Thomas Bird

Since its premier at the 52nd Telluride Film Festival in Colorado last month, tantalising images and reviews of Colin Farrell in Ballad of a Small Player have been circulating online. Based on the 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne and directed by Edward Berger, whose 2022 epic All Quiet on the Western Front landed four Academy Awards, Ballad of a Small Player is set to bring a fresh view of Macau to a global audience.  ‘They really followed the book in terms of locations,’ says the novel’s author Lawrence Osborne, from his apartment in Sukhumvit.  For Osborne, ‘authenticity of place is the secret to authenticity of story,’ and he’d always felt, ‘the kaleidoscope of the exploding city has not been rendered in film before.’ ‘Berger,’ he says, ‘understood that he had to capture the texture of Macau.’ Osborne is yet to see the film adaptation, which Netflix is closely guarding until its official release in October, although he did get to watch some scenes being shot.  The story follows Lord Doyle, a fraudulent British gambler drifting through ‘Asia’s Las Vegas.’ ‘It’s very autobiographical. A lot of that character is about poverty and failure. When I watched Colin Farrell going through the lines on the set, I saw myself 20 years ago.’   Photograph: Netflix   As Osborne tells it, he discovered Macau after being hired as a reporter for The New York Times, a job that followed years of poverty and failure as a down-on-his-luck writer. ‘I was in the wasteland in the ‘90s. Eventually, a