Danny Boyle Dodges AI Question About ‘Ink’ at TIFF: ‘I Don’t Think We’ll Need to Go Into That’

On Tuesday afternoon, Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” about the rise of U.K. tabloid The Sun under owner Rupert Murdoch (a cheeky Guy Pearce) and editor Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell, swaggering), made its Canadian debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. As our critic wrote, it’s “a propulsive, can’t-look-away account” of the rise of the U.K.’s most popular tabloid and the smuttification of news, with the rag opting for outrageous headlines, giveaway contests and topless women over hard-hitting journalism. And yes, it’s indeed an electrifying film that should garner praise for not only Boyle but Pearce and Variety cover star O’Connell, who delivers his most magnetic performance since “Starred up.”

During the film’s post-screening Q&A at the Princess of Wales Theatre, Boyle and the cast fielded questions from the audience about a few topics, including the movie’s use of AI. Boyle previously copped to using “about thirty seconds” of AI at the Telluride film Festival “where we animate a couple of old photographs.”

“Oh, and there’s some mice,” he added. “It’s very good for animals and we had some mice that run around The Sun newsroom.”

When an audience member in the balcony of the theater asked Boyle about his use of AI in the film and the threat AI poses more broadly to the film industry and the world, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind TIFF-premiering “Slumdog Millionaire” said, “We used a tiny amount of it. It’s very much linked with VFX in our world; it’s one of the tools they use in the VFX. We try to be very responsible and make sure no actors were out of work because of it, so we would always employ actors if we were going to use a bit of it. There was about thirty seconds of it.”

As for the broader implications of AI, he tabled that for another day.

“The why of it… is a hugely complicated , which I don’t think we’ll need to go into here,” he offered. “But we will need to go into it, all of us.” With that, the moderator ended the Q&A.

Boyle was joined onstage by O’Connell and Pearce who, earlier in the chat, dished on how they painted humanizing portraits of two larger-than-life figures who’ve wreaked quite a bit of chaos on the world. Boyle said he identified with the Yorkshire-raised Lamb because, as a native of Lancashire, he was also “an outsider coming to London.”

Pearce, meanwhile, said that when he began researching Murdoch, he didn’t necessarily see the “monster” with the “mystique” that so many people paint him as, but someone timid and callow.

“It started, really, with looking at some footage of Murdoch from the mid-‘60s onward,” Pearce explained of his fellow Aussie. “When I looked at footage of him and interviews of him where they would catch him at Sydney Airport or Melbourne Airport… he always looked awkward, he always looked shy, he always looked very humble… and not the image we all have of this person we think we now know given what we’ve seen in the last twenty, thirty or forty years.”

He saw loads of “ambition” in Murdoch following his research, but mostly “a quiet, humble kind of chap.”