At the UK premiere of the drama "Ink" following the makings of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Oscar-winning British director Danny Boyle criticised US President Donald Trump's tendency to dismiss things as "fake news".
On the red carpet at the London Film Festival on Monday, Boyle told AFP the film sees the "first seeds of the attention economy" sown by Murdoch in the late 1960s, as he transforms a struggling broadsheet The Sun into a sensationalist tabloid profiting off sex and scandal.
Australian actor Guy Pearce plays the young and ambitious Murdoch who has moved to the UK from Australia and is seeking to upend the media establishment, alongside Jack O'Connell as the pugnacious Sun editor Larry Lamb, a northerner taking on London's Fleet Street.
"The beginning of the film is very entertaining, and lures people in to feel complicit in that, before it moves into a darkness," said the "Trainspotting" and "Slumdog Millionaire" director.
"There is a cost to that attention economy, which we're now paying," said Boyle. "Nobody knows what the truth is anymore ... The most powerful man in the world says a fact is fake news. And he says a lie is his Truth Social."
The real-life Murdoch, 95, oversees a sprawling media empire which holds considerable sway as a major conservative political force in Britain, the United States and his native Australia.
Britain's exit from the European Union and the rise of Donald Trump are credited at least partly to Murdoch, while his media have long carried a pro-business agenda and have been sceptical about climate change.
"I've always had a bit of a fascination with Rupert Murdoch. And it was a great sort of origin story," Pearce told AFP.
"It was interesting to find a character who is to some degree quiet and reserved and somewhat old-fashioned, but also ambitious and wanted to uphold a sense of integrity through journalism."
The Murdoch dynasty has moved from shaping television screens to being portrayed on them in recent years, inspiring shows, documentaries and plays, and even serving as an inspiration for cruel patriarch Logan Roy and his offspring in the hit HBO series "Succession".
"Murdoch is fascinating, because everybody has such opinions about him anyway, very deserved opinions, in modern terms," said Boyle. "But he was a very different man then."
The film, adapted from a play by British playwright James Graham, will be released in cinemas in the United States on December 11 and on January 8 in the UK and Ireland.