Martin McDonagh Talks with Patrick Radden Keefe
Martin McDonagh burst onto the London theatre scene as a young playwright in the nineteen-nineties. At one point, he had four plays running simultaneously on stages across London. But McDonagh also aspired to work in movies, and he eventually shifted his focus to directing films such as \u201cIn Bruges\u201d and \u201cThree Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.\u201d \u201cWhen you sit down to write something, how do you know if it\u2019s a movie or a play?\u201d the staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe asked McDonagh at The New Yorker Festival. \u201cIf it has four characters, and it\u2019s set indoors, it\u2019s a play,\u201d McDonagh replied\u2014\u201cif it doesn\u2019t have any donkeys or dogs.\u201d McDonagh\u2019s new film, \u201cThe Banshees of Inisherin,\u201d starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, is his first feature set in Ireland, and it prominently features a donkey. \u201cBanshees\u201d traces the story of a friendship breaking apart in the beautiful, remote hills of the country\u2019s west. \u201cI just wanted this [movie] to be sort of plotless in a way,\u201d McDonagh said. \u201cJust to have the unravelling of this breakup be what the whole story was about.\u201d The film is now nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.\xa0\nThis segment originally aired on October 21, 2022.