It was suggested to John Michael McDonagh that he might reduce the size of his production credit at the end of The Guard. The response was exactly what you would expect from a man who uses his middle name professionally because it takes up more space on screen.
This is McDonagh’s directorial debut and the first feature film on which he’s proud to see his stretched-out name. He wrote the screenplay for Ned Kelly (2003), which starred Heath Ledger and Naomi Watts, but rates it as a “six out of 10, maybe not even that”. After a bad experience with the director — “He was rewriting my stuff and it was shit” — and because he hasn’t met too many intelligent directors since, McDonagh decided to make The Guard himself.
Set in Connemara and starring Brendan Gleeson as an indifferent law enforcer, it is, McDonagh reckons, the best Irish comedy in at least five years. “I don’t think the writing’s as good over here,” says the second-generation Irishman during a visit to Dublin. “I don’t think the directors are as good. From what I’ve seen, I don’t think there’s a lot to beat, let’s put it that way. I liked Garage, and what? I Went Down? How long ago was that? Two films in nearly 15 years. . .”
A bruiser accent and Del Boy-like charm turn this potential arrogance into admirable self-belief. McDonagh had obstinate confidence long before he had success. The older brother of the playwright Martin, he grew up in London, and left school at 16 in order to get a job and save enough money to stay at home and write. McDonagh spent eight years producing bad novels — all of which were rejected. “From my bed you could hear the flop of the manuscript as it came through the letter box,” he recalls. “It’s quite a depressing sound.”
So he switched to screenplays: he got a directory of where to send scripts and started firing them off on headed paper from his old job. The response was immediate. A producer called to chastise McDonagh for sending two big-budget, feature-length westerns to a television company using stolen stationery, but admitted the scripts were good and recommended him for a screenwriting course.
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Reckoning his talents lay in film scriptwriting, McDonagh forgot about novels. “When I read other people’s scripts that I get sent, I can see what’s wrong with the structure of them. I realised my dialogue was better than most people’s dialogue,” he says, with a blasé swagger.
He spent a decade living off the development funding of screenplays that never got made. Then, when McDonagh was 35, Ned Kelly made it into production, with Ledger in the title role. Halfway through shooting, McDonagh — unwilling to compromise so as to get his double-barrelled name on a prominent film — walked off the set.
“The worst thing you can do in the film business is not return people’s calls. They start shitting themselves and getting freaked out. The director was ringing me, saying, ‘You can’t walk off’, and I said, ‘Actually, I can — I just have.’ Then you’re left with either leaving it and having the whole thing destroyed, or trying to save 60% or 70%. So that’s what I did,” he says.
“I was involved with a director [Gregor Jordan] who thought he was a great writer, but wasn’t. I would have thought common sense meant if you know that the person is destroying the script you went into production with, then you try to put a stop to it. But [the producers] didn’t. About 55% of it is mine. All the crap stuff — the stuff with Naomi Watts — that’s his. Anything sentimental in it, that’s his. The last half hour is almost all mine because he didn’t have time to change it, and that’s the best part of the film.”
McDonagh suspects there was an embargo on him during the press promotion for Ned Kelly, but then he does have strong opinions. This is only his third interview. Among the things he doesn’t care for are nationality — “I sort of have an anarchist sensibility to it”; Steve Staunton’s football management style; most child actors; stage acting; and his brother’s theatrical successes.
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“Do you want me to be honest?” he says repeatedly, and always rhetorically. “I don’t like the theatre. I don’t give a shit about it.” This is not to suggest that he has anything but admiration for his brother. In fact, Martin McDonagh has previously said something similar.
“We both respect each other; that we’re not just caving in and doing shitty work for the money,” he says. “Martin doesn’t direct ads he gets offered. I don’t direct ads. He’s not going to write or direct shitty TV — neither am I. The further you go in this business, you realise most people are prepared to do all that shit and that you’re an anomaly, in a way.”
When McDonagh was 24, his parents moved to Galway, his father’s home county, and the brothers stayed put. They chipped in and purchased the family home, although McDonagh later bought out his playwright sibling and continues to live in the same south London house as he did when he was 14. Martin borrowed his older brother’s directory and started sending off his own scripts; working his way through the radio and television listings, before finding success in the theatre section with The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
“I got a Fulbright scholarship and I went to Los Angeles. It was a big whack of money. At the time I thought, ‘This is a bit of a success.’ But while I was away, because he had the house to himself, Martin started churning out all these plays. When he used to be saying, ‘I’ve written this stuff for the radio’ or ‘I’m sending off this one-act play’, I’d be like, ‘Mmm, let’s see how far you get with that,’ ” he recalls with a loud laugh. “Even when he was going, ‘There’s this company Druid in Galway [interested],’ I was like, ‘Yeah, who are they?’ Of course, then he just sprung off around the world.
“I was only jealous with In Bruges [Martin’s debut feature film] because, as I said, I don’t like the theatre. I think most theatre acting is pretty poor. I like his stuff. I don’t read it before it’s produced because I’d rather watch it with the actors. I never gave a shit, I wished him all the success he wanted in the theatre world, but I got jealous when he got that film set up, yeah.”
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Watching The Guard, it’s impossible not to draw comparisons to his brother’s theatre work and In Bruges, which also stars Gleeson. They share the same black humour, melancholic tone and find fun in the gombeen image of rural Ireland.
“They’re similar,” agrees McDonagh. “I don’t think they’re directed similarly but I’d say the writing is similar. After my parents left, we were still living together. And those years, say when you’re 15 to about 25, that’s when you’re defining yourself, what you like in art, books, films. We shared all that at the same time. We’d be watching shit dramas on TV, slagging them off and saying the same things, so you develop in tandem. [We have] the same sensibility, I guess. Plus all the books I read, he’d then read.”
As McDonagh talks, his hands dart in and out of his jacket pockets — partly because the garment has recently been dry-cleaned and he keeps finding specks of disintegrated tissues, and partly because he has self-diagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder.
“I’m always moving stuff around. I like to have everything aligned. At one point it was so bad that when I was watching telly and there was a magazine on the floor, it had to be angled towards the telly. Now it’s reduced to turning the key in the door five times before you leave,” he says. “It helps with making films anyway. If you have an obsessive attention to detail and you’re looking at the frame of the monitor and something is striking you as being wrong, you gradually work out what’s throwing it.”
He took this approach to The Guard and has great faith in the finished project. While he took advice and ideas from crew members, he is confident that the finished project is his and doubts if he could give up control of a film again. He would consider directing someone else’s script but he says none of what he gets sent is good enough.
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If he were to rework an “80% good script”, would he be doing what he had hated about the Ned Kelly shoot? This blip of self-doubt is gone as quickly as it arrives. “I just assume I’m a better writer than most people. So I wouldn’t mess up the material,” he says with a good-natured chortle that just about keeps him on the right side of self-confident. c
The Guard is on general release from Friday