2008 marked the directorial debut of Martin McDonagh with his black comedy, In Bruges. Considered one of the greatest Tarantino-esque films ever made, the modern classic earned McDonagh an Oscar nomination for his original screenplay about a pair of Irish hitmen who put themselves down after a botched hit in the titular Belgian city of Bruges. Irish actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson starred as the hitmen and received high praise for their on-screen electrical chemistry.
In 2012, the Irish playwright turned film writer-director found similar commercial and critical success with: Seven psychopaths, another black comedy that also starred Colin Farrell with Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson and Christopher Walken. But in 2017, McDonagh outdid himself with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouriwith seven Oscar nominations, two wins for its stars Sam Rockwell and Frances McDormand (whose gold statue was briefly stolen at an Oscar afterparty), and $160 million at the box office from a film that cost about $15 million.
After the critical and commercial success of Three Billboardsdid McDonagh bring the old Irish band out In Bruges back together in his upcoming period drama/black comedy, The Banshees of Inisherin. The film received a 13-minute standing ovation at its Venice premiere last month. Though the plot centers on the sudden breakup of two lifelong friends on an island off the coast of civil war-torn Ireland, anti-buddy comedy director Martin McDonagh reunited with stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in the rolling green hills of the proud island nation they are all calling home.
Farrell, Gleeson and McDonagh wanted to work together again
It all started in the mid 2000s when Martin McDonagh first got the idea for the script of In Bruges, to which he explained movie4 in 2008, saying:
“I took the train from London to Bruges for a few days. It just struck me how cinematic the place was, strange medieval gothic architecture and beautiful canals. Half way through the second day I was bored to death because there isn’t much to do except go to the churches and the museums. So I just wanted to get drunk or have sex. And that became two characters in my head, the culture lover and the drunken whore.”
For the bickering, back and forth dialogue of the In Bruges McDonagh knew he needed two talented yet outspoken Irish actors to play his culture buff and his drunken whore. But he got more than he bargained for with Brendan Gleeson as the cranky culture buff and Colin Farrell as the neurotic, leprechaun-drunk whore. Together, the actors created one of the most palpably controversial on-screen dynamics of all buddy comedies, similar to those of Jeff Bridges and John Goodman in The Big Lebowski or Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy in the first Shrek movie.
Not only was McDonagh impressed by the amazing performances he pulled out of his leads In Bruges, but he was also extremely grateful for their professionalism, telling Film4 that the actors “never once were bossy or forceful to work with a budding director, quite the contrary. In fact, they helped me every step of the way.” So the only question is why it took McDonagh fourteen years to get back to Farrell and Gleeson.
On the one hand, the life of a film director moves at a magma pace compared to actors who can jump from project to project. But in Banshees’ case, McDonagh told The Hollywood Reporter that he took the time because the three agreed they “wanted to do nothing less than In Bruges or something that would disappoint one In Bruges fan.”
The official trailer hints at some of the writer-director’s comedic violence
As the official trailer for The Banshees of Inisherin is an indication, fans of In Bruges will see their patience rewarded. Farrell and Gleeson’s controversial buddy dynamic is palpable as ever. But for all his jesting two-liners, the banshees trailer can only point to McDonagh’s signature black humor, with Gleeson’s character being so adamant about ending his friendship with Farrell’s character that he threatens to cut off a finger every time Farrell’s character speaks to him.
The trailer shows supporting castmates Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan (who recently appeared as The Joker in the batter against Farrell’s Penguin) seem to match the McDonagh humor equally well. And the director claims that, like Farrell and Gleeson’s, Condon and Keohan’s characters were written explicitly for them. As talented as these up-and-coming actors in the film may be, Farrell and Gleeson also had to share the screen with an unexpectedly impressive on-screen talent.
Farrell and Gleeson had to compete with an equestrian scene stealer
Strangely enough, an important side character from the banshees script is a dog, a border collie named Jenny, whose role becomes pivotal to the story in some order. Stranger still, like Peter Sellers stealing the show from David Niven in the original The Pink Panther (1963), there was another four-legged character in banshees whose role was much smaller in the original script, but expanded during production after the director and producers were pleasantly surprised by the level of performance they captured.
During a Q&A at TIFF, McDonagh said:
“The more we worked with the horse, the beautiful horse, the more scenes we wanted to put her in, oddly enough… We added Minnie, [which] was the name of the horse, to many more scenes. I kind of like that aspect that these animals, supposedly brutal animals, are almost more thoughtful and caring… than the humans.”
These farm animals weren’t the only ones competing for the frame of the film’s human stars.
The setting of the film is fictional, but the real locations are almost too beautiful to believe
Like the desert of New Mexico in the hit television series Breaking BadIreland herself became a character in banshees. Although the film is set on the fictional and titular Irish island of Inisherin, it was filmed on the real-life Irish islands of Inishmore and Achill, where McDonagh often visited relatives growing up. The influence of the Irish coastal landscape on Martin McDonagh in banshees is evident from these children’s visits, as the locations and cinematography are unmistakably reminiscent of another film, Golgotha (2014), which was written and directed by Martin’s older brother, John Michael McDonagh. GolgothaLike it banshees, features prominent photos of its star Brendan Gleeson squinting at the Atlantic, seemingly awash with the glory of the Irish coast. And why wouldn’t he be?
In Bruges alumni Martin McDonagh, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson invite American audience bring a friend (on second thought maybe don’t bring a friend) and get lost in the beautiful countryside of Ireland and in the eyes of that horse, “the beautiful horse” when The Banshees of Inisherin hits theaters on October 21.