Interview: Martin McDonagh, director of Seven Psychopaths

In Bruges director Martin McDonagh talks to Alistair Harkness about taking political potshots at Hollywood, and how rabbits and Buddhism helped him cast his new movie

MARTIN McDonagh would like to set the record straight about his new film Seven Psychopaths. It may star Colin Farrell as a Hollywood-based Irish screenwriter called Martin, and it may also be fuelled by Martin’s struggles with writer’s block as he attempts to follow-up the blood-splattered hit comedy with which he made his name. But the real-life Anglo-Irish writer/director of the blood-splattered hit comedy In Bruges insists this is not a hand-biting takedown of his own experiences in La-La-Land.

Well, not entirely. “There are a few things in there,” laughs McDonagh, a playwright turned filmmaker, “but I haven’t worked for a studio, nor would I, so those aspects are not really my experiences. Even writer’s block is not my experience. Writer’s laziness is, but writer’s block isn’t.”

It would be disingenuous, however, to say that the film doesn’t reflect McDonagh’s own creative anxieties about his work. Part of fictional Martin’s problem is that while he has a great title for his new movie – the eponymous Seven Psychopaths – he’s struggling to reconcile its implicit violence with his own fanciful desire to write a “Buddhist” thriller in which the characters might, just might, resolve their conflicts by retreating into the wilderness instead of killing each other in a hail of gunfire.

“I was kind of like where Martin is at the start of the movie,” confesses real-life Martin of his meta-movie’s origins. “His attitude towards violent films and his desire to take his script to a place that’s more about peace and love are things that I share, so I knew it had to be about the dichotomy of that tug of war: Sam Peckinpah on one hand and Terrence Malick on the other.”

This isn’t as incongruous as it sounds. McDonagh’s Oscar-winning short film Six Shooter – about a trio of recently bereaved strangers on a train who respond to their grief in irrationally violent ways – used absurdity (including a story about an exploding cow) to offset trauma. And for all its sly gags about its titular location, In Bruges was very much grounded in reality by the fact that Colin Farrell’s profanity spewing gunman was dealing with the guilt from accidentally shooting a child during a bungled hit.

“All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy,” nods McDonagh. “I see the darkness in the world, but I don’t want to deal with it in a heavy-handed way. Comedy allows you to question and explore some of those issues without being heavy; it a lets you get away with murder.”

With Seven Psychopaths, then, he wanted to interrogate the ridiculousness of every Hollywood film about guys with guns, but without being all Michael Haneke about it.

Pinballing Farrell’s screenwriter through a comically over-the-top Los Angeles populated by deranged dognappers, Shih tzu-loving mobsters and rabbit-carrying serial killers, the film allows McDonagh to comment on why, say, a woman being shot in the stomach barely raises an eyebrow, yet holding a gun to a dog’s head causes outrage.