COLIN FARRELL & BRENDAN GLEESON

IRISH WAIL

In the year’s most anticipated cinemetic reunion, In Bruges co-stars Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell play estranged friends in Michael McDonagh’s The Banshees Of Inisherin. They talk to Roe McDermott about travelling back to 1920s Ireland, bullying culture, legacy, family and the intricacies of their own relationship.

The boys are back. Fourteen years after the cultishly beloved dark dramedy In Bruges, writer/director Martin McDonagh and actors Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson return in one of the year’s best films, The Banshees of Inisherin. The highly anticipated and already widely acclaimed movie centres on Colm (Gleeson) and Padraic (Farrell), two friends living on the tiny island of Inisherin in 1923. One day, Colm suddenly announces that he doesn’t like Padraic anymore – and the effects of that sudden declaration not only devastate Padraic, but also ripple across the island.

Exploring friendship, estrangement, grief and the loneliness of this small community against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War, the screenplay is one of McDonagh’s best – intimate, beautifully observed and combining psychological realism with an almost fable-like quality. While Gleeson is always impressive, the film also marks a career highlight for Colin Farrell, whose portrayal of loss and bewilderment is tender and heart-breaking – his eyebrows alone deserve an Oscar.

But for many people, the draw isn’t just the combination of actors and director – it’s the reunion. In Bruges was so beloved by so many cinema fans, and both Gleeson and Farrell are acutely aware and appreciative of the excitement surrounding both their earlier work together and their new release.

“It’s lovely, both to be lumped together with such company and also that people seem to have such an affection for whatever it was Martin created for us to inhabit in In Bruges,” says Farrell, reclining on a sofa in Dublin’s Merrion hotel. “People speak of ‘getting the band back together’ and words like ‘chemistry’ get thrown around. It’s really lovely because it’s not been hard work for us!”

Gleeson and Farrell met in 2007 when Brendan was trying to get his adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-TwoBirds made, but it was when they played an odd couple of hitmen on a weekend away in Belgium that they became fast friends.

“We hit it off at a very basic kind of a level, Gleeson recalls. “There was a similarity of aspiration and approach and just the way we looked at life. We’re very different, but something central was there. There was a kind of shorthand from the beginning. That’s one of the reasons it was such a pleasure to get back together again, the fact that

The Banshees Of Inisherin: (clockwise) Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, Farrell with Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon.

“Martin has gotten to the importance of trust and kinship and friendship in a way that hasn’t really been articulated as being as important as it is.”

we like each other off camera.”

As Farrell and Gleeson speak, they listen attentively to each other, nodding along and interjecting – the easy rapport of friends and colleagues. However, The Banshees Of Inisherin is about two characters with fundamentally different views on life who fall out. Gleeson’s character, Colm, is a philosophical and artistic soul, who plays music and makes beautiful pieces of art. A melancholy figure suddenly aware of his mortality, he believes he needs to focus on leaving behind a legacy of his existence through his creative pursuits. Padraic is a gentle, rambling soul, whose priority is living cheerfully with the people he knows on Inisherin. When Colm decides that Padraic’s banal life and conversation is suddenly incompatible with his own desire for a meaningful existence, the two men fall out, with Colm enforcing distance in increasingly violent and distressing ways. The film addresses something that many people experience but few openly address: a core-shaking estrangement.

“There’s no convention to say, ‘I don’t like you anymore’”, Gleeson observes. “How do you end a friendship? You can’t say, ‘I don’t want to go with you anymore’ because you’re not going with each other, there’s no convention for it and people really struggle. It has huge implications. Martin has gotten to the importance of trust and kinship and friendship in a way that hasn’t really been articulated as being as important as it is. Colm’s creative impulse doesn’t just impact Padraic, it ripples through the island. Everyone suddenly turns on Padraic, and that wasn’t Colm’s intention, he just wanted a bit of space.”

In the film, the chasm between the two men disrupts the delicate balance of the island’s social ecosystem and more disruptions start to occur as disconnection grows and festers.

“The herd instinct in a communal context is often fairly healthy,” says Gleeson, “because we get benefit from others’ well-being and things like that. But then it turns into a pack when it turns around, it becomes something else and dangerous.”

This feels so relevant to modern society, I note – whether it’s politicians who have no answers to systemic problems and so instead decide to turn communities against each other in a competition for support and resources, or on social media, where people feel incredibly isolated, disconnected and anxious - and instead of coming together, engage in tribalism where knocking someone else down is a form of protecting yourself.

“Exactly,” Farrell nods, “it’s a displacement of energy and purpose.”-

The film takes place in 1923, and there are several subtle references to the Civil War taking place on the mainland – a conflict that turned brother against brother, friend against friend, and saw people forming allegiances that they felt deep conviction for, but often cost them their relationships and sometimes their lives. Gleeson and Farrell reveal that Martin McDonagh first spoke to them about this project seven years ago, and in original drafts of the screenplay, the Civil War played a much bigger role.

“It was more intrinsic to the plot,” Gleeson says, “but he decided to make it more about the people. I remember him saying that it was kind of a relief that it’s more intimate and focused on this relationship, because it allows the audience to bring in their own thoughts and ideas and interpretations. And that is the brilliance - the second time you see it, you come back with a different view. The second time I saw this, I said ,‘This is how wars start.’ You think of Ukraine, the Eastern people, you look at the North of Ireland and everything that’s happened all over the world. You think of bosom friends who are suddenly shooting each other.”

Colm’s desire for meaning, to leave behind a piece of music or art that will outlive him, speaks to the idea of legacy. Thinking about their own relationship with art and cinema, what do Colin and Brendan value and want to leave behind them?

“About a year ago,” says Farrell, “I was talking with Henry – the youngest of my two boys, he’s ten - about a recording artist and how much fame they had. And he said, ‘Dad, isn’t it funny, like you’re really famous but imagine that in one hundred years nobody will really know what you did.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you’re dead right! So what does that mean? It means I just enjoy the now. That’s all that means.’ And then we went off. And of course art lives on, and when you make something there’s a chance that it goes out into the world and it informs human beings and it can affect mood and affect experience. But as far as legacy goes, if you just treat the moment with the integrity it deserves, and that it asks of you, then the rest will take care of itself. I love the idea that my son wasn’t one hundred percent right, that even in a hundred years there’ll be one film on a crusty shelf somewhere in somebody’s collection that will stand the test of time. I love that idea.”