EXCLUSIVE UPDATE: I’ve heard from sources that Martin McDonagh has a title ready for his next movie, the one he’ll shoot this summer with In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in the lead roles. The film is titled The Banshees of Inisheer.

PREVIOUS EXCLUSIVE, 8:07 AM: Martin McDonagh’s untitled next film that he set up for world rights at Searchlight Pictures will re-team him with his In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, sources said.

The film is set on a remote Irish isle, and they will play two lifelong friends who find themselves at an impasse when one abruptly ends their relationship with alarming consequences for both of them. It will shoot this summer. Film4 is financing in a deal put together by CAA Media Finance.

The writer-director teamed with those actors and Ralph Fiennes in the McDonagh-scripted 2008 black comedy In Bruges, in which Farrell played a hitman who botches a job and is brought to the picturesque city in Belgium to enjoy himself before he is bumped off by a colleague (Gleeson). Turns out the hitman is suicidal because of the botched hit — a child was killed — and when his buddy halts his suicide attempt and refuses to bump him off, both of the assassins are targeted by their vicious boss (Fiennes). The pic was a big breakout directorial debut for McDonagh.

McDonagh directed his previous film for Searchlight, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which won Oscars for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell.

Blueprint Pictures is backing The Banshees of Inisheer as producer, with Graham Broadbent, Peter Czernin and McDonagh producing, and Diarmuid McKeown, Ben Knight, Daniel Battsek and Ollie Madden the exec producers.

Oscar-winning writer and director Martin McDonagh is reuniting his In Bruges dream team of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson for his new film The Banshees of Inisherin.

The film is due to begin filming in August in Galway and tells the story of a pair of lifelong friends on a remote Irish island who find themselves at an awkward time in their relationship when one of them no longer wants to be friends.

However, in true McDonagh fashion, there will be dark and hilarious consequences to the decision.

This movie has been over 25 years in the making. It was originally supposed to be the third instalment in a series of plays McDonagh dubbed the “Aran Islands Trilogy,” which began with The Cripple of Inishmaan and was followed years later by The Lieutenant of Inishmor. In fact, the idea for The Banshees of Inisheer was conceived in 1994, before any of his other plays had even hit the stage.

In a 2016 interview with The New Yorker, McDonagh revealed that he wrote seven plays in 1994 and all of them were produced except Banshee. When asked why, he said it wasn’t “any good".

He has clearly changed his opinion of the work and is now set to give the story the big screen treatment and he is no doubt hoping Farrell and Gleeson can once again work their magic.

Inside The Banshees of Inisherin: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Martin McDonagh’s Tense, Heartbreaking Reunion
The latest film from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’s McDonagh holds many surprises—and marks a change of pace.

Answers don’t come easy in The Banshees of Inisherin. Take one early incident: The new film from Oscar-winner Martin McDonagh finds Brendan Gleeson slamming his seaside cottage’s front door in Colin Farrell’s face. Why does he do this? Farrell’s character, a simple man by the name of Pádraic, proves increasingly desperate for an explanation; Gleeson’s Colm, supposedly a good friend, remains almost comically withholding. This dance continues for awhile, McDonagh reveling in the tension of the unknown. When Pádraic finally gets his answer, Colm’s delivery is punishing: “I just don’t like you no more.” And off we go.



It’s a seemingly modest setup for McDonagh, a filmmaker known for high-concept genre riffs (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) and emphatic social commentary (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). Yet coming off of Billboards, his biggest cinematic success to date, he had a specific idea for where he should go next: “I wanted to tell a breakup story,” he tells Vanity Fair in his first interview about the new movie. “This is about things getting inexorably worse from a simple, sad starting point.”

The film is still singularly McDonagh: teetering between comedy and tragedy, propelled by wildly colorful dialogue, and underscored by a subtly escalating tension that reveals itself in sudden outbursts. Banshees also represents a kind of homecoming for its writer-director, both literally and figuratively: It’s the first feature McDonagh has shot and set in his native Ireland, and it’s an intimate character study that recalls the early-career plays with which he made his artistic mark.



The film takes place on the fictional island of Inisherin, and is set in 1923, during the Irish Civil War. McDonagh draws poignant contrasts between the sounds of gunfire and killings across the water, and of the wars of words (or lack thereof) developing within the island community. We meet Pádraic as an exceedingly kind man whose entire being is rocked after experiencing Colm’s abrupt, casual cruelty. Life, for him, had been happily defined by his daily 2 p.m. drink at the pub, his miniature pet donkey, Jenny (oh, the cuteness), the familiarity of a place he knows inside and out. But both for Colm and for Pádraic’s witty and grounded sister, Siobhán (Kerry Condon), such simple pleasures prove unfulfilling, untenable. As they turn away from him, and look inward toward themselves and their passions, this gradually goes for Pádraic too.

McDonagh movies are often highlighted by fireworks: Frances McDormand cursing out a bunch of teenagers, Christopher Walken shot to a bloody death in the California desert. In Banshees, with the drama starting at a lower key, extraordinary natural scenery takes over. “I wanted it to be as beautiful as possible,” McDonagh says. “To aim for beauty and for cinema. Because if you heard of a story of two guys grumbling at each other, and you didn’t have the epic kind of beauty, it might get a little tiresome.” He adds, “I’ve seen a lot of U.K. and Irish films that don’t seem to aim for the cinema as their number one choice.”



There’s a personal element to all of it. McDonagh filmed on the islands of Inishmore and Achill, off of Ireland’s west coast, which is near where his parents live in Galway. He’d also visited many of these stunning locations as a child. The mythical quality of the fictional Inisherin, as McDonagh realizes it, is suffused with memory and history. “[Inishmore] has been featured in Irish literature for the last 150 years. It hasn’t really been shown too often in movies—not that part of Ireland,” he says. He also commits to the characters speaking in dialect authentic to the time and place, fully aware Stateside viewers might not catch every word—but not wanting to compromise his wholly Irish vision: “When I’m watching Mean Streets or Goodfellas, I’m hearing 90% of it. I’ll miss some Italian or New York dialogue, every couple of lines—but it doesn't matter. I’m going with it.”

Then there’s the matter of the broader Irish conflict, proceeding at a steady clip as the curious impasse between Pádraic and Colm intensifies. McDonagh was attracted to the war, thematically, because of its unique contours: “The Irish Civil War was between two sides who, a year before, were on the same side and fighting the British and the British Empire,” he says. “The tragedy of that war was that everyone was close friends—and then they were killing each other.”



How things can get even close to that stage between Pádraic and Colm, well, that’s the way of McDonagh—as well as of his two actors, reunited for the first time in over a decade.

“The pendulum swings wide with Brendan,” says Colin Farrell, “from the tenderness that he’s capable of to the godlike wrath that he can exude if needs be. He’s always digging, always asking the big questions.” Farrell and Gleeson previously starred together in McDonagh’s 2008 debut feature, In Bruges, which has found a cult fandom in the years since, with particular love toward the two actors’ absurdist odd-couple pairing. McDonagh always wanted to get the gang back together, and finally had the project for it.

They rehearsed for weeks before filming, just like they did on In Bruges, and found the same comfort and respect for one another instantly back in place. The only (big) departure was the story they were telling. “This is much more difficult terrain,” says McDonagh. “The love was there, like in any broken-down relationship, but it was interesting to have them not have that ease with each other—because they love each other as actors, as people, but they cannot have that onscreen.” McDonagh mined his decades-long relationships with the two Irish stars, tapping into sides of them that haven’t gotten much exposure in movies: “I wanted to make something that someone who likes In Bruges would go with, but that could be a little more, at least at the outset, odder or weirder—and definitely something different.”



Farrell’s wrenching work centers the movie. The actor imbues Banshees with a sweetness that allows him to show arguably more soul than in any past role. It’s gentler and softer, certainly, than what McDonagh asked of him in In Bruges (and his follow-up, Seven Psychopaths). That doesn’t mean things don’t take a dark turn, of course: As Pádraic refuses to heed Colm’s request that he be left alone, things get dangerous, Farrell embodying his character’s loss of innocence and the painful reckoning that follows. (Note for the squeamish: Severed body parts are involved.) Gleeson, meanwhile, brings a characteristic harshness to Colm early on, before the man’s deeper motivations—a fear of mortality, a sense of artistic endeavors unpursued—give way to a richer, trickier performance. The actor credits McDonagh’s script for facilitating that: “He goes into these awful places finally armed with compassion and empathy.”

he Banshees of Inisherin is stuffed with frequent McDonagh collaborators, pushing themselves into new territory. (One notable newcomer is Eternals’ Barry Keoghan, a scene-stealer as a local policeman’s son who comes between Colm and Pádraic.) Carter Burwell’s score skillfully develops a feeling of small-town mystery, then dread, while cinematographer Ben Davis sticks to McDonagh’s mandate for finding sheer beauty throughout. Both, in addition to other craftspeople on the film, also worked on Three Billboards, a movie that shares Banshees’ love for playful writing and lurking sadness but little else.

Kerry Condon played a bit part in Three Billboards, as a receptionist. But in Banshees, she’s revelatory as Siobhán, perhaps the funniest and saddest part of the whole piece. McDonagh, who first cast her in a play more than 20 years ago when she was 18, intended to give the actor (best known as Mike’s daughter-in-law, Stacey, on Better Call Saul) the showcase he felt she’s long deserved: “I don’t think I’d quite seen how brilliant she was onstage really captured in the movies. I wanted to make sure that we did that—and she just blew me away.”



Armed with a cast and crew he knows and loves, making a feature back home for the first time, McDonagh tells me he came into Banshees “more confident” than in his past films. “I [used to] try to make every single decision about every little thing, from costumes to everything, and I think after you’ve made a couple, you realize that some of that is a waste of time,” he says. “You should expend all energy on the things that will really matter in the end.”

The performance of Three Billboards likely aided in the confidence boost too: The movie made over $160 million at the global box office, won acting Oscars for lead Frances McDormand and supporting star Sam Rockwell, and was nominated for best picture and McDonagh’s original screenplay. “I was just overjoyed that it did cross over,” McDonagh says. “My other stuff had been sort of a small, culty, good reaction, but this was the first time when things exploded as it was released.” He even took the backlash in stride. “When the backlash happened, I was like, Okay, if this is still true in 10 or 20 years, whatever, but it felt like I was outside of it,” he says. “And I think the film’s good, and I disagree with those arguments.”

The breakout success means more eyeballs, surely, are on what’s next. But this “breakup story,” as McDonagh calls it, seems designed to defy expectations. “It is my quietest movie,” he acknowledges, even as it builds toward an interrogation of themes familiar to his work—love and hate, beauty and brutality, the senselessness of death. That last one is right there in the movie’s title, teased in symbolic gestures and plot reveals until Banshee’s final moments, in appropriately tragicomic fashion. “It’s just aiming for the truth and hoping for the best,” McDonagh says. One thing’s for sure: He tells it like nobody else.

The Banshees of Inisherin will be released in theaters on October 21, via Searchlight Pictures. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.

Set on a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN follows lifelong friends Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson), who find themselves at an impasse when Colm unexpectedly puts an end to their friendship. A stunned Pádraic, aided by his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) and troubled young islander Dominic (Barry Keoghan), endeavours to repair the relationship, refusing to take no for an answer. But Pádraic's repeated efforts only strengthen his former friend’s resolve and when Colm delivers a desperate ultimatum, events swiftly escalate, with shocking consequences.

Cast: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan