Perhaps because of his prolific background as a playwright, director Martin McDonagh (“The Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) is a storyteller who allows much mystery in the lives of his characters. His acclaimed black comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin” begins with Colm (Brendan Gleeson) ending his friendship with Pádraic (Colin Farrell) for reasons that are never entirely clear. The time is 1923 rural Ireland.
“Martin doesn’t do a lot of backstory in his writing,” production designer Mark Tildesley explained to TheWrap. “He wrote the script and storyboarded the whole movie and had very specific ideas about how he would like to do it. But we knew that audiences would have to reconstruct parts of the characters’ pasts through the look of the film.” Tildesley, whose credits include Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” and Danny Boyle’s “Sunshine,” also designed the 1980s sets for the current film “Empire of Light” (see interview here).
A key part of his work for “Banshees” was done in the country house where Colm resides. Every item in his bachelor apartment was discussed, including art, ephemera, and the large gramophone for playing records. The color was also used to indicate a yearning and ambition within Colm that the character himself never fully articulates.
“The movie is set a hundred years ago on an island where most people have never been outside their town,” Tildesley said. “But Martin wanted the story to have a modern twist, to be super colorful, not some dreary old black and white world like you often see.”
When doing the research for the production design, all the photographs from the 1920s were, of course, in black and white. “So the challenge was to find a way to incorporate all this color,” Tildesley said. “We got hold of a piece of folklore from a local museum in Galway. We went and looked at some of the original dyes and colors, many of them okra, indigo blue and Oxford red.”
Colm’s cabin was a real place and not a set built for the film. After a lengthy search, Tildesley and his team found the modest home, an original whaling lodge, in a place called the Achill Islands in County Mayo.
“We weren’t going to go into the studio to build anything for this house,” Tildesley said. “The person who owned the cabin was very nice, but we explained very carefully what was going to happen in her house and what we would like to do.”
Tildesley added: “Eventually we were able to persuade the owner to let us be involved in the design. It was very dark inside so we needed some more windows so we dug new windows out of the original stone. We managed to put in a couple of small windows, including the one where Pádraic sees Colm from the outside.”
The detail was essential. “It’s a movie about windows. It has a lot to do with the views through the doors in the manner of John Ford. All of that was in Martin’s storyboards, that we would have this ability to see the characters’ relationship to the land.“
The interior of the cabin offered secrets to Colm’s character.
“We didn’t want to give away the fact that Colm wasn’t feeling well, in terms of his sadness, but we just wanted to slightly connect the inside of his house with his melancholy,” Tildesley said. “We imagined that Colm had been a great musician and throughout his life he had connected with other musical artists who had traveled the coast. That sense of trade, with many ships coming from the Mediterranean, offered him a connection to those other worlds. He would have collected some puppets from Europe, for example”.
Tildesley continued: “Also his gramophone and some of his records were a way of connecting him to the great universe outside. And make it more different and mundane than Pádraic. This was some kind of dream place: Colm had a connection to the outside world and this was a dream place next to a wild bay. It is the most exotic and glorious place in the entire movie. We painted the interior as bright and bold yellow as we could. And the same for his red door.
Although the use of yellow was also a reference to the great feeling of melancholy in the home. “With yellow, we thought a lot about Vincent Van Gogh. We hang a chair on the wall, like in a Van Gogh painting. Colm is also struggling with the darkness like Van Gogh did. And he also loses some parts of the body, as he happened to Van Gogh ”.
He added: “It’s a tricky old business, trying to find the tone. Martin has such a specific tone in writing about him, but we wanted that house to feel strange enough, not too heavy or mysterious, but enough to give you information that might help you understand how he came to be who he is. ”
There was also a complicated conversation with the owner of the cabin about: Spoiler alert! – the climax of the film. Colm’s house deliberately burns down at the end, which was accomplished with minimal visual effects, but instead a fire blanket that was fashioned around the perimeter of the house.
“The house was completely covered in a fire blanket, if you will, so the glorious old building was fully protected,” Tildesley said. “And then the fire was completely contained. And then we set fire to it, while this glorious old building was protected. The owner of the cabin was there that day, watching the burning. It was pretty surreal for him.”