MR. HITMAN’S HOLIDAY
Talking with ‘In Bruges’ director Martin McDonagh
by Christopher Sandlin
Many directors go their entire career without winning prestigious awards for their work. British director Martin McDonagh, on the other hand, won an Oscar for his directorial debut with the 2006 short film Six Shooter. Before getting started in film, McDonagh became one of Great Britain’s most celebrated (and tabloid-fodder) contemporary theatre directors. In 1997, at the age of 27, he was the first playwright since Shakespeare to have four productions running simultaneously in London’s West End. His grotesque, blood-filled (yet comedic) plays quickly thrust him into the spotlight as the Quentin Tarantino of England. Oh, and if that’s not interesting enough, did you hear about the time he nearly got into a knockdown with Sean Connery at a London theatre awards show? If you haven’t heard of this rebellious playwright yet, this won’t be the last time.
McDonagh marks another first with In Bruges, his first stab at writing and directing a feature film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year. He also scored an impressive list of star talent with Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes. The film is a clever and inventive twist on the hitman flick, so if you think there’s nothing new to say about hired killers, think again. We recently sat down with the Oscar-winning writer/director and talked about his new film, his experience with Hollywood badboy Colin Farrell, and the cure for boredom in Belgium.
McDonagh found his inspiration for the film during a weekend trip to Bruges (that’s in Belgium, by the way), just a few hours’ train ride from his home in London. “I was walking around and was stunned by how beautiful it was,” he says. “Beautiful but dark and brooding, and medieval and gothic too, especially at night time. I just thought, ’Wow,’ it had never been used in a film before, as far as I knew, so wouldn’t it be cool to have this place as a character in a film.”
It wasn’t long before the majesty of the medieval city center wore off. “In the middle of the second day I was bored out of my head and wanted to get drunk,” he says. “And that became the two characters in my head. The one who appreciated the culture and the churches, and the other who wanted to get drunk and meet women, which became the Colin Farrell character.”
In Bruges starts off as two hitmen (Farrell and Gleason) head to the storybook medieval town of Bruges, Belgium to cool off after a botched hit job in England. One (Gleeson) revels in the history, ambience and gothic architecture while the other (Farrell) can’t help thinking the town a shithole. We see gothic gargoyles on the churches as Farrell’s character is dealing with his own inner demons. The film takes a turn onto a much darker path, and we realize the hit men are in Belgium for something other than a holiday.
McDonagh says he wanted to set up a “fish-out-of-water” situation in which he starts with the stock kind of hit man situation and brings it to a whole new place. “I wanted Bruges to be like a fully-fleshed character in the film,” he says. “We see it in every shot. It’s palpable, especially at night.” Once the audience realizes why the two men are there, he says, the story is brought to a “darker, sadder place.”
The characters were originally written as being from London, but when Farrell and Gleeson, both Irish, signed on, McDonagh decided it would be an easy switch for the characters to be from Dublin. “I got them to read for it and we only had to change 20 words or so,” he says. “Working class London is quite similar to working class Dublin. It’s only when you get to the posher folks that the difference in the idiom arises.”
It’s not often we see Farrell acting in his native tongue, but that’s just a small part of the reason his performance here is perhaps his strongest to date. McDonagh says the real Farrell doesn’t quite live up to the badboy image he’s sometimes associated with. “He’s one of the sweetest, most shy and nurturing people I’ve worked with,” McDonagh says. “He helped me completely as a first time filmmaker. They all did. I couldn’t have worked with any nicer, non-starry people. Colin and Brendan are some of the funniest guys you’ll meet. I think that even comes across in the darker moments of the film. I like all those cool and sexy stories about Colin, but I never saw that side of it at all.” Still, he says, there’s not a lot to do in Bruges, so it was inevitable that they ended spending a lot of time in local pubs, especially an Irish one to watch sports.
McDonagh says the first time he met Farrell, it was obvious he understood the film because he didn’t talk about the comedy, the action, or looking sexy. Rather, he concentrated on his character’s despair and suicidal compulsions. That was when McDonagh knew Farrell was there for some intense work.
Before setting off to work in Bruges for nearly three months, McDonagh spent three weeks in rehearsal with Farrell and Gleeson. “It was pretty much me, Brendan and Colin in a room,” he says. “Going through the script, talking about why every line is there. Brendan and Colin had some kind of respect for the script. I don’t know if they always have it. You would expect sometimes a Hollywood star to come in and throw their weight around and change things up, but they were kind of humble about lots of that stuff. I had known Brendan for a long time, so he had that respect. I don’t know if Colin got that from Brendan or if he had it anyway, but the loved the script from one day one. He wanted to do it as soon as he read it. There was never any argument or fight about sticking to what we had. I would always listen and be open to it. But again, if I’ve been with the script for two years, I’ve pretty much decided these are the right lines for every single scene and every single character. They respected that completely.”
Later in the film we meet the hitmen’s malicious boss, a surprising (but superb) act of casting with Ralph Fiennes. McDonagh says Fiennes was running around like a kid the first day of shooting, as it was his first time to brandish a pistol in a film. “The first day he was very method about it,” McDonagh says. And after the first take: “He was just no questions, he wanted to shoot and shoot. He’s a great actor and brought a tremendous amount of intensity to the part. He hasn’t really done comedy before, but with that character I wanted to cast against type a little bit to have someone who hadn’t done that 100 times before. He brings the comedy but he brings the darkness and the intensity of the man he is.”
“I was worried about that until two weeks ago,” McDonagh says, laughing. “They were really great to us and they let us shoot everywhere, so that was cool. It was a beautiful place. We showed it to the Mayor’s office and the tourist board and all of the Belgians who had worked on the film. They all loved it and were behind it.”
Still, the film is not a comedic romp like the previews suggest. Filmgoers expecting a bunch of laughs, violence and action scenes will get that, but also a lot of very disturbing scenes and intense dialogue. Then there’s the racist midget coked out of his mind with a Dutch prostitute…but for that, you just need to see the film. “Some people are just not gonna like it because it’s violent and has a strange sensibility,” he says. “You can’t quite define it just as a comedy or as a drama or shoot-em up. It’s got elements of all those things, then I think it goes to a stranger place. It will be interesting to see how it’s taken.”•••
Christopher Sandlin is Editor of the Dallas/Gulf Coast edition of the Boston-based EDGE.
