The inescapable truth, I tell Martin McDonagh, is that I have watched In Bruges more than a hundred times, and gifted copies of the film to many friends who have been reckless enough to mention that they've never seen it. Actually the recipients haven't all been friends: some have been people I've met at parties or whose acquaintance I've made in bars or airport lounges. This compulsion has been going on for eight years and, if anything, is getting worse. Talking to the director about it now, I'm visited by the fear that it's only a matter of time before I'm knocking on doors and pressing his work into the hands of complete strangers. Does this pattern of behaviour, I ask McDonagh, make me discerning or just very weird?
"I'll go with discerning," he says. "Mainly because I feel the same way about the films I really love. And these films are usually at what you might call the cult end of the spectrum. It would worry me more if you'd told me you were handing out free copies of The Wizard Of Oz. The truth is that I'm delighted you love In Bruges so much, and that you've seen it so many times. Because, in the end, what's the point of making films unless somebody, somewhere, has that reaction?"
In Bruges is 104 minutes long. By a rough calculation I've spent 220 hours watching it: time in which I could have become dauntingly proficient in Flemish or karate, travelled to the moon and back, or listened to the complete works of Mozart. But revisiting a classic by a truly great writer and director - a status which McDonagh, 46, has irrevocably secured with his most recent stage play, Hangmen - really is like returning to the masterpieces of any other great artist. To those of us with the affliction, the attraction of repeated viewing of classic movies is no stranger than replaying albums such as The Beatles' Revolver, Sam Cooke's Night Beat, Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited or Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue. One New York critic was accused of suffering a rush of blood when, shortly after the millennium, he called McDonagh "the first great playwright of the 21st century". It's an assessment that looks less absurd with every passing year.
In Bruges, released in 2008, is that rarest of films: the perfect collision between a script of extraordinary poetic sensibility and a cast in complete harmony with both the screenplay and each other. It's dark, very funny, savage and deeply compassionate. The dialogue has a surreal eloquence that almost suggests McDonagh is in touch with another reality.
We meet in a Belgian bar in east London. McDonagh isn't fond of giving interviews and, over the years, has acquired a reputation for being something of a handful. When he first emerged, fully formed, in the mid-Nineties, he would occasionally hide behind a persona which combined the swagger of Muhammad Ali with the impertinence of John Lydon. He's had to live with the memory of a fracas at the 1996 Critics' Circle Theatre Awards, where he won for his early play The Beauty Queen Of Leenane. Later in the evening McDonagh - enervated, as he said at the time, by a speech by "that wanker [journalist] Max Hastings" - advised Sean Connery to "F*** off, mate."
"I suppose I've always been at war with theatre and with the people who own us," the author tells me. "But then, as Gandhi said, you get c***s everywhere."
Tonight, even though he's feeling "less confrontational than usual", you sense that McDonagh is not the sort of person who, should you come out with something he considered especially inane, would allow it to pass unnoticed. One of his favourite moments from journalistic history, he tells me, is a reply given to a reporter by the musician Nick Cave, when the writer sought to investigate territory the Australian was reluctant to revisit. "Cave said, 'Google it, f***er,'" McDonagh tells me. "I don't find it easy," he adds, "for me to talk about me."
Though sometimes still considered an Irish writer, since most of his dialogue echoes the voices of his ancestors from Connemara, McDonagh grew up in south London, first in Old Kent Road, then Battersea. He has dual Irish/British nationality, but his accent bears no trace of the Galway vernacular that enlivens much of his work. In one of his first encounters with the London press, a well-known theatre critic, while acknowledging McDonagh's talent, ridiculed his working-class background and his pronunciation of the word "featre".
"They all did that," McDonagh says. "All those posh snobs from Oxford and Cambridge. Even now this is how some people think you have to talk."
Reading through his slender file of former interviews, I also noticed that he once refused to say how many children he had. That worried me, I tell him, because the last interviewee I encountered who declined to answer that question, the singer Screamin' Jay Hawkins, was later revealed to have been responsible for more than 50 offspring. The truth, McDonagh says, is that he has no children. He lives in east London with his Italian girlfriend, Melina, and their dog.
"The dog's called Sammy," he says. "I never lie in interviews."
Where his working life is concerned, he is considerably less circumspect.
"I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing," he says. "That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good."
Equally, he can be mercilessly unforgiving of himself. At one point I tell him how much I enjoyed the 2010 Broadway production of A Behanding In Spokane, starring Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell. Walken plays a man who has toured the United States for 47 years in search of his missing hand. I only saw it once; I thought it was outstanding. McDonagh gives me his assessment of the play, which is somewhat less glowing and at one point includes the adjective "shit".
"Are you joking?"
"No. Christopher and Sam were fantastic in it. The reason that play is shit is that there's no depth to it." He's taken steps, he adds, to block its performance in Britain. The decision has nothing to do with the reaction to the play of some right-thinking American critics, who found the unbridled racism of Walken's character, and especially his fondness for the word "nigger", too much to bear. If there's one term least suited to McDonagh's work, it's politically correct.
Now seems as good a time as any to confess that I struggled to bond to In Bruges' successor, the 2012 Hollywood production Seven Psychopaths, starring Farrell, Rockwell, Walken and Woody Harrelson, quite so firmly.
"Neither did I," says McDonagh. "And I believe I know why." The later film has wonderful moments, but with its highly ambitious "film within a film" narrative, lacks the pace, conviction and elegant simplicity of In Bruges. It is, as the writer/director puts it, "maybe a bit too meta. But I can watch my best work over and over, even though I have seen it a hundred times. Just like you can."
Should you not have seen In Bruges, then the story, on the surface, at least, is simple enough. Ken, a veteran Irish assassin played superbly by Brendan Gleeson, has brought his junior compatriot, Ray (Colin Farrell), to the medieval Belgian town, ostensibly to lie low after the younger man, while committing his first professional hit, accidentally shot a boy. They've been sent there from London by Harry, played by Ralph Fiennes, an Essex gangster. Harry - though he shows the indifference to pain in others that is the hallmark of a true psychotic - maintains a fastidious attachment to the principles of fair play in conflict. He also has an unusual capacity to be moved by idealised memories of his own childhood, a sentimental condition for which Bruges, a city he visited once as a boy, has become the ultimate trigger. The real reason Harry has despatched the killers to Belgium, it emerges, is to allow Farrell's character a few days' grace before he orders Ken to execute him. Should his order be disregarded, he tells Ken, he will come to Bruges to kill them both.
In Bruges is commonly described as a comedy and is, undeniably, a triumph of wit and dark humour. Ray's main enthusiasms - lager, cocaine and girls - rarely overlap with those of Ken, a middle-aged widower with a keen interest in literature, Flemish art and ecclesiastical history. Neither does their English gangmaster's assessment of Bruges ("a fairyland") resonate with Ray's ("a shithole"). At one point, whilethe younger man is being dragged around various centres of culture by Ken, the pair stop at the city's Groeningemuseum, where the older man wants to see "The Last Judgment" by Hieronymus Bosch.
Observing the souls contorted in torment, they discuss Purgatory. "Purgatory's kind of like the in-betweeny one," says Ray. "You weren't really shit, but you weren't all that great either." Pause. "Like Tottenham."
Of the many jokes that have been made at the expense of Tottenham Hotspur, I suggest to McDonagh, this is probably the best.
"Well," he says, "I do find myself agreeing with that. But ever since I wrote that scene I've been worried it would eventually be ruined by Tottenham winning the treble. That's been a constant source of anxiety in my life. But I think I'm safe - for a while at least."
The essence of McDonagh's genius is his ability to take his audience to the darkest of places and have them laughing so hard that the drama may be over before they start asking themselves how they could have been amused by such scenes. At the final performance of Hangmen at London's Wyndham's Theatre in March he had 750 people laughing at a scene in which an innocent man slowly chokes to death, lynched in the public bar of a Lancashire pub.
The more robust comic moments of In Bruges involve a thief suffering homophobic abuse seconds after having been shot in the eye, and a Canadian couple being punched out in a restaurant, by Ray. ("That's for John Lennon," he tells the boyfriend, "you Yankee f*ing ct.") There's a magnificently bizarre cocaine-driven scene involving, in Ken's words, "two manky hookers and a racist dwarf". But the film also shows, in flashback, the death of the child Ray shoots. The boy, kneeling in a pew, is killed instantly by a bullet which passes through the body of the intended victim, a priest, as he staggers, fatally wounded, out of the confessional box and into the church. The scene ends with an image of a note the dead boy had composed to remind him of the sins he is to confess: "1. Being moody. 2. Being bad at maths. 3. Being sad."
More than any modern writer I can think of - and that includes some of McDonagh's most celebrated influences, such as Harold Pinter, Terrence Malick and Martin Scorsese - McDonagh is blessed with a remarkable ability to communicate tragedy, humour and compassion. There are celebrated screenwriters who have worked a lifetime without ever getting those qualities to co-exist convincingly within a single work. With McDonagh they can coincide in one scene, within seconds.
Some of the dialogue Ray and Ken exchange from their twin beds in their shared room at the Relais Bourgondisch Cruyce hotel invite comparisons with The Odd Couple, the 1968 film starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, or even Laurel and Hardy. Gleeson's default look of mournful resignation at the inequity of life isn't too far removed from the expression Oliver Hardy gives to the camera after a chimney has fallen on his head. The difference with Gleeson's character is that the scenes of carnage he's forced to contemplate are horribly real.
As I know from my own pilgrimages to Bruges, the town, while picturesque, is hardly the most obvious setting for a movie, even if this film couldn't conceivably have been made elsewhere. Had McDonagh set out with a shortlist of locations?
"Absolutely not," he says. "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. I checked in to the same hotel - the same room, actually - that the boys share, overlooking the canal. I started walking around the centre. I had a few beers. Then she phoned and said she couldn't come."
McDonagh never mentions the name of the woman who failed to show up. Whoever she was, we have a lot to thank her for.
"I'd been checking out every museum, every tiny little square, to show her once she arrived. And when she didn't come, I found myself doing the same thing the next day. Bruges is very small, as you know. There wasn't much else to do but wander. And so," McDonagh continues, "I wandered. Eventually I began getting just very slightly bored, wonderful as Bruges is. That was when the idea for the film started coming to me. You have this character in a place that is stunning, and yet he's bored. He's hating it. And yet he can't leave. He's forced to stay. But why?"
One of the phrases McDonagh has least affection for is "backstory". One of our best-known British film critics, I remind him, is very fond of using it.
"F*** him," says McDonagh. "Backstory," he adds, in a tone that recalls the way Franz Liebkind, the Nazi playwright in The Producers, pronounces the name Churchill. "So," he continues, "this character went on vacation where he got kicked in the teeth by an anteater. And that's why he robbed that bank. Backstory. To me, the words are right there on the page. The rest is the actor's job."
In the case of In Bruges, though, it was a slightly different process.
"Me, Brendan and Colin were in a room together, in Bruges, for three weeks before we started filming," McDonagh recalls. "We read the script. We discussed the characters' backgrounds. We decided they weren't two strangers who came together for a hit. They were more like a bickering married couple. In the film you get that sense right from the start. That time we spent together was extremely valuable."
During those sessions, Gleeson tells me, "I would occasionally find myself asking, 'Well, exactly how are we getting to this place in the script?' Originally, for example, Ken and Ray were two cockneys. But the main thing in my mind was that I wanted to inhabit the work as it emerged, right there and then. The thing about approaching Martin's writing as an actor is that, once it clicks, the characters are so diverse and fascinating that the moment you've entered that world it becomes the only place in the world. That might sound strange," adds the Irishman, "but it is absolutely true. And when you are given an opportunity like that it is a privilege, believe me. It is unusual. It is just pure joy, actually."
Martin McDonagh was born in London in 1970. His parents, John and Mary, had moved from Ireland to find work and have since returned to live in Galway. An early article by an English writer describes the couple as "a builder and a part-time skivvy". It's the sort of language that helped convince the young McDonagh that theatre was "not for the likes of us". His relationship with his brother, John, two years his senior, was characterised, Martin has remarked, by "love, love, love and a tiny spark of hate". John left school at 17 in orderto concentrate on writing. In 1994, he won a fellowship to study screenwriting at the University of Southern California and moved to Los Angeles. John McDonagh's recent triumphs include The Guard (2011) and Calvary (2014), both starring Gleeson. When Martin was 16 he followed his brother's example and began to write full-time, existing mostly on benefits.
The two shared a deep love of classic cinema and Martin immersed himself in American film, to a point some might consider obsessive. His own most-viewed list includes Preston Sturges' Forties classics The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels, as well as Charles Laughton's 1955 film Night Of The Hunter, starring Robert Mitchum as an eerily charming priest and would-be child murderer. Another film he has revisited repeatedly, he says, is Kings And Desperate Men, starring The Prisoner's Patrick McGoohan. "It was made in Canada in 1981," McDonagh says. "You can't even get it on DVD. I have a copy on a grainy video. I mean, that is what you can call a cult film, if you can't even get hold of it." (The movie is now available to the curious in higher resolution on YouTube.)
The young McDonagh, whose orthodox career ambitions went no further than accepting a clerical post at the Department of Trade and Industry, attempted radio scripts that "never really worked". Once he began writing for the stage, though, it was a different matter. In a nine-month spell between 1994 and 1995, having quit his day job, he wrote seven plays, only one of which has not been produced to serious acclaim. (The other, The Banshees Of Inisheer, he says, was "no good".)
The first director to recognise McDonagh's unique voice was Garry Hynes at the Druid Theatre in Galway, which she co-founded in the mid-Seventies. In 1995 Hynes received a copy of The Beauty Queen Of Leenane. Reading it, she found herself "knocked back in her chair". She bought the rights to the whole Leenane Trilogy, whose second part, A Skull In Connemara, follows events after the local priest, troubled by the knowledge that his graveyard is becoming seriously congested, employs two men to exhume its skeletons. In 1998 Hynes became the first woman to receive a Tony award for direction, for the Broadway production of The Beauty Queen.
If his early work was never for the faint-hearted, in the late Nineties McDonagh took one step too far for the theatrical establishment with The Lieutenant Of Inishmore, a brutal satire on terrorist extremism. Previously supportive theatres refused to stage it, fearing a production might put lives at risk. The play opens with two villagers, Donny and Davey, struggling to come to terms with the fact that someone has accidentally killed a cat named Wee Thomas, the sole companion of Donny's son Mad Padraic - a sadistic maniac whose appetite for torture is considered excessive even by his fellow terrorists in the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). When he gets a call informing him that Wee Thomas is unwell, Padraic is conducting surgical experiments on the body of a screaming Belfast drug dealer.
The play took the audience to the edge of what might be defined as satire, with its scenes of gruesome torture and blindings. The INLA, who killed the Conservative MP Airey Neave, were still active when McDonagh wrote it, and not widely perceived as the most suitable people to be ridiculed as buffoons.
"I was trying to write a play," McDonagh said at the time, "that would get me killed, although I had no fear that I would be. Paramilitaries never bothered with playwrights."
McDonagh declared that he would submit no new plays until The Lieutenant Of Inishmore was produced. It eventually opened at the RSC in Stratford in 2001, to rapturous notices.
"Martin's work shows a very particular talent and commitment," says Gleeson. "He has sometimes displayed a flagrant disregard for his own safety. It would be very wrong to assume that what he does is without cost. In my experience there are two things that are remarkable about his level of artistic courage: it is very rare and it never settles."
One of the extraordinary things about McDonagh's work in general, I suggest to Gleeson, is that, savage though his scenarios may be, he never descends to portraying violence for its own sake, in the way that Quentin Tarantino, brilliant as his best work has been, occasionally does - a form of humour not too far removed from pulling the legs off a spider.
Gleeson first worked with McDonagh on a film called Six Shooter, which won the writer/director an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film in 2006. Though less than half an hour long, it involves a son shooting off his mother's head, another woman, who has lost a child, throwing herself to her death from a train, and an exploding cow. It's extremely funny.
"I'd met Martin through my son Domhnall," says Gleeson (the Star Wars actor has a small part in Six Shooter). "At first I was concerned he might be pushing the envelope just for the sake of it. He is not afraid of a question. I have always felt safe working with him, because I've known that I was in honest hands."
In Bruges is not for the squeamish, and amply justifies its 18 certificate. And yet there are moments - especially towards the end, when Ray is pondering his own death, lying on the cobbles of a snow-covered square where horrified locals had been preparing to celebrate Christmas - that arouses the sort of life-affirming sentiments evoked by that other seasonal favourite: Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. In Kings And Desperate Men - another film set at Christmas - there is a scene in which McGoohan, a radio DJ who is being held hostage, addresses his captor, who is pointing a loaded shotgun at his head.
"You're not a sort of moral crusader, are you?" McGoohan asks. "Because you don't really look like one."
I tell McDonagh that I see In Bruges and the rest of his work as explosions of outrage; I've always thought of him as a moralist.
"I think that's true. And I'm surprised that that is not more often commented on, because I think it's more evident than concealed. The Lieutenant Of Inishmore is pure moral outrage. Some people just see the torture and the corpses, but those things are there for a reason. If I read that there was a play that was going to 'explore moral rage' I certainly wouldn't go. Whereas I would definitely pay to see a play that involved an exploding cat."
McDonagh may have mellowed a little since his Max Hastings encounter, but he remains robust in his position on matters of principle. Actors doing ads, for instance
"That just drives me crazy. Every single one of them, even actors you would have assumed had some sort of integrity, take the king's shilling. And it is impossible not to work with whores," he adds, "because they're all doing it."
"Do you go to the theatre often?"
"Twice a year, max. If you pick carefully then it's usually not too terriblean experience. You should come out of the theatre stunned and dripping and, not necessarily angry, but having had an evening at least. Having had a bit of f***ing fun."
His work explores areas that the imagination of someone more orthodox - I won't say "normal" - could never envisage. Certain themes recur, among them child-killing and deliberate blinding. In his 2003 play, The Pillowman, an author, Katurian, has been imprisoned by a ruthless dictatorship alarmed by the cruelty of his stories. He is questioned by an agent named Tupolski, who suspects that a serial killer of children may have been inspired by them. One exchange goes as follows.
Katurian: "I don't have themes. I've written, what 400 stories, and maybe ten or 20 have children in?"
Tupolski: "Have murdered children in."
Katurian: "So, what is this about stories with murdered children in? Do you think I'm trying to say, 'Go out and murder children?'"
Tupolski: "I'm not saying you're trying to say, 'Go out and murder children.' [Pause] Are you trying to say, 'Go out and murder children?'
Katurian: "No! No bloody way! Are you kidding?"
One of McDonagh's most valued collaborators has been Sir Nicholas Hytner, former artistic director of the National Theatre (where he staged The Pillowman) and director of The Madness Of King George. Theirs was never an obvious partnership, and you could argue that Hytner, who is 13 years older and comes from an affluent background, has been the George Martin to McDonagh's John Lennon. The vicious streak that sometimes colours McDonagh's imagination is, in Hytner's words, "an interior affair. It comes from somewhere that's not accessible to anyone else."
Towards the end of The Pillowman, Katurian, realising he is going to be killed, asks Tupolski, "Do you do it out of the blue, or do you give me a minute to say a prayer or something?"
"Well," replies his captor. "First I sing a song about a little pony and then [my colleague] Ariel takes out his hedgehog. You know, his execution hedgehog? And when the hedgehog's out, well, you've got either 13 or 27 seconds left, depending on the size of the hedgehog."
When writing, McDonagh says, "There's a zone you get into. For me, that usually means that the characters are talking so quickly that I am really just taking down what they say - maybe struggling to keep up with the voices."
Hangmen, McDonagh's first British theatrical production for 12 years, is set in a pub close to Failsworth, Manchester, in 1965. The landlord is Harry Wade, who had been the nation's second most famous hangman prior to the abolition of the death penalty earlier that year. It's one of the most brilliant examples in a long tradition of Northern surrealism, which was established by writers such as Peter Tinniswood and still colours the work of performers such as Johnny Vegas.
On the day I first saw Hangmen, I mentioned the work to the editor of a well-regarded magazine. His response, delivered in a patronising tone, was, "Oh, yeah. McDonagh. Irish." It's an assessment that, with hindsight, was worthy of a punch, not least because McDonagh, while he is addressing the kind of universal themes that attract any great writer, has an extraordinary ability to replicate street voices, be they from London, New York or Greater Manchester.
"I know the bars of Failsworth pretty well," I tell him. "How did you capture the language?"
"I don't know," he says. "I've never been to Failsworth. I hear it's no Bruges."
There's a moment when a young, suspicious-looking cockney named Mooney, played by the musician and actor Johnny Flynn, falls into conversation with police inspector Fry and the landlady, Shirley. The impudent absurdity of the dialogue is reminiscent of legendary authors such as Luis Buñuel or Gérard Depardieu's brilliant mentor Bertrand Blier, at their best.
"You going to have any more peanuts with your mild," Inspector Fry asks Mooney, "or have you had enough peanuts?"
Mooney: "I saved a couple for emergencies."
Fry: "For peanut emergencies?"
Mooney: "Yeah. In case I get trapped in a lift with a gorilla. Or a policeman."
Shirley: "Does that happen to you often?"
Mooney: "Only when I'm in Wales."
Shirley: "You want to stop going to Wales then."
Mooney: "I know, but I keep getting drawn back. It's the gorillas."
McDonagh was talking about Hangmen as an idea more than ten years ago. When he finally sat down to write it, he says, it was done in weeks. How long did In Bruges take to write?
"Five weeks. But I'd started writing it in my head on that day that the girl wasn't there, as I walked around. I was already mapping it out."
Currently, McDonagh is in North Carolina, working on his next film, whose working title is Three Billboards Outside Of Ebbing, Missouri. The quality of the script, which is about a black mother's battle to obtain justice for her murdered daughter in the face of opposition from endemically racist authorities is, McDonagh says, unhesitatingly, "Good. Very good. It is. The only thing is, we might have to change the title. There is no Ebbing, Missouri."
In Bruges fans will be interested to hear that he also has plans to reunite Gleeson and Farrell, in a play set during the Irish Civil War in 1922.
"It will be a two-hander," McDonagh tells me. "Their characters will be on an island off the mainland: probably Inisheer [the smallest of the Aran islands and the location for the opening titles of Father Ted]. Hopefully," he adds, "this will get us back together."
This will be welcome news for Gleeson. In his final scene in In Bruges, bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound inflicted by Harry, Ken decides to fling himself from the bell tower in a selfless gesture to save the life of his friend Ray, who is drinking in a cafe below and is next on Harry's hit list. Before he jumps, he scatters coins so as to alert passers-by. He falls in slow-motion to the accompaniment of "On Raglan Road", the love song written by poet Patrick Kavanagh, sung by the late Luke Kelly. It is one of the most moving scenes in a film of its generation or any other.
And now, Gleeson tells me, "Whenever Martin writes something new, I am always really, really disappointed if I'm not in it. I just can't help it. I think the truly great thing about him is that his moral compass is absolutely infallible. No matter how ghastly his characters, you never absolutely hate anyone. That's because there is extraordinary empathy and humanity in his work." Gleeson, who is as far removed from the condition of theatrical luvviness as any actor I have ever met, pauses. "What I have come to realise is that Martin's work is about love. As an actor, you put a great deal of effort into a lot of projects. And to see your work being elevated - because that is what he does - is extraordinary. You just cannot work with somebody of Martin McDonagh's talent," he adds, "and not feel blessed."
