", 2024) imagined transferring it to the big screen, Lawrence Osborne, author of the book "The Ballad of a Small Player" (2014), told Lusa in an interview.
We have to go back to 2007 when, sent by Vogue magazine, the British journalist spent a night in a remote monastery in the west of the Chinese province of Sichuan. "The monks told us that all the girls there had gone to Hong Kong and Macau and most of them never came back, nobody knew what had happened," recalls Osborne, who lives in Bangkok.
A "strange and disturbing" idea that resurfaced when he travelled to Macau and stayed, as usual, at the Lisboa hotel-casino, a 1970s building and part of the empire of gambling magnate Stanley Ho (1921-2020) - "I'd never been to a place like this before".
"I wonder how many of those girls are from Sichuan?" he remembers thinking as he saw prostitutes circulating in the lobby of the Lisboa. "I'd go downstairs at night, and they had a sort of greyhound betting area in the basement, and some guys would sit there with sunglasses on at night - it was quite fun. I'd sit in the café and watch these girls going round clockwise, they'd go round like that all day," he recalls.
Dao Ming came to life in those corridors - in Osborne's book, she's a prostitute - but the resistance of putting herself in the shoes of a Chinese migrant ended up relegating her to the background in this story. The choice of protagonist was resolved when, one evening, the journalist came across a "lonely British man, all sweaty, wearing some kind of shabby velour jacket", playing a game.
"He looked completely lost, the only “gwai lou” in the place," he says, using a local Cantonese expression that refers to Caucasian foreigners but literally means “devil” or "ghost".
Osborne thus discovered Doyle, a would-be aristocrat (“Lord”) - with a noble title inspired, he told Monocle in an interview, by Lord Stow, as the locals called Andrew Stow (1955-2006), the British pharmacist who founded the custard tart empire in Macau.
Or rather, in Doyle, he found someone to project his voice. Narrated in the first person, "The Ballad of a Small Player" is "very autobiographical". "Not in the sense of being a crazy addict or an imposter - well, some people would disagree - but the voice is me," he adds.
The relationship with Macau was years in the making and evolved as he started travelling to the territory more often, as he needed to leave Thailand to renew his entry visa. His days revolved around the Lisbon. At night, he would go down to the casino and marvel at "that incredible kind of opera". Then he started gambling.
"It was a lot of fun, I lost money, and that was even more fun. And that whole supernatural atmosphere that the Chinese have when it comes to gambling was something I'd never seen before," he says.
Regarding Macau, he notes that today it's a different city from the one he wrote about in 2014. The depiction of Berger is also somewhat different from Osborne's -The depiction of Berger is also somewhat different from Osborne's - many of the book's references to Portuguese gastronomy or places , or even to the old casinos in the area, don't appear. The Greek Mythology in the Taipa area, where Osborne begins the book, no longer exists.The Greek Mythology in the Taipa area, where Osborne begins the book, no longer exists.
Macau is shown in "an operatic film, which is very colourful, very intense, very noisy", he says.
And for those who see the film, they may be exhausted as they follow Farrell, who advances, sweaty, on the verge of collapse, through opulent halls and rooms, evading the law and the law of odds, and not knowing what awaits him in the next hand - "the feeling that all gamblers live for", as Osborne writes in the book, which has earned him comparisons to Dostoyevsky and Graham Greene.
The book "is quieter, more interior and calmer, it's a different kind of voice", the author considers, acknowledging, however, that he was "positively surprised" by this "sensual film", which also added new details to Doyle's universe, such as the investigator sent to Macau to find him, Cynthia Blithe (Tilda Swinton).
"The story is very dark, it's not a tourist brochure, but the city looks incredible in the film (...) I think we've done something good for Macau. And it's not a small thing, it's big," he says.
Lawrence Osborne says he only saw the film when it premiered in London, on 9 October at the Royal Festival Hall, and acknowledged that he was "very moved": "it felt like I was looking back on my life 20 years ago."
"And I was sitting in that cinema and nobody knew who I was, completely anonymous (...) At the Q&A, it was just Collin Farrell and Tilda Swinton, but it's still my world, and it's a strange feeling. I went there completely alone, had a little Netflix limo waiting for me, had a whisky by myself and went home. It was strangely satisfying," he said.
"Ballad of a small player" premiered on Netflix on 29 October.
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