Ink director Danny Boyle on Saturday confirmed that redacted Sun newspaper headlines shown as part of an epilogue in his Netflix drama about the founding of the UK tabloid will be shown in full in the U.S. theatrical and streaming version of the film.
Speaking while receiving the Deadline Legend Awards during Deadline’s Contenders Film Los Angeles awards-season event Saturday, Boyle said an edited version showing the headlines is currently being edited into a new cut of the film in time for its December 11 release in select theaters.
The pic, based on James Graham’s play and adapted screenplay that tells the story of Rupert Murdoch and editor Larry Lamb’s takeover of the British tabloid The Sun in the late 1960s, setting the tone for new kind of journalism in the process, was unable to show the headlines owing to Britain’s stringent libel laws.
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“We’ve had a battle to get the film to where it is now, and I can tell you — I can say this, can’t I? — I think that we just won the ability [to show the headlines] because we’re in America, and you have better protection for freedom of speech than we have in Britain,” Boyle said during the Q&A session at the DGA Theater, adding that he hopes the uncensored version “will be [in] the finished version of the film, which we’ve never been able to show in Britain.”
Boyle pointed to one specific headline in the epilogue that was redacted in UK versions of the pic, above an article about the 1989 death of 97 fans crushed while trying to enter Hillsborough Stadium to watch a Liverpool-Nottingham Forest FA Cup soccer game. The tabloid report blamed Liverpool fans for the tragedy, citing what turned out to fabricated police and official reports.
“There are various headlines … at the end of [Ink], and there’s one particular, which although it won’t mean anything to you, to anybody from Britain it does mean a great deal, which is that The Sun ran a terrible headline called ‘The Truth,’ which is one of the principal concerns of James Graham’s screenplay throughout the whole film,” Boyle said.
“[The Sun] ran this headline, and it was a bunch of lies about the way that Liverpool fans were killed at the Hillsborough disaster,” he continued. “It’s one of the low points of British journalism, and we wanted that to be always in the film, and we weren’t able to have it in the British version. We have these redacted versions, but know that we’re in America. We’ve got it in there, and I hope that the tidal wave will then reach back to Britain, and we’ll be allowed to put them in there because it’s an important moment for freedom of speech, which you have enshrined.”
He added, “You know, it’s it’s it’s interesting that a tabloid that you know that lets it all hang out would try to stop you from doing something similar.”
The epilogue in the pic, which stars Jack O’Connell as Lamb and Guy Pearce as Murdoch, is also key as it ties The Sun’s rise to modern tabloids — and Murdoch’s eventual founding of Fox News.
“What they ignited … and the pact that they came up with to start The Sun culminates financially and principally in the birth of Fox News,” Boyle said. “Because the money that The Sun made allowed Murdoch to buy 20th Century Fox and then to finance the establishment, the extraordinary establishment, of a new terrestrial channel in America, which takes a lot of money. So there’s an umbilical cord, I think, that connects these two guys and their meeting in 1969 with where we are now.”
Ink, which has been hitting festival since its world premiere to open this year’s Venice Film Festival, is due to open in the UK on January 8, when it becomes available to stream on Netflix.