Martin McDonagh
All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.Collection: Sad
Though it may not seem like it, I never try to write about a place, per se; it's always, first and last, about story. Story is everything. Story and a bit of attitude.Collection: Attitude
I've got a fondness for rabbits.
I probably haven't had enough gay characters in my stuff. When you're writing something, you're thinking, 'Why couldn't this person be black, white, gay?'
I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.
I don't find it easy for me to talk about me.
I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.
Ireland was an idyllic place for us as children. We had all these cousins and all this green countryside. Given what I've written about rural Ireland, my memories of it are all blue skies and endless play.
I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.
I realize that I am never going to grow up.
Everything went perfectly on 'In Bruges.' It was constant warfare, but I won all the battles and was really happy working with the actors and everything on the film.
I can't stand up in front of people. It just fills me with horror.
The fact that ticket prices are way too expensive, and there's only one bunch of people going to see Broadway shows, is something I've never liked.
I never feel like a smug or a smart-alec film director, and there are plenty of those around.
I fell into the theatre because I felt I was doing it well, and I stuck to it for the same reason.
With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.
I think as a writer you never have to flee from fame because you're not that visible in the first place, but, after the Broadway success of 'Beauty Queen,' people were coming up to me all the time, and I wasn't really prepared for that level of attention.
I don't feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don't feel either. And, in another way, of course, I'm both.
There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies. See, I always suspect characters who are painted as lovely, decent human beings. I would always question where the darkness lies.
I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.
I pick and choose what I want to do at any given time, and what not to do, importantly. My agents, I won't hear about any offers or options.
I seldom feel comfortable in a theatre. I always feel like I own a cinema. I feel equally happy in an empty one as a full one. Probably happier in an empty one!
My plays are always pushing towards cinema anyway. They're down and dirty, real and more fun.
It's like two years straight out of your life doing a film. It's very enjoyable, especially working with the guys, but I kind of like the idea of traveling and growing, and developing as a writer and as a filmmaker.
When you've got good actors, they're going to come up with good stuff, but you're never quite sure how the dynamics are going to work between them.
Dublin people think they are the center of the world and the center of Ireland. And they don't realize that people have to leave Ireland to get work, and they look down on people who do.
Theatre was an art form that I didn't really respect, and because I wanted to shake it up and do different things on stage, I was able to combine all the things I'd learnt through writing on my own.
When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.
I hope there's some kind of morality in all my work.
'Pulp Fiction' is an amazing film, and I haven't made one nearly as good.
My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I've never been to.
As a kid, as a poor-ish, working-class kid, even visiting America seemed like an impossible dream. Every time I ever went anywhere in America, it always felt cinematic and dreamlike and like a movie from the '70s or something.
I'd love to do something like 'A Canterbury Tale,' because I love the English language.
I never, ever drink while writing. Never have from the start, and I'm happy that I never have to. A lot of my stuff is plot-driven and mathematical, and I think you need a clean and sober mind to pin down the logistics of that.
I can go anywhere. In fact, for 'Three Billboards,' I was just getting on trains around America. I wrote everywhere from New York to New Mexico. I always write with pencil and paper.
I don't write all the time. But if I'm writing something, I'll just bang into it every day until it's finished. I write pretty quickly.
I never really tell anyone what I'm writing beforehand because I usually don't know what it will be.
I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.
I'm not really into the fame side of things, so I'm very happy with making a film every four years or so.
I loved 'The Master' a lot. I'm not going to get to work with Daniel Day-Lewis, but Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best around, I think.
I've learned not to be such a show-off and to have a bit more empathy with humanity. Or at least to fake that.
When I heard the Pogues, I connected with the songs immediately, but it was also the first time I didn't reject out of hand the kind of music that my parents had always tried to push on to us when we were growing up.
Plays were really my last option. The reason I didn't write plays initially was because I thought theatre was the worst of all the art forms.
I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.
I never lie in interviews.
I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.
I went to Bruges for a weekend away from London. I was supposed to be meeting a girl there the next day. It was a tentative arrangement. From the moment I saw the town, I thought, 'This place is just so cinematic, so gorgeous.' Every corner seemed to offer a new image.
When I started out, I was very vociferously against theatre or what I saw theatre as being, so I tried to make my plays the opposite of that - something a bit more cinematic. I'm a film kid, so I'll never have the same love of theatre as I do of movies. It's just the way I was brought up.
'Beauty Queen' will always be a favourite because I think it's a really tight play, and when it's done right, there is a sadness to it that I love.
There's no point in me meeting with a bunch of producers or studios, because I'll write my own scripts in my own time.