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Recently Released In Theaters Reviews
2008 FALL MOVIE PREVIEW Blindness How to Lose Friends & Alienate People Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist Flash of Genius Beverly Hills Chihuahua Forever Strong Eagle Eye Miracle at St. Anna Choke Nights in Rodanthe My Best Friends Girl Lakeview Terrace Battle in Seattle Igor Recently Added Spotlights Clark Gregg Sean Faris Charlize Theron Stuart Townsend Justin Hartley Samuel L. Jackson Patrick Wilson Kerry Washington Meg Ryan Jada Pinkett Smith Eva Mendes Debi Mazar Alan Ball Nicolas Cage Anna Faris |
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 Martin McDonagh
Interview By: Andrea Tuccillo 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. 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 ... |
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