Writer/director Martin McDonagh is keenly aware of how many minutes’ standing ovation his latest film got at the premiere the previous evening at the Venice Film Festival. “Fifteen. But who’s counting?” he says over a coffee in the swish Excelsior Hotel on the Venice Lido. It’s not that McDonagh values his work by such a metric, but it’s become an inescapable festival measure of the commercial and critical potential of films when they play outside in the ‘real’ world - often indicating which movies will be included in the awards conversation at the end of the year.
Not that McDonagh needs a cinema of applause to tell him whether his work is great; his latest, is a spiritual sequel to modern classic and follows the triumph of It’s the story of two friends in 1923 Ireland - amiable Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and grumpy Colm (Brendan Gleeson) - whose relationship spirals from pub banter to violent one-upmanship (fingers snipped off with shears) when Colm decides one day he no longer wants to be mates. The film received rapturous reviews at Venice as much stars. McDonagh’s first film after a series of well-received plays, created a brotherhood in Farrell, Gleeson and McDonagh, and they had remained friends years after the project.
