Martin McDonagh: ‘No one really tries to make sad films any more’

The London Irish writer-director on his bad early plays, enjoying a quiet home life with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and his latest film – a friendship breakup movie starring In Bruges’ Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson

Martin McDonagh, writer, director and creator of small, crazed worlds of fierce people taking their pain out on each other, is talking about his new film, The Banshees of Inisherin. “It’s a really beautiful film, with brilliant performances,” he says. “And it’s funny… but it’s sad. No one really tries to make sad films any more.”

It is sad, The Banshees of Inisherin, but, as he says, it’s also very funny; plus grotesque, violent, tender, surprising, a bit spooky and visually stunning. Many of these elements are established components of a McDonagh creation, whether his early plays, such as The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997), or his 2017 gothic revenge western Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which won Oscars for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell. The Banshees of Inisherin, though, is a shift in mood. Less speedy, more painful and mythical. Like a terrible fable.

As you might have guessed by the title, it’s also Irish. Though far from the usual cliched depiction, its opening shots, across the knobbly pastel land and out to the glittering sea, could be filmed nowhere else. It was made in eight weeks in the summer of 2021 on Inishmore and Achill, two islands off Ireland’s west coast. The weather was wonderful and the sunsets astounding. “The most beautiful summer I’ve ever experienced in Ireland. Which was,” says McDonagh, “unexpected.”

Though he was born and grew up in London, McDonagh’s parents live just outside Galway, on the road to the coast where Inishmore sits with the other two Aran Islands. He’s at his folks’ house now, Zooming from the sofa in his shorts, and shows me the view; yep, it’s lovely. During filming, he would stay here at weekends. “Though I didn’t tell my parents what I’d been up to,” he says. “I’ve learned not to, because it usually ends up in some gross beheading or something.”

In McDonagh’s plays and films there is often something gross, someone’s guts being spilled, or a gun fired flamboyantly in an enclosed place, or an animal being hurt and setting off something terrifying in humans. In The Banshees of Inisherin, alongside a tight tale of male friendship is a highly specific, progressive act of violence so appalling that it makes you laugh as you flinch away. It’s to do with a hand. Hands having a tough time of it feature in two of McDonagh’s plays – The Beauty Queen of Leenane and A Behanding in Spokane. I ask about this hand thing; he is bamboozled at my connection. “I’ve never made the link,” he insists. “I wouldn’t say it’s psychologically important!” But after I’ve asked, throughout our interview we wave at each other for laughs. This is very McDonagh.

Back to the sadness, though. The Banshees of Inisherin has much sorrow in it, mostly for Colin Farrell, who pays Pádraic, a nice bloke who is sad for the whole of the film. His distress is directly caused by Colm, his best friend. Every day, Pádraic calls round for Colm to go to the pub. One day, Colm doesn’t come. He tells Pádraic, with harsh simplicity: “I don’t like you no more” – and it’s this declaration that fires the starting gun for the turmoil that follows.

McDonagh, who won best screenplay at the recent Venice film festival for The Banshees of Inisherin, says he tried to imbue the friends’ breakup “with all of the sadness of the breakup of a love relationship… because I think we’ve all been both parties in that equation,” he says. “And there’s something horrible about both sides. Like knowing you have to break up with someone is a horrible, horrible thing as well. I’m not sure which is the best place to be in.”

You surely wouldn’t want to be Pádraic, though. His face, when he first gets the “you’re dumped” news from Colm, is a picture of devastation. “Yeah, it takes him almost 30 seconds to understand,” says McDonagh, “and you can see him going through the process – is this true? And then: this is true – and it’s all in his face, in about 20, 30 seconds. It’s my favourite bit in the whole film. It’s heartbreaking.”

Farrell won best actor at Venice for his performance – his eyebrows alone deserve an award, so expressive are they – but everyone in the film is great. Kerry Condon is Pádraic’s sister, Siobhan; Barry Keoghan is Dominic, a sharp lad deemed stupid by all around him; and no-longer-friend Colm is played, with shattering heft and tenderness, by Brendan Gleeson. McDonagh fans will be happy about the pairing: Farrell and Gleeson first acted together in In Bruges, McDonagh’s much-loved first full-length feature, and the pair’s chemistry is genuine. In Bruges, a funny, brutal, post-1990s tale of out-of-their-element hitmen, didn’t cause huge waves when it was released in 2008, but has achieved cult status since. “People discovered it in the intervening years and they’ve taken it to their hearts,” says McDonagh. “Especially blokes. They come up and say: ‘We really love In Bruges.’ Almost as if they’ve made it themselves.”

In In Bruges there’s a definite status hierarchy between the two leads – Gleeson higher, Farrell lower – and this leads to shifting sympathies and resentments. And in The Banshees of Inisherin, which has a similar status setup, McDonagh found himself changing allegiance. When he wrote the screenplay, he had sympathy for Pádraic, the dumped friend, “because he’s a nice guy”. But, he says: “I knew for the film to work, I had to give Colm’s side of the equation as much merit and as much thought. So Brendan and I talked about Colm’s music, and the desire for art, and with that, for me, from being 60-40 in favour of Pádraic I moved to 49-51.”

Colm’s side is this: he has to end his friendship with Pádraic because time is moving on. Colm’s a musician; he’s getting older and he wants to use the rest of his days creatively, rather than sitting in the pub with Pádraic talking nonsense. So he decides to dump his friend in, it has to be said, a harsh manner. Which raises several questions, including: do you have to be selfish and cruel in order to create? Can an artist be nice?

“Well, with the film it’s one of the things, hopefully, to be discussed. But I don’t subscribe to the whole tortured artist thing,” says McDonagh. “You hear stories about film directors who are total cunts. And they usually make shit films. None of my cinematic heroes are really nasty. Maybe Sam Peckinpah. He was a very tough guy, and you see that in his films, but that’s OK, because he tortured himself as much as anyone. But I don’t see the value in being a dickhead.”

However, when it comes to the “time’s running out, let’s crack on with making stuff” realisation, McDonagh is very much on Colm’s side. The writer-director is 52 now, and recently made the decision that he’s going to spend what creative time he has left – he reckons “around 25 years” – making films rather than plays. His reasoning? Films are quicker.

“I always used to think they took longer than plays, but with this one we were filming it a year ago, and now it’s out,” he says. “But if you’re lucky enough to have successful plays, which I have been, then they start off-West End, like at the Royal Court, then you go to the West End, then to off-Broadway, and then to on Broadway. And to get that right with each move, to cast it and take care of it, go to rehearsals, that’s five years of your life.”

McDonagh’s career started in theatre. In 1994, when he was 24, he wrote seven plays in 10 months, and they all arrived – bang – at pretty much the same time in theatres from Galway to the National. From being a complete unknown (he left school at 16 and worked in the civil service for five years before he quit), at 27 he was the youngest person since Shakespeare to have four plays running simultaneously in London. McDonagh was a sensation; feted for his talent and for his anti-establishment brio. In interviews he would slag off other Irish playwrights who had dared to question his talent.

At an awards event, when the host wanted everyone to toast the Queen, he and his brother, the writer and film-maker John Michael McDonagh (The Guard; Calvary), both refused, and in doing so managed to anger Sean Connery, of all people, who Martin told to fuck off. When the National Theatre’s then artistic director, Trevor Nunn, refused to put on Martin’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore – fearing, ridiculously, that it would derail the Northern Irish peace process – McDonagh said he wouldn’t allow any more of his plays to be staged until The Lieutenant of Inishmore was seen. He got his way – the Royal Shakespeare Company produced it – and the peace process continued just fine.

Anyhow, after a riotous run of excellent theatre work, McDonagh made a deliberate move into cinema in 2004, with Six Shooter, a short film for which he won an Oscar. His first full-length movie was In Bruges, followed four years later by Seven Psychopaths and then, in 2017, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In recent years he has written fewer plays, though the two he has – Hangmen and A Very Very Very Dark Matter – have been successes, especially Hangmen, which took exactly the route he describes, ending up on Broadway, with Tony nominations.

Actually, The Banshees of Inisherin started off as a play, the third part of an Aran Islands trilogy, after The Cripple of Inishmaan and 2018’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore. But the play didn’t work, and to write the film, McDonagh started over again, only keeping part of the title (it was originally The Banshees of Inisheer, a real island: Inisherin is made up). His plays and films feed off one another, mostly because he believes in the central importance of the writing, a belief nurtured and encouraged by theatre. Matthew Dunster, the director of Hangmen at the Royal Court in 2015, starring David Morrissey, commented approvingly at the time that McDonagh has “an alpha sense of his own worth as a writer”, and that comes from his plays. Was he confident about them from the start?

“Well, when I started writing, a lot of my heroes were confident,” he says, “because they were from books or music, like Joe Strummer. And I would read interviews by playwrights and they always seemed so mealy mouthed and whiny and fake. The attitude would be: ‘I hope you come see my play, see if you like it. I think it might be OK.’ And I knew that those plays were shit, because they sounded shit and because I was watching a lot of them. I wrote a lot of shit plays myself for, like, eight years, but it was the ’94 period when they started getting good. The Beauty Queen of Leenane, it was written really quickly in, like, a week and a day. And I didn’t really change a word. You just know, if you’re honest.”

He’s still honest about his work, and chucks out “at least one thing every year or two” that isn’t up to scratch. Even after the event, he can reassess: he tells me that The Behanding in Spokane is “one of my shit plays” and says of Seven Psychopaths that he doesn’t think it works because he was trying too hard to make a “cool film”. “It ended up like an essay about the people instead of a film. I watched Bruges and Psychopaths back to back just before making Three Billboards, and I realised that I was with all the characters in Bruges. And that was the kind of film I wanted to keep making.”

And Three Billboards…, of course, ended up a huge success, though he remembers that he was in the movie doldrums before it, as Seven Psychopaths hadn’t landed well. “Three Billboards kind of had to be a success, really.” The story of McDormand’s heroine’s rage against a local police force that was spending all its time on bullying black people rather than solving her daughter’s murder, the film was a smash hit, though some expressed reservations about the redemption of Sam Rockwell’s character, a racist cop.

“I could see where that debate could come from,” he says. “But I thought it was not seeing what I see in the film. The bait in the whole idea was: what’s a villain and what’s a hero? But I don’t know. Basically, if someone’s calling your film racist, and you wrote and directed it, that means they’re calling you a racist. And I’ve always been so anti that, that, yes, it’s hurtful. No one wants to be called that.”

He can have trouble with other people’s interpretation of his work. A reviewer called The Banshees of Inisherin a return to form after “the gross misstep that was Three Billboards”. “I thought, ‘gross misstep’, really? Was it that bad?” He has not enjoyed certain new stagings of his old plays because they’ve not been how he imagined the play in his head; and he’s refused permission to let his plays be used by theatre companies because they wanted to edit out characters’ words that they deemed offensive.

“Put a warning in the programme notes, sure, but let the character be who they are,” he says. “Trust your audience to have the intelligence to know I’m not using these words. Characters need to be whatever they need to be. If they’re nice, fine. If they’re homophobic, you’ve got to know it’s the character. If there are racist words, then that’s to show an audience that this part of Ireland is racist. Or we’re going in a direction of a bland, inoffensive nothingness.”

In the theatre it can be easier to be firm about this, because with plays, the writer is king; not so, always, in films. This is why he directs, McDonagh says, to keep the writing intact. He describes a trick where a director will take a script written by someone else and “change every third line, but just a bit: like instead of: ‘Hello, how are you?’, they’ll change it to: ‘How you doing?’. And then they claim that they’re co-writers!”

He thinks this is terrible – “There should be workers’ rights for writers” – and with his own films he refuses to let anyone touch a single syllable. “The people I’ve worked with know, even at the script stage, even when they give me the money for it, there can be no notes on the script. There’s never a condition. There’s never a note. You take it as is, or you fuck off.”

All of which makes him sound hugely confrontational, but in person he’s not like that at all. McDonagh is friendly and talkative, engaged with questions, truthful in his answers. Actors describe him as collaborative, and he himself thinks of filming as “like mates, getting together trying to find solutions, mates trying to solve this thing”. Still, he’s used to battling. From the start of his career, he has had his detractors, mostly because he writes about Ireland while not actually being from there. He grew up in south London, on an estate in Elephant and Castle, and then in a terraced house in Camberwell. His parents were both from the west of Ireland, and he and his brother grew up surrounded by other Irish families, and went over to their grandparents for their holidays.

“We were brought up to be proud of being Irish, maybe more so than someone brought up in Dublin,” he says. “We’d always hear Irish music and be encouraged to do GAA [Gaelic football] games. The Irish football team were doing great at that time as well, so that added to a sense of pride, I guess. But at the same time, I’ve always been a bit anarchist, and anti-nationalist. I had posters of punk bands and Travis Bickle [the antihero of Taxi Driver] on my walls.”

He identified with the Pogues, meaning as Irish with an outsider’s eye, and these days he would call himself London Irish. Yet it’s notable that he has never written a present-day play or film set in London. Even now, he’s not thinking about that, particularly: “Actually, the next film’s going to be on Easter Island. So not even close.”

Anyway, for the moment he lives in east London, though he says: “I’m happy to be always travelling.” He likes being on planes, going to film festivals, moving around the world for his job. When he finishes a film, he goes on holiday, and even when he’s at home, he pops away for weekend jaunts to the Lake District and Scotland, just for the difference: “I love being on a train with a notepad, looking out of the window.” He can write anywhere because he uses a pen and paper, scribbling away, rubbing out, writing again, then typing it up himself because no one else can read his tiny scrawl.

When he’s at home, excitingly, he’s going out with Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge. They’ve been together since 2018, though he won’t rise to my questions about this: “No comment, but thumbs up on my love life, thanks for asking.” Domestically, he’s says he’s good at “pasta, punctuality and… I’m not great at cleaning… I’m going to say pasta again. I can do a smoothie. I can’t do anything electrical. I can’t drive. When I’m at home I’m just very quiet. I listen to music, it’s always a bit of guitary, good lyrics, sort of singer-songwriter stuff. The Felice Brothers, I love.”

He’s a vegetarian, and an animal lover. He spends a while extolling the virtues of Minnie, a local horse that appears a lot in The Banshees of Inisherin. He realised he needed Minnie in a crucial scene, and she rose to the occasion: “She makes that whole scene. She makes that scene the saddest part of it, just how gentle she was, where she’s looking in the doorway, almost looking away because it’s too sad. And for her, that’s all improv! Amazing.” We also talk about westerns and how he thought of Colm and Pádraic as being in a spaghetti western: “Two gunfighters banging the bar door open, while we’re getting shots through the doorway like John Ford.”

In the end, despite his ability to switch off and go travelling, despite his no-comment, high-profile love life, it’s all about the work with McDonagh, and the thrill and imagination and collaboration and disruption that comes with making it. When his work surprises him, that’s when he gets really excited. “When I was writing the script and Colm walked into the pub, I didn’t know what he was going to say,” he recalls. “And then, when he said about the hand, I went: ‘Oh fuck, this is fun!’”

I wave at him. He waves back, delightedly.

“It’s fun! Because it throws everything up in the air. And that’s what I like. I love that.”

• The Banshees of Inisherin goes on general release in the UK on 21 October, after its UK premiere at the BFI London film festival on 13 October

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