Conversation With Martin McDonagh

The Beauty Queen of Leenane
Written By Martin McDonagh
Directed by Katie Chidester
Through July 10
Hunger Artists Theater Fullerton
Fri. & Sat. - 8:00 pm
Sun. - 7:00 PM

If you’re a theater-lover you are probably quite familiar with the work of Martin McDonagh. An acclaimed playwright and stage director, McDonagh is responsible for such award-winning plays as The Pillowman and The Lieutenant of Inishmore.

His play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane is currently playing at the Hunger Artists Theater in Fullerton under the skillful directing ability of Katie Chidester.

If you’re not familiar with his stage work however, here are some things you should know about this talented British writer/director and his recent forays into filmmaking: His short film Six Shooter, starring Brendan Gleeson, won the Best Short Film Oscar in 2006. His latest full-length feature film, In Bruges, also stars Gleeson along with Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes. It’s a film with both funny and serious elements set in the picturesque Belgian city of Bruges (rhymes with “huge”). Gleeson and Farrell play hit men sent to Bruges by their boss after a botched assassination.

McDonagh explains how he came up with the story. “It came out of Bruges in lots of ways,” he says. “I went there for a little weekend trip about four years ago without any idea of any kind of story or any reason why I went there in the first place. I think I had seen a picture of the place but didn’t know anything about it and just turned up and wandered around and was shocked by how cinematic the place was—strange and otherworldly, medieval and gothic and all those things. I was there for like two days and by the second day I was bored out of my head and just wanted to get drunk, get laid, anything just not to have to go to another church. But that kind of became two characters in my head that were arguing with each other: the culture loving geek and the drunken whore.”

Once he decided that these two characters would be hit men, the story basically wrote itself after that. What took shape was a darkly comedic journey for these two opposite men, essentially contract-killers with soul. Through it all, though, it was crucial that the Bruges setting remained constant. “If we hadn’t been allowed to shoot there I would’ve scrapped the whole thing because there wasn’t any other towns that I could think of that would capture the same thing, that was as strange and fairytale-like but was also kind of unknown.”

Thankfully, location-shooting was given the green light and the city of Bruges welcomed the cast and crew. “Their main thing is tourism,” McDonagh explains. “Part of A Nun’s Story was filmed there like 40 years ago, but they had never had a Hollywood feature or even a Belgium feature made there.”

To play the film’s two hit men, Ray and Ken, McDonagh had to find two actors that, while different, were still able to bring a real connection on-screen. The script originally intended the characters to be British, but once McDonagh cast native Dubliners Farrell and Gleeson he happily made the change. “They’re both brilliant, they’re both funny, they both can go to very melancholic, very sad places as actors but they’re fondness for each other is kind of palpable from when they’re bickering at the start,” he says. “You really feel that they do get on, that they do like each other, but they’re just great, really sensitive actors too. A joy to work with, the best fun, and you can kind of see that even though it goes quite dark and into despair at some places you can see that we had a lot of fun behind the scenes with it.”

In addition to finding the perfect actors to play Ray and Ken, McDonagh needed someone to play their ruthless boss Harry. He wanted someone unexpected in the role and he found that in Fiennes. “I wanted someone in that part who we hadn’t seen before,” he says. “There are a few actors who have done those heavy, kind of working class English gangster roles before but I just wanted someone who was first and foremost a great actor who could then bring it to stranger, weirder places. But then, there’s also a great intensity to most of Ralph’s roles. He has played like one or two psychopaths before too so he knew he would be able to go down that route. The most important thing is to play the truth of the character rather than playing the comedy on top of it. He’s never really done a comedy before and I think he’s hilarious in this. He makes me laugh every time I watch.”

On camera, Bruges seems pristine and preserved, but did McDonagh find a seedy underbelly in his explorations of this quaint city? “Nope, I looked!” he says. “There’s nothing down there.”

But immediately after he says this, he remembers something and he quickly changes his mind. “Actually, you know, yeah,” he says. “One night Ralph had just arrived in and we went to dinner, just me and Colin and Brendan and him. [We're] walking back across the square and there’s a major knife fight—I had never seen it before anywhere, New York or London. Guys literally trying to stab each other and then running away.”

Apart from this one almost-dangerous encounter though, filming In Bruges was a pretty painless endeavor. It was McDonagh’s feature directorial debut and the experience was not at all what he expected. “Going into it I thought if I get out of it with a film I liked even if it wrenched my heart out and was a pain that would be ok,” he says. “But I liked the film a lot and it was actually a joy to work on. I never thought it would be fun. I thought it would be hard and there’d be a hundred people asking me questions and me not knowing any of the answers. But when you get together with a group of people who just want to do their jobs really well and when they all like the script, there’s something kind of joyous about that. You realize that you don’t have to be some big dictator. You can just be a normal person as long as you’re surrounded by people who are equally as artistic and care about their jobs. So it becomes easier than I ever thought it would be.”

Interview by Andrea Tuccillo
Ms. Tuccillo is a writer for The Cinema Source