Martin McDonagh’s favourite film of all time
Nobody writes like Martin McDonagh. Thanks to a bundle of plays he wrote in a fit of creativity in 1991, the self-taught British-Irish director became the most celebrated English-language dramatist of his generation. His play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, opened at the Druid Theatre, Galway, in 1996 and won him a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play. After cementing himself as the toast of Broadway in 1998, he stepped into films, releasing Shooter in 2005 and In Bruges (astonishingly his first full-length feature) in 2008.
The success clearly came as something of a shock to McDonagh, who’d spent years living in anonymity and collecting unemployment benefits. When he won the Most Promising Playwright prize at The London Evening Standard Awards in 1996, he managed to insult Sean Connery after getting drunk as a way to calm his nerves. The press regarded such antagonistic antics as second nature to this new rockstar playwright, but really McDonagh had no idea what to do with his newfound fame. His character was like his writing: off-kilter and unpredictable. “McDonagh’s writing is a tightrope act of unnerving skill and maturity,” John Peter of London’s Sunday Times wrote in a review of one of his early plays. “Its hard moral drive is oiled, but never softened, by brutal but generous humour.”
His films were much the same. In Bruges saw McDonagh divide the various sides of his multifaced personality and assign them names and motives. The end result is something unflinching, darkly humorous and wonderfully twisted. The moral complexity of McDonagh’s characters (the bulk of whom are simply terrible people) is something we find in his favourite films, too, all of which feature murderous anti-heroes of one sort or another.
During a conversation with Metro US, Martin McDonagh was asked to name his favourite film. Far from dismissing the question, he was quick to reassure the interviewer that “film nerds always like to be asked their favourite films.” With that in mind, he named a handful of films that have an impact, including: “Badlands, Night Of The Hunter, Seven Samurai, Taxi Driver, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly.” The director and writer also took the time to name some of his favourite directors growing up: “Preston Sturges was a little later, but Sam Peckinpah definitely, I was a huge Peckinpah fan. And Sergio Leone. And all of the Powell and Pressburgers.”
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were once leading figures in the British film industry. However, the pair were never treated with the same reverence as Alfred Hitchcock or even Frank Capra, although McDonagh believes that Martin Scorsese’s praise of Powell’s cinema might do something to remedy the imbalance: “I always talk about them as being the best,” the director continued, “And you wonder if it is because there were two of them. It is starting to come around a little, because Scorsese seemed to help with their rehabilitation. A Matter Of Life And Death is always my favourite, though. Everything about that movie. The opening, everything.”
