Danny Boyle, who reinvented British film with Trainspotting, turns his account of a Fleet Street takeover into the Mayor of London's Gala at this year's BFI Festival.
Danny Boyle brings a slice of Fleet Street history to the Royal Festival Hall on Monday 12 October 2026, when Ink has its UK premiere as the Mayor of London’s Gala.
Boyle was born in Lancashire in 1956 and came to film from the theatre, making Shallow Grave in 1994, which won the BAFTA for Best British Film, and Trainspotting two years later, which reset what a British film could look and sound like. Slumdog Millionaire won him the Academy Award and the BAFTA for direction in 2008, and in 2012 he staged the Olympic opening ceremony in Stratford. He has collected a Golden Globe and an Emmy alongside those, and returned to horror in the 2020s with 28 Years Later.
Ink is his account of Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of a London newspaper in 1969, and of Larry Lamb, the editor he hired to remake it. James Graham adapted his own stage play, and Guy Pearce and Jack O’Connell play the two men, with Claire Foy alongside them. It is Boyle doing what he has done for thirty years: taking a British institution apart and filming it from the inside.
The UK premiere opens the evening at the Royal Festival Hall, with a repeat showing in the same hall the following morning. Boyle appears separately in conversation during the Festival, and STUDIOCANAL releases the film in Britain once it closes.