Anna Daniels
Three years after he shook up Hollywood and swept Oscar season with his 2017 hit Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, director Martin McDonagh is heading back home for his next film. In more ways than one: The British-Irish director’s next film, which will take place in his native Ireland, will reunite McDonagh with his In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. The film will follow two lifelong friends in Ireland whose friendship comes to an abrupt halt.
Variety reports that McDonagh has set up his next project under Searchlight Pictures and the U.K.-based Film4, reuniting him with the companies that helped bring Three Billboards to the big screen. According to a follow-up report from Deadline, McDonagh’s next movie will be titled The Banshees of Inisheer and will star his In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in a film “about a friendship gone sour in Ireland.” Here is the description of the film, per Variety:
The movie follows two lifelong pals on a remote Irish isle. At an impasse, one abruptly ends the friendship, resulting in alarming consequences for both.
A cast has not been finalized yet for McDonagh’s film, but production is reportedly set to begin this year with the film reportedly receiving a budget of $20 million. It will be a homecoming of sorts for McDonagh, whose last two films have been set in the U.S. McDonagh hasn’t made a film set in his homeland of Ireland since In Bruges, which was admittedly mostly set in Bruges, Belgium.
But this Irish setting is some cause for excitement — some of the criticism lobbied against the polarizing seven-time Oscar nominee Three Billboards was that McDonagh was tackling markedly American issues from a European perspective. Love or hate Three Billboards, McDonagh’s best film is still his splashy directorial debut In Bruges, which has always felt like his most personal and assured movie. That The Banshees of Inisheer will reunite Farrell and Gleeson, whose crotchety chemistry was one of the delights of In Bruges, is just icing on the cake.
McDonagh will serve as writer and director for The Banshees of Inisheer, and produce with Graham Broadbent and Peter Czernin through their Blueprint Pictures. Diarmuid McKeown, Ben Knight, Daniel Battsek, and Ollie Madden will executive produce. Searchlight has worldwide distribution rights on the project.
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