The “love” between Martin McDonagh, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson
One of the best films last year was easily Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, which saw McDonagh reunite with his In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. The film simply tells the tale of one man falling out with another man on a small island off Ireland without (initially) giving a good reason.
McDonagh noted that the film was “written for them from the start from the very start” and had intended to get the team back together since the release of In Bruges. “We had a great time on that, and it came out well, and people really cared for it,” he said. “And we’ve remained friends over the years. I did Seven Psychos with Colin, but they wanted to work together [and] I wanted to work with them.”
Interestingly, McDonagh also revealed the fact that both Gleeson and Farrell had been set to work together around five years ago, although he didn’t explicitly state what the project was nor who else was attached to it. He went on to explain that he felt a certain sense of relief at the project falling through.
“I was so happy it fell through in a mean, selfish way,” he said. “So it’s perfect and crazy that they haven’t worked together, even separate from me, in the intervening years. Because they love each other, because they’re Irish, you thought something might [have] come.”
Gleeson noted that he could tell that McDonagh was writing for the actors and leaving room for them to provide their own takes on their characters. “He’s worked with all of us apart from Barry [Keoghan], and he deliberately left space within the writing, not for new words, but for whatever the actor was going to bring, so all of that was up for grabs,” he said. “So it gave it an aliveness, an immediacy and a possibility.”
As for those character specifics, McDonagh had a good sense of exactly what his two main players would provide to the story. “You want to tap into Colin’s sensitivity and his vulnerability, or at least how he can show those things on screen,” he said. “And for Brendan’s character, I knew Brendan is a fiddle player, so those aspects were specifically written for them.”
McDonagh even claimed that if Gleeson and Farrell had turned down the film, he most likely would not have made it. “I can’t imagine who else I would have made it with, to be honest,” he said. There is evidently a great love shared between the three men, resulting in one of last year’s best films.
Farrell noted McDonagh’s brilliance, saying, “We’ve all worked on things where you try and work and reshape and rewrite, and you’re trying to rise, and it’s rising with you. Martin’s stuff, you come in, and it’s up there, and you’re just trying to ladder up to figure out how to get up there and how to do it justice.”
