{"id":18882,"date":"2025-09-12T00:04:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T00:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=18882"},"modified":"2025-09-12T00:04:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T00:04:20","slug":"it-was-bananas-farrell-shoots-movie-in-macau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=18882","title":{"rendered":"‘It was Bananas’: Farrell shoots movie in Macau"},"content":{"rendered":"
Colin Farrell plunges into an intoxicating fever dream among the high-stakes baccarat tables of Macau casinos with ‘Ballad of a Small Player,’ a rare major Western film shot on location in Asia’s gambling capital.<\/p>\n

The surreal, dark and twisty drama co-stars Tilda Swinton as an investigator in pursuit of Farrell’s velvet-suited conman and gambling addict. It was filmed over 33 days in various Macau casinos, including scenes shot on live gaming floors while surrounded by real-life high rollers.<\/p>\n

Farrell told AFP he had spent a crazy eight weeks living in hotels “in the middle of the gambling strip… which I can’t imagine I would ever do” otherwise. “It was all-hands-on-deck. It was a bananas shoot,” he said at the Netflix film’s Toronto film festival premiere Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Macau is the world’s top casino hub by gross gaming revenue, roughly four times that of Las Vegas. The tiny Chinese-controlled territory has a skyline dominated by sprawling, luxurious casinos, many themed with replicas of global landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and canals of Venice.<\/p>\n

While gambling is banned in China, it has been legal in the former Portuguese colony since 1844. “It’s never been really shown like that on screen in a Western film. So, it felt like an adventure to me,” director Edward Berger told AFP.<\/p>\n

Macau has appeared more fleetingly in Hollywood films like 2016 heist flick “Now You See Me 2.” Berger’s new movie is the journey of “a fragile soul in a loud exuberant place… Macau is over-the-top so we wanted to capture that,” he explained. “It’s the most vibrant, most exuberant, colourful place I’ve seen.”<\/p>\n

Hungry Ghost<\/p>\n

The movie takes place during the Hungry Ghost Festival\u0097a traditional celebration rooted in Chinese folk religion where the spirits of the deceased are free to roam\u0097which lends the film a supernatural air.<\/p>\n

Several key scenes are also shot in nearby Hong Kong. The film borrows the colourful and kinetic trappings of Hong Kong cinema, including the films of Wong Kar-wai, Johnnie To and Hou Hsiao-Hsien.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Farrell plunges into an intoxicating fever dream among the high-stakes baccarat tables of Macau casinos with ‘Ballad of a Small Player,’ a rare major Western film shot on location in Asia’s gambling capital. The surreal, dark and twisty drama co-stars Tilda Swinton as an investigator in pursuit of Farrell’s velvet-suited conman and gambling addict. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}