On Inisherin a young woman wrestles with her conscience as she tries to decide between starting her own life on the mainland or remaining in service to her beloved brother in the home they share. On Inisherin, a young man struggles to escape the abusive hand of his own father, shunned as he is by the rest of the small community. On Inisherin, the distant thunder of civil war on the mainland plays frequently in the background, constantly threatening to inch ever closer to the island’s residents. And yet…
And yet, on Inisherin, as a half-dozen more dramatic stories are playing, the banshees are instead wailing a song about two friends, Pádraic Súilleabháin and Colm Doherty, who’ve had a mysterious falling out. For Colm, the reasons are clear — he wants to create music and put something new and original into the world, and he doesn’t want to spend any more of his days downing pints at the pub while Pádraic discusses his miniature donkey’s ablutions. But few others on the island can understand the brutality with which he swings the ax on his longest-lasting friendship. And so, even with more important things going on, it’s this trivial preoccupation with which the island of Inisherin is obsessed.
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The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh’s fourth film, began with an ending. As the Covid pandemic loomed, McDonagh found himself in a dark place of his own, struggling to process a failed relationship. And as the writer and director of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and In Bruges is wont to do, processing it meant picking up a pen. “I think I was tapping into being in that sad sort of breakup place,” he says now. “I was getting sad on a daily basis and writing this was like a side of joy.”
The sadness found a release as he came up with the denizens of a fictional Aran Island off the west coast of Ireland, never having to travel too far from his own feelings as he imagined the trauma of two friends undergoing their own conscious uncoupling. “Every day you think, ‘Oh, this is useful, write it down.’ And at the end of it, you have something decent,” he notes. “I think that was probably one of the things that helped bring me out of it.”
He insists it’s “the first and probably only time” he’ll work through his own issues so directly with his work, but it seemed fitting that, as the global pandemic started to take hold, McDonagh found himself back on the small, remote island chain on which he’d set two plays, The Cripple of Inishmaan in 1996 and The Lieutenant of Inishmore in 2001.
“That feeling that Colm has, that he might be wasting his time, was a thought I had a lot during the pandemic,” McDonagh says. He’d finished his script before the lockdowns began, but in the year and a half it took to finally get the film on its feet, the notion of an island community dealing with existential issues couldn’t help but be informed by the way life was readjusting around him. “I think we all thought about how much time we were wasting, and what we might want to do afterwards. Do you just keep going along like you did before, or do you rush to make up time?”
Indeed, while other films have attempted to literally incorporate the pandemic into their storytelling, The Banshees of Inisherin feels like the first to properly capture a sense that it’s while the world is grappling with big, seemingly insurmountable obstacles that our own much more petty and personal complaints appear to take on disproportionately seismic importance. So, despite the story taking place in 1923, the focus of Martin McDonagh’s new film is on two friends having a tiff, and not on the larger issues going on around them.
McDonagh borrowed the title from a play he’d written years earlier but had been too embarrassed to publish. The Banshees of Inisheer would have formed the third part of his Aran Islands trilogy, completing a cycle that would have covered the entirety of the small island chain southwest of Galway. But, he says, there is nothing of that play in his new film. He just liked the alliterative ‘sh’ sound of The Banshees of Inisherin as a title, as much as to include a reference to it in the script itself.
Freed from the confines of a theater in which to stage it, McDonagh knew he wanted to bring a cinematic scale to the landscapes, opening the possibility of scouting more of Ireland’s west coast, and so setting the film on the extant isle of Inisheer felt disingenuous. So, Inisherin was born from his imagination, but he does consider the film, loosely, to be a third part of the trilogy. “I guess in my heart it had to feel like it could be one of the Aran Islands,” he notes.
But the banshees of the title might not be quite so elusive. In Irish folklore, banshees are female spirits whose shriek is a portent of death, and McDonagh’s script slides in one of his own in the form of Mrs. McCormick, played with comical wickedness by Sheila Flitton. It’s not that Mrs. McCormick is a literal banshee, but she does seem to appear just when she’s not wanted. And as with the nature of that mythology around the outskirts of his screenplay, McDonagh affords himself the opportunity to stretch the extremities of his story to the heights of emotion and trauma. Blood flies, tears are shed, and death seems destined to come to Inisherin. But in the middle of it all, truths are told and deep heartbreak must be processed.
There was another desire driving McDonagh’s decision to focus his narrative on Pádraic and Colm: he wanted to reunite Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, with whom he’d collaborated on 2008’s In Bruges. Though the two actors had met and discussed other projects, it was on In Bruges, with McDonagh’s writing to hand, that they became an indelible on-screen pairing. And it had been 14 years since they had shot the film; 14 years since they last worked together.
“We had so much fun on the first one,” says McDonagh. “I definitely wanted to work with the boys again, but there was a trepidation there too, not to do anything lesser than Bruges. In the years since it had come out, we’ve all had people come up to us to say how much they liked it. You don’t want to disappoint those people, at the same time as you don’t want to replicate exactly what you did before. If In Bruges is a love story between their characters, this is the end of that. The end of love.”
In that way, Banshees is, suggests Farrell, “In Bruges 10 years later, 90 years before.”
The actor jokes that reading the script was a slog. “It kind of comes alive on camera, but it’s tough to get through as a read,” he laughs. But, in fact, he did have a real hesitation when he picked it up. “It wasn’t a nervousness of, ‘I wonder if Martin is going to send me a good script,’ because that’s f*cking ridiculous. But because I love him so much, I did have a fear of, ‘What if I don’t like it?’ There’s a part of me, the f*cking eejit that I am, that would prefer him not to cast me in a film than to get a script from him and not want to do it.”
He needn’t have worried. “I just f*cking adored it. I had a feeling it was going to be sad, I had a feeling it was going to be violent, I had a feeling it was going to be funny and disturbing and provoking and all those things. And it was, and I was incredibly moved.”
“This is the stuff you wait for,” says Gleeson of his own reaction to the script. “The Colm character, his journey became so apparent, but it was such a challenge. When the script came in… It reminded me of when my boys were into Harry Potter. They used to buy two books, because they couldn’t wait for the other fella to finish one copy. They’d be gone until the whole thing was done. And with Martin’s scripts, that’s what happens to me. I just disappear. You go into his world and it’s always a thrill.”
Even as Inisherin toplines the very real heartbreak of a friendship lost, those peripheral stories happening on the island are given no less care and attention. “Everywhere you look there’s the truth of the human struggle,” says Farrell. He points to Kerry Condon’s touching portrayal of Pádraic’s sister, Siobhan, who might be the only one on Inisherin talking sense. And yet her unflappable, deep love for her brother is holding her back from being the person she wants to be. Farrell also points to Barry Keoghan’s turn as Dominic, whose abuse by his own father, the local policeman, becomes apparent as we spend more time in his company. On Inisherin, the suffering is as harsh and unforgiving as the weather (though the film was shot during a surprisingly perfect summer, on which more later), and as is traditional for one of Martin McDonagh’s scripts, the stakes are raised with every passing scene.
For Farrell and Gleeson, the shift in tone felt necessary — like McDonagh, they had little interest in repeating the beats of the cinematic universe they’d established purely for the sake of nostalgia — but it also brought with it a sense of trepidation. “It was very hard, it was harsh,” notes Gleeson. “And myself and Colin had got on like a house on fire with In Bruges. I did wonder if there would be anything of the script that would creep into our relationship off-screen.”
“I was nervous,” confirms Farrell, “about whether he was going to be a little bit more distant. I was just wondering. Because I knew where he was going to go. I had a feeling how he was looking at the script, and how it was a mountain that he wanted to climb, it was important for him to climb, as it was for me, as it was for all of us. And I just wasn’t sure.”
“I’ve had it happen, where people come up and they won’t talk to you in person,” says Gleeson. “And really, it was liberating in a way to understand that you don’t have to do that in order to be perfectly in your character.”
“It was such a relief,” agrees Farrell. “I was f*cking delighted five seconds after seeing you. Because some people do have that process, and they need that space. And look, if somebody does need that on the day, I get it. I’m going to go over and say, ‘Can you not just act, and any chance of a hug?’ I’m not that needy. But f*cking hell, I was just so glad we could come to this separation from a similar place as In Bruges, which for me is a place of mad, deep respect and affection and ultimately love.”
“The process is interesting,” says Gleeson. “There are people that need to go into a place like that, and I think a lot of it is absolute nonsense. I prefer working with people that strive to do something on the same hymn sheet, from their various perspectives.”
“There were for sure days when I’d be off in a corner, and days when you’d be off in a corner,” says Farrell. “Sometimes you need to stay close to a mood and you want to be on your own…”
“But you don’t have to blank an actor for the entire project,” adds Gleeson.
“You’re not creating behavioral lines in the sand every f*cking day,” agrees Farrell. “If he would have, it would’ve murkied the waters. Because the whole script, for me, was about love, was about respect, was about regard, and how those things get lost under the tumult of words unspoken, dreams unfulfilled, and losses that haven’t been grieved properly.”
Martin McDonagh hadn’t necessarily designed the script this way, but as the production of The Banshees of Inisherin set up shop on the real Aran Island of Inishmore and on the larger island of Achill further north, and as costume designer Louise Kiely clothed Colm’s character in a large duster coat to tramp through the tall grass, he and cinematographer Ben Davis couldn’t help but lean on the influence of Westerns. “It just started to feel that way,” McDonagh says. “These two gunmen coming back to the saloon where they’re squabbling.”
“I had to stop myself from ordering a sarsaparilla when I got to the bar,” laughs Gleeson.
“We leaned into that kind of John Ford style of shooting through doorways,” McDonagh adds. “A Searchers vibe was definitely something we wanted to tap into.”
And while Ireland has a reputation for verdant green landscapes dulled by days, weeks and months of rain and grey skies, shooting the film during an unseasonable warm spell in the late summer of 2021 meant those colors took on added vibrancy. So, as dark as the story becomes at times, it is nevertheless awash with saturated visuals. “There was a book that was released recently that included retro-colored images of the west of Ireland at the turn of the 20th Century,” says Farrell. “And it was extraordinary seeing splashes of color. Everything was so vivid, so bright, and so optimistic. It was all the colors that are represented in nature.”
Banshees, then, delivers a view of the country that defies the stereotype of drab, Irish weather and equally monochromatic lives. “Nothing was superfluous in how Martin told this story,” Farrell says. “Every single shot had a reference point that was grounded in truth. That’s what allows for the heightened aspect of the language and the performance and the story. Allegory begins to creep in a little bit, and the power of allegory is that it allows us to feel further from the story we’re telling, but then over time you go, ‘This thing that seems a little bit farfetched is actually… oh, sh*te, it’s about me.”
“There’s a lot of truth in the room, isn’t there?” asks Gleeson rhetorically. “It reminds me of something Martin said to me years ago, which is that all his stuff, it’s all about love, really, even if it doesn’t always look that way.”
“Absolutely,” says Farrell. “The work I’ve read of his, and all the time I’ve spent with him, I’ve never been able to detect any hint of subliminal darkness or a sneaky agenda getting through. For all the hilarity, all the awkwardness, all the f*cking dynamism of the macabre he presents in the writing, at its core there is, honest to God, a very deep sweetness and tenderness, and a real consideration for human beings, and why we are the way we are.”
The discussions about what it all meant started with rehearsal, a process McDonagh insists upon, harking back to his roots in the theater. “We rehearsed and ironed out certain things,” says Gleeson. “We came up with various different backstories within that, and to what extent there was a closeness between the various characters.”
“It put out all of the questions there, of why Colm was being so harsh in the very start of the film,” says McDonagh. “Is that the truth of who he is, or is that the only move he can see that will work? And those discussions imbued each later scene with different dynamics and different tones, so that it wasn’t one-note. It wasn’t a guy just saying harshly, ‘I don’t want to be friends with you.’ It was so much more subtle than that, and it almost got more subtle as it went on.”
McDonagh had experienced the elevation of his material in this way when he charged Gleeson and Farrell with their characters in In Bruges. “On the page, In Bruges seemed like a just a funny genre story,” he says. “But they took it to the depths of sadness and meaning that the film has.”
As the tension between Colm and Pádraic ramps up, Colm, a keen fiddle player, gives his friend an extreme ultimatum: either leave him alone or he’ll start to cut his own fingers off. This is the allegory: a threat of such self-destructive misery that it seems an almost impossible and unlikely escalation.
Did Gleeson ever wonder why Colm went to such extremes? “I did, and I asked him,” he says, pointing at McDonagh.
“Geez, I can’t remember,” McDonagh replies, laughing. “Maybe: ‘Shut up and do it! That’s backstory, that’s your job.’”
But Gleeson recalls the conversation. “He said it’s quite common for writers to wake up in a nightmare where they feel that their hand is no longer capable of writing. That we fear the loss of the thing that allows us to express ourselves, whatever it may be. Your voice if you’re a singer, or your memory if you’re an actor; we worry we’ll forget our lines. If that thing is threatened, it becomes about everything. So, I think my rationale was that Colm had made a commitment to risk everything in order to facilitate this space that he felt he needed to create properly.”
“People do terrible things to themselves all the time,” says Farrell in agreement. “The power and the beauty and the potential of the human body, the human experience, is overwhelming for a lot of us. It’s very hard to hold being a human being. I say that with humility, understanding, and gratitude for how blessed my life has been, but just the mere fact of being a human… You’ve either got to be fully plugged in or plugged the f*ck out.”
Gleeson recalls struggling particularly with a shot in the film in which he was directed to regard his fingerless hand. “I remember Martin and I talked about it, and it was an interesting talk,” he says. “Trying to understand what the image of looking at my hand would feel like was a little bit challenging. What am I feeling? Is it, ‘Have I blown it?’ Or, as it ended up being, is it with a sense of pride and relief that I’d had the courage to do it?”
McDonagh, then, tells a story about a woman at a test screening who had a problem with Colm’s extreme reaction. “She was adamant that an artist would never do that. ‘An artist would never destroy the thing they use to create their art.’”
“Speak up,” laughs Gleeson, “Van Gogh couldn’t hear you.”
“Yeah, but she goes, ‘He cut his ear off, that doesn’t affect his painting.’”
“It’s funny that there are artists who can understand it and other artists who can’t,” says Gleeson.
“There’s a much clearer throughline with a fiddle player cutting off his fingers and then not being able to play than an artist cutting off his ear,” adds Farrell. “But the bottom line is they’re both significantly profound acts of violence against the self. The origin of that need, that desire, that devotion is what this is about.”
Farrell can’t rationalize that compulsion to self-destruct, but he knows he has felt it. “I didn’t learn to destroy myself in the way I was in my early 20s,” he says. “I did it, but I didn’t have any particular example of it. I wasn’t led down it. Maybe if I’d had music, it would have been different. Maybe if I had of f*cked off out West when I was 16, or had somebody edging me towards that, maybe it would have been different. Fine, but it wasn’t.”
Instead, for all of the characters in The Banshees of Inisherin, the journey is about pain and how they process it. How they seek it out and how they seek to remove it. “There’s a certain mental prescribed pain that we share as a community,” Farrell thinks. “Some feel it, some try to hold it for others, and unfortunately some people turn away from dealing with their own pain and inflict it on other people.”
For Pádraic, the pain of whatever unresolved trauma lies beneath the surface is kept at bay by a sunny disposition that is challenged by his friend’s sudden disinterest. Farrell says he discussed with Condon how it was that Pádraic and his sister came to live together with no sign of their parents on the island. The question of what happened to them provided a key to Pádraic’s inability to deal with anything beyond the trivial, and Siobhan’s irrepressible need to take care of her naïve brother.
“By the end of the film, Pádraic’s had a rude awakening about the nature and the pain of loneliness and isolation, which is something he’s never experienced before,” says Farrell. “He’s so dismissive, like, ‘Lonely? What do you mean lonely? What are you talking about?’ But it’s visited on him by everyone he loves by the end of the film. Reading the script, I, Colin, can understand why, but for Pádraic it’s absolutely crushing. Everyone pays a price for what they need.”
In the end, each of the characters we meet on Inisherin represents parts of each of us watching, some that we acknowledge and some that we don’t; some even that we can’t. Gleeson asks McDonagh how he knows, instinctively, when a particular line feels off. “You’re very exacting with what you write,” he says. “You know when you’re unhappy with a line. And I’m wondering, in light of our conversation, if the reason you know how to be happy or not with a line is because it has to feel true to a part of yourself.”
“Yeah, I think so,” says McDonagh. “I mean, you become each character, if it’s going well, and then each line has to be true to that person more than me, necessarily.”
“Does it ever get uncomfortable, writing?” asks Farrell, making this reporter’s job even easier. “Does the emotion that you stir in us and the audience ever stir you? I’m not asking are you totally objective, because I know you’re not, but does it ever feel as powerful to you as it does to us?”
“I think so,” replies McDonagh again, and he recalls a line from Dominic, who makes an awkward attempt at one point in the story to romance Siobhan, only for his advances to be gently, but definitively rebuffed. “Well, there goes that dream,” Dominic says. “I’ve definitely felt like that when girls have said no to going out with me, so many times. Or they’ve fallen out of love, or whatever. It’s such a sad line; it’s horrible for him. But it’s truthful.”
“It’s ballsy, that you state things like that,” says Gleeson. “You’re so kind of obtuse at the way you come around at different things, but every so often you hit it straight between the eyes with a line like that.”
“Well,” says McDonagh, “especially with a character like Dominic, it’s like a sea of crazy stuff and then, boom, just a moment that’s crystal clear. But all of the craziness is just a disguise for that moment to be there, and sometimes you have a whole play or a script that’s leading up to a moment like that.”
He recalls a scene in In Bruges, where Farrell’s character regards himself in a mirror just before going on a date. He’s fussing, and awkward, and the nervousness of a trained assassin desperate to impress a girl is both funny and disarming in equal measure.
Farrell remembers the moment, and being given a particular direction that he should touch and prod at his own face as he stares at his reflection. “There was something about malleability and the impermanence of the human body, and of not trusting any part of it,” Farrell says. “He can touch it, but he can’t feel it.” He remembers that moment saying everything about Ray, his character in Bruges, without a line of dialogue spoken. He remembers McDonagh’s certainty about it.
“You find those moments, Martin, with a fearlessness,” says Gleeson. “And you’ve been doing it from the beginning. I remember seeing Banshees for the second time and thinking about how wars start, because you’ve got the civil war going on over there, but then this war between these two lads. It’s like the worst thing you can do is work with a director whose sensibility is diametrically opposed to your own, where your instincts just can’t align with theirs. It becomes almost impossible, then.”
“Really?” asks McDonagh. “Even more than working with a d*ckhead?”
“Absolutely, more than a d*ckhead and more than an incompetent, because you can kind of f*cking ignore them.”
Agrees Farrell: “There’s a superficiality to the arsehole behavior sometimes where it’s not indicative of the core.”
“It’s when you’re with someone,” finishes Gleeson, “and they’re not trying to be difficult, but what they’re saying is going entirely against your instinct, and entirely against your conception of the character and what motivates them… that’s an impossible situation.”
As they gather for breakfast to talk about this latest collaboration, they are fresh from its London premiere. Their bags are packed for a whistlestop visit to Dublin where The Banshees of Inisherin will play to a hometown crowd for the first time. And though they’re months on from the film’s Venice Film Festival world premiere, they’re still nervous about how the film will be received.
Picking up on criticism of McDonagh’s work — infrequent though it may be — that it leans too heavily into Irish stereotypes, Gleeson confesses to feeling especially sensitive to the hometown reaction. McDonagh’s use of language is heightened, he admits, but it comes from a respectful place. “There’s a difference between someone calling you a Paddy and you’re laughing, and someone calling you a Paddy and you’re not,” he says, launching into a story about a reaction he’d had from an Irish friend who was in the previous night’s audience. “That kind of sh*t was banging around in my head last night, and he finally sidled up to me and said, ‘You’re getting better each time, Brendan, with your dance partners.’ The relief was extraordinary. The idea that people would feel in any way alienated was really upsetting, because they’re kind of the people you’re trying to reach.”
“It’s the only review that really counts,” agrees Farrell. “My uncle couldn’t even speak to me last night. He said, ‘I just can’t talk about it right now and I need to have a lie down, but I want to say it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever been a part of.’ I’ve got goosebumps thinking about it.”
Their conversations, in prep, production, and now as the film is being unspooled around the world, come easily. There are, they say, always more layers in need of unpeeling. They hadn’t intended to leave it 14 years before reuniting on a project, but now that they have, they don’t want to leave it another 14 more. “The road is always getting shorter ahead,” says Farrell. “So, I’d just love for us to do something together again sooner than that.”