Martin McDonagh on the complex layers of reality in ‘Seven Psychopaths’
Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths was one of the most widely-celebrated films of the 2010s. The film starred Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson and Christopher Walken and focused on a struggling screenwriter trying to finish his screenplay of the same name.
Films like Barton Fink and Adaptation were arguably sources of inspiration for McDonagh, which also explore the notion of writer’s block. The inspiration points for Farrell’s alcoholic character, Marty, soon appear in his own life and he becomes wrapped up in a post-modern telling of his own story.
Discussing writer’s block, McDonagh once said: “I don’t even subscribe to writer’s block being a truthful thing. I’ve had writer’s laziness quite often. But I think it’s all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I’ve always been ok at that. Sometimes it’s not fun. The four-year interim [between In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths] was just not wanting to be on that conveyor belt of making film after film.”
He added: “I wanted to see a bit of the world and think and write some new stuff. I wrote a play and another film script between In Bruges and this. The play was on in New York with Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken, so that was almost like a rehearsal period for this film. So even though it looks like a four-year hiatus, it’s not really. Plays are artistic things too!”
The film plays with the conventions of storytelling and writing, as do Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ and Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York. The interesting thing about writing films such as this is that they are films about writing films, which naturally lead to complex layers of reality being present and evident within the film.
Of these complex layers, McDonagh said: “You didn’t want to go so far down that meta-fictional rabbit hole that it became smug or smarter than your audience (or reader at the script stage). I never feel like a smug or smart Alec film director, and there are plenty of those around. I think I see more the joy in pausing the film than telling Tom Waits’s crazy story, rather than the worries of going down a dead end.”
He added: “If you play with those conventions enough, the audience gets to a place where they don’t know whether the conventions are going to be obeyed or not. In any dramatic story, there’s always a payoff or some kind of ending that’s worthwhile or exciting or truthful. There has to be an ending; I can’t think of any good film that just dribbled out to some weird place.”
