Martin McDonagh: how we made The Banshees of Inisherin (2024)

Martin McDonagh’s Zoom screen crackles into life and he jokes that he’s not looking especially attractive today. It’s early morning, Los Angeles time, and in his hotel room he sits half-slumped in his chair, tired and smiling, reflecting on the previous night’s entertainment, out with Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Kerry Condon, the cast of his awards season frontrunner The Banshees of Inisherin. The Oscar nominations had just been announced and so, with an impressive nine categories accounted for, including best director, best picture, best actor (Farrell), best supporting actor (Gleeson, as well as Barry Keoghan) and best supporting actress (Condon), it was obviously the logical thing to do.

“I was up early watching the nominations,” McDonagh says excitedly, creaking into life. “And I was worried that someone might slip through and not get nominated with the others.” The 52-year-old playwright and film-maker has previous Oscar form (two nominations for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, one for In Bruges and a win for the short film Six Shooter) and displays none of the phoney lack of interest in trophies and best picture races common to most top-tier talent. Instead, he says, “I like the awards season,” runs through the Banshees nominations and decides: “You can’t really complain with nine nominations. And so Brendan’s working out here, and Colin and Kerry live here, and I’m heading back to London tomorrow so it seemed like the perfect time to go out together and pat each other on the back and say, ‘This has gone pretty well, and it continues to do so.’ ”

McDonagh adds that the film has been a team effort and he regards the creative personnel involved as his “mates”. He’s been overwhelmed by the reaction to the film, which has been a commercial hit in the UK, Germany, France and Australia and is, this weekend, opening on 1,100 screens in the US. “I thought it was going to be this very low-key thing that a few people would like and get,” he says. The movie is set on an Irish island in 1923 and features two best friends (Farrell and Gleeson) falling out over nothing and everything, and wondering about transience and art and violence and war. “What’s happened to the film is not anything I could have quantified beforehand,” he says.

Beforehand is 2015, when McDonagh attempted a first draft of the script. The title is a hangover from a play that he never wrote, a proposed follow-up to his 2001 black comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The body of the 2015 draft contains only the first five minutes of today’s Banshees of Inisherin, with all the rest, says McDonagh, “plotty and dreadful. I sent it to Colin and Brendan. I think Colin liked it, but Brendan wasn’t keen. Brendan not being keen made me re-read it and not like it either. So I chucked it and left it and went back to it again three years ago.”

By that time McDonagh was riding high from the success of Three Billboards (about a mother grieving the death of a murdered daughter), which he found, he says, quite freeing. “I wanted to tap into the melancholy of Three Billboards, and I wanted to get rid of as much plot as possible and just write about the sad pain between these two men.”

The new version was written, he says, “within three or four weeks. And it’s pretty much exactly, word for word, what you see in the film.” He emailed the script, over Christmas 2019, to his producer Graham Broadbent with the words: “What do you think of this?” Broadbent, who was holidaying in Argentina at the time, read it and emailed back: “Sad, beautiful, very funny. What shall we do?”

● Read Kevin Maher’s review of The Banshees of Inisherin

Broadbent says that the beauty of a McDonagh script is that when it arrives it’s done. There are no changes to be made. McDonagh has claimed that his policy with producers when handing over his work is, “You take it as is, or you f*** off!” Broadbent confirms that this is the case. “As a producer, a lot of your time is spent in development, redrafting, redrafting, redrafting. Martin just goes, ‘Here you go. Here’s your 100 pages. Do you want to make it?’ ”

Filming was delayed by the pandemic and when the time was finally right, in August 2021, a cast and crew of 250 descended on Ireland’s west coast and the tiny islands of Achill and Inishmore (both doubling as the fictional Inisherin). “We had to get to Inishmore by boat,” says the production designer Mark Tildesley, whose previous gig was the Bond behemoth No Time to Die. “And when you get there there’s hardly accommodation to sleep 50 people, let alone 250. But we camped up and we made it work, and some of us stayed in these little shacks at the back of a hotel. There were no luxuries involved.”

Tildesley explains the myriad production complications involved in filming on a tiny island that is, in the case of Inishmore, a protected European “special area of conservation”. The stone cottage belonging to Farrell’s character, Padraic Suilleabhain, for instance, had to be constructed of island stone and reclaimed island wood, and was required to have zero negative impact on the local ecology. Even the grass you see in the film surrounding Padraic’s cottage is sitting on a layer of earth that is sitting on a huge tarpaulin that is sitting on the real, protected Inishmore grass.

Elsewhere, the pub location where much of the action takes place was built on an Achill beauty spot with a demand by McDonagh that the front door, when open, provide an unobstructed shot of the Wild Atlantic Way (to represent the yearning for escape that defines Gleeson’s character, Colm Doherty). “There was nothing on that spot but a bit of tarmac and a bench,” Tildesley says. “But it had the most spectacular view so we built a doorway first, then and there, and moved it about until it was the view Martin was after, and then away we went and built the pub.”

Tildesley says that his finest moment came when his team suggested to McDonagh that a scene outside a grocery shop should feature a casual shot of a post box, still coloured red from British rule, being painted green for the new Irish Free State. It’s a standout moment, remarkable in its metaphorical clarity (national identities as thin as a coat of paint), but Tildesley says it’s a testament to McDonagh and the flexibility of his working environment that these ideas can be so instantly incorporated. “With something like Bond it’s like driving a giant oil tanker that turns very slowly,” he says. “But with Banshees we were able to be inventive and very light on our feet.”

The actors have nothing but praise for McDonagh’s methods, with the director himself describing his filming days with the cast as nothing more elaborate than “like old friends hanging out really. We go for dinners, discuss the scenes, talk about the characters. I think it shows in the movie.”

Shooting finished in October 2021, and the film immediately went into post-production. The Oscar-nominated composer Carter Burwell (best known for his work with Joel and Ethan Coen) had already begun working on the score. His only instruction from McDonagh, he says, was to avoid any “diddle-dee-diddle” traditional Irish musical influences. So Burwell leant into the loneliness and the strangeness of the story and came up with a score that’s mostly played on a harp, flute and celesta (a keyboard that plays bell sounds), and features tunes that “don’t fit into a major or minor key, but are more complicated than they appear at first. And that’s sort of like this movie too.”

The music, unnerving, but with a light fairytale flourish, is a vital element of the film and underscores its folkloric quality. It was recorded in Abbey Road studios in May 2022, and that, says McDonagh, was when the film really began to come alive. “I had shown early versions of it to friends and there were good reactions, but not overly favourable,” he says. “But then Carter came along and added that beautiful music and that launched it into a different place of sadness and otherworldliness that made it into the cinematic experience that it is.”

Burwell, however, says that there’s more to the emotive power of The Banshees of Inisherin than the tinkling of his bells. “This film is about sadness and loneliness,” he says. “And coming out of the Covid pandemic, these are emotions that are at the surface for a lot of people around the world. You can touch them very quickly. And I think that Martin, with this film, has done that.”

The movie had its premiere in September at the Venice Film Festival, where McDonagh won the best screenplay award and Farrell won best actor. It was the beginning of an awards season journey that has continued steadily and relatively unimpeded and will conclude at the Academy Awards in March.

● Colin Farrell reborn: from Hollywood hellraiser to a charmer with an Oscars chance

There have been a couple of minor snags along the way. Detractors seem unsure of McDonagh’s depiction of Irishness, with The Spectator claiming to reveal “what The Banshees of Inisherin gets wrong about Ireland”. And an Irish Times critic took the film to task, claiming that the character’s clothes were unrealistic and the sequence featuring Padraic and Colm drinking on a table outside a pub was anachronistic. “Did customers really drink alfresco in 1923?” the writer asked. McDonagh seems perplexed by this. “But what’s the alternative?” he asks. “Why wouldn’t one pub have a table outside? Is there any research that says there was no single pub with a table outside? And if you don’t have a table outside, then you’re going to spend an entire film inside a pub.”

Back to the awards. Did I mention that McDonagh likes the awards season? “I love studying the awards race and checking in on the odds every month and seeing who’s going up and down,” he says, beaming. “It’s always been Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Fabelmans ahead of us, and I like being the third favourite rather than the first.” But The Fabelmans got its arse kicked by the Baftas with just one nomination, I add, reminding him how Steven Spielberg was locked out of the best film and best director categories in that race. “Yes,” he says, seriously, and I could swear he’s trying not to smile. “That was a bit mean.”

And does he have a speech ready for the big night, and the big moment, possibly, at the podium? “Well, because I get so nervous about that stuff, yes. The sooner I can get something down on paper and just forget about it, the happier I will be. To go in without anything prepared, I would just be, literally, puking up on stage. And no one wants to see that.”
The Banshees of Inisherin is in cinemas and on Disney+, Amazon, Apple and Sky

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