MM: Yeah. [Laughs]. But it was great - they were all just lovely guys. They really completely helped me, so even the first day of shooting, it was much more fun than I ever thought it would be.

SFBG: How did they help you?

MM: Well, we had three weeks of rehearsals prior to the first day of shooting, so we just kinda analyzed the script and talked. We just pretty much bonded. And there was never any kind of starry-ness about them. It was just about doing good work and getting into the characters. And they were quite protective of me. If producers or the like were hanging around, they would just take care that the process wasn’t being interfered with. They're just a great bunch of boys.

Learning about lenses: Martin McDonagh

SFBG: How did the movie actually come to be made?

MM: I just wrote a script, specifically for me to direct. I wanted to keep it kinda small. I went to Bruges, and this story was kind of inspired by that trip in lots of ways. Just wrote the script, my agent sent it to a few film companies, and there were, like, two or three film companies really interested in it. So I was kind of in an unusual place of being able to pick what studio to go with. So that’s how it came about. I think they saw the short film I made and were happy to have me make it.

SFBG: Did it help to have Colin Farrell and the other actors involved?

MM: At that stage, they weren’t even a part of it. The film company just liked the script and wanted to make it. It was only after that Colin and Brendan came on board.

SFBG: Here's a question you probably get a lot: why Bruges?

MM: Well, I went there just for a weekend trip from London, and was just struck by how beautiful and strange and picturesque but also kind of gothic and dark and medieval it was, with the canals and cobbled streets.

So I was just wandering around thinking all those things, going to all the museums and churches. And then in the middle of the second day, I was getting really bored, having been to everywhere twice or three times - this was four years ago - and I just wanted to get drunk or meet a girl, anything to get away from the museums and churches.

Then those two voices in my head started talking to each other: the side, the Colin Farrell side, that just wanted to get a drink and the Brendan Gleeson side that just wanted to go to another church or another museum. So pretty much that’s how the initial story popped up. And then I thought, why do these two people have to be in Bruges when they didn’t want to be in Bruges, and that’s when the story of the past, the hits that went wrong, came out, and the fact that they had been sent there by their boss, Ralph Fiennes.

SFBG: Was Bruges a transit point to the rest of Europe?

MM: No, not really, no. I wasn’t really exploring that side of it - more that it's sort of an unknown place that no one really knows, and it's just so strange to be sent there. There's no reason to be there. You can understand Paris or Prague.

SFBG: Even Siena!

MM: Exactly. We know all those places. There's nothing too surprising about those places. You know a little bit at least about Venice or Siena. But Bruges - half of the characters in the film, when they're told they're going to Bruges, they say, "Where's that?" or "Why?" Which is exactly what Colin and Brendan are doing themselves. If they're doing that, I thought the audience is going to do the same thing. So it's supposed to be a place where no one knows where it is or why a whole film is set there.

It's a beautiful blank slate, too. It's such a cinematic place - I thought it had both of those elements: it's a cinematic place that no one really knows too much about.

SFBG: There are references to Don't Look Now, Touch of Evil, and even The Killers.

MM: Oh, the Burt Lancaster one.

SFBG: There's that, and the one with Clu Gulager.

MM: Wow. I haven't seen that one for years and years. I remember watching it in a film noir weekend or something. But yeah, Don't Look Now is a template of a film where a town is a character - Venice is so much a character in the story. And yeah, Touch of Evil was there. I love Orson Welles, anyway, but that scene of Brendan in the hotel room [the Welles film is on a TV in the background] is a six-and-a-half-minute take with no break. I kind of wanted to have a tip of the hat to, y'know, the best ever long take in Touch of Evil.

SFBG: You are a big film fan.

MM: Very much so. Before all the theater, film was all I ever cared about, really.

SFBG: Did that prepare you for directing? Or did you do anything to prepare?

MM: No, I talked to the DP a lot and storyboarded a lot, but not too much more. I made the short films to learn a little bit about the dynamics of the set and camera lenses and all that kind of stuff, but even now I'd say I don't know as much about it as I could. It's just a first film, so I got time to learn, maybe.

SFBG: Were you trying to avoid a theatricality that comes with many movies adapted from plays.

MM: Yeah, yeah, I wanted it to be as cinematic as possible. I didn't want it to seem like a playwright's film: I didn't want it to be about two guys talking for two hours on a bench. Um, I storyboarded an awful lot and thought visually about every single scene. But at the same time, I didn't want to run away from what I think I do well, which is dialog and character and plot, in some ways.

So, um, at the same time I wanted it to be as visual as possible, I still wanted it to have long scenes of interesting conversation. I hope that's what the film is, a balance of the very cinematic but with the very dialogue and character-based kind of stuff because an interesting conversation can take you to cinematic and strange places, too. It can be as exciting, sometimes, as a shootout.

I do like the scene on the bench when [Gleeson and Farrell's characters] are talking about heaven and hell, and then it goes into a very weird kind of comedy place with karate and being hit with a bottle. It just goes down a very strange kind of route, then it goes back to Colin having to deal with what's happened to him. So it goes from a comedy scene to a sad scene all in one - I think that has a lovely kind of dynamic, pulse to it.

SFBG: Other unavoidable reference points in your work are David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino. How do you feel about that - do you avoid it or embrace it or are you conflicted about it?

MM: I guess both, I think. I like their dialogue a lot - especially their earlier stuff, certainly Mamet's earlier plays and Quentin's first couple films. But in some ways, we kind of wanted to set up a Tarantino-esque situation of the hitmen, then take it to a deeper, sadder, darker place of guilt and despair, and so it's almost using those guys as a starting point to subvert and lead an audience to, "OK, this seems like a Tarantino film," then bring it to a sadder place.

SFBG: Where does that sadness come from? Bruges is a medieval town, and there's a sense of medieval concepts of justice...

MM: I think it's me, y'know. I think I like a black comedy but if you're dealing with themes of dumb men and shooting, I just wanted to analyze those aspects. You know, I'm not a big believer in gunplay or war, so it was interesting just to set up that - the cool hitman kind of thing - but then say, "Is it really cool? These guys are shooting on the street. What if your kid got hit or my kid got hit?" To set up those things and explore the sadness of that is interesting.

SFBG: Male bonding is also a major theme.

MM: Yeah, my earlier stuff was much more female-oriented. My first play had two very strong female characters. But yeah, I guess I've gone down a male path a little bit, but I'm going to come back around! [Laughs] It's true - I think my next couple ideas are very female-based.

Bonding - if you got two people in a scene and just have them talk to each other, I guess thats bonding. Male bonding always sounds like a horrible...locker room kind of thing that I've never gotten involved with. [Laughs] I mean, I've always been a loner, so I've never gone into that male bonding kind of thing anyway in my personal life.

SFBG: Where do you find your dialog - in pop culture...?

MM: No, I just think it comes from me and my head - and the sickness in here. [Laughs] Yeah, no, I've always just had these conversations in my head. This one was from two sides of me: one side liking the culture and the other side just liking the booze. [Laughs] You just set those characters talking and try to follow where they go. And then add stranger, quirkier things that aren't about me, y'know. Colin's character is very...un-PC, I'd say. He has a childlike opinion about everything, which I don't share, but I think it's interesting to have a character who has political opinions that are completely the opposite of your own. It just takes it to a completely different place.

SFBG: So what are your political opinions? At the risk of seeming like an essentialist, Pillowman struck me as a very Irish play.

MM: Really. Huh.

SFBG: Though maybe not to you!

MM: [Laughs] It doesn't strike me as an Irish one - I was trying to write my first non-Irish one.

I guess, as a writer or as a person, I have more of an anarchist sensibility - it's seemingly left-wing in some ways but it's more about a love of people. I'm anti-all-government and most political viewpoints in some ways, but i believe in people, and that there's a decency there, that if we can get the politicians out of it as much as possible, we might be OK.

But I don't know if that comes across in the work, probably not. Most of the time, I try to keep my political opinions out of the work. I think maybe Pillowman is the only time it's kind of snuck in a little bit, though it's more about a writer and the freedom of speech and the responsibility of an artist or the lack of responsibility of an artist.

SFBG: Do you feel a sense of responsibility?

MM: Aaah, no! But then there's also the kind of thing, well, what happens if something does happen that's bad because of your work, and even though, I say you should have no responsibilty, I'm not saying you wouldn't have guilt if something like that would happen. But that's not an intellectual response - guilt, I guess.

SFBG: What are you going to work on next - will you ever go back to the theater?

MM: I'm going to write play this year that I've had in my mind for the last couple of years. I have a couple of films that are sort of ready to go. But I'm not going to do anything about them for maybe a year or two. I just want to take a break and travel and learn and grow up. [Laughs] It's about time.

SFBG: Hate to break it you but the learning never quite ends.

MM: OK, yeah, well, I'll start learning!

SFBG: Do you have to write the play for a particular company?

MM: I don't think I've ever done that. It's just a story in my head that I need to get out. [Chuckles]

SFBG: Do the stories always come to you like that?

MM: All the time, yeah. Sometimes you try to push them back for a while, but the good ones just keep bubbling up, I think. That's what happened with Bruges and this new play. It's been in my head for a little while so it's time to get down to it.

SFBG: Anything you like out there, film-wise? Anything you see missing or that you'd like to make yourself?

MM: Yeah, well, I loved lately There Will Be Blood. I loved that a lot. I loved the Jesse James film, which hasn't seemed to have gotten much recognition as other ones.

I'm interested in making a kind of Seven Samurai-type movie. There's an Irish kind of Seven Samurai-type script that I've got in my back drawer. But also I've got a film that's actually called Seven Psychopaths, which is more of an American one but explores that kind of cinematic Seven Samurai kind of thing. But it has elements of a Hollywood writer not wanting to write about violence and wanting something to be much more Buddhist and life-affirming, at the same time as wanting it to be cinematic and with swords and guns and stuff.

It's again, I guess, the two sides of my brain: the peace-loving pacifist side, with the Hollywood-loving, Seven Samurai-loving side, and seeing how that works together.

SFBG: Does cinematic-ness always have to involve action?

MM: No, no, no, no, very much no, no, no! But sometimes when I analyze the films I like the most, even though I wouldn't say I like violent films or action films, there are suually elements of those things in them, and that's because i haven't grown up yet! [Laughs]

SFBG: But the entire culture hasn't seemed to have grown up either.

MM: Yeah, a good sword fight isn't necessarily a bad thing.