‘Banshees of Inisherin’ Director Martin McDonagh Describes His Ideal Formula: ‘A Touch of Despair and a Couple of Laughs’

thewrap.com:

A version of this story about Martin McDonagh and “The Banshees of Inisherin” first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

Seventeen years after winning an Oscar with “Six Shooter,” an uproarious and touching short film starring Brendan Gleeson, and 14 years after making his feature directing debut with “In Bruges,” British-Irish playwright turned moviemaker Martin McDonagh now has his most successful movie for awards. “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a black comedy that reunites the “In Bruges” team of Gleeson and Colin Farrell, won four awards from BAFTA at the British Academy Film Awards, as well as taking the musical or comedy Golden Globe over Academy Award frontrunner “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It also received nine Oscar nominations, two more than McDonagh’s previous high of seven for 2017’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”   In “Banshees,” Farrell plays Pádraic Súilleabháin, a sweet-natured if slightly dull islander whose daily pub runs with his longtime friend Colm Doherty (Gleeson) are cut short when Colm announces that Pádraic is dull and he doesn’t want to be friends anymore.

As anybody whose seen much of McDonagh’s work would expect, things escalate from there to a very dark place. Playwright-turned-filmmaker McDonagh spoke to TheWrap about ditching an earlier version of the film, embracing melancholy and steering his career away from the stage from now on. Years ago, you wrote two plays, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” and “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” that were supposed to be the first two parts of a trilogy set on the Aran Islands in Galway Bay.