McDonagh On “Three Billboards” Backlash

04/10/2022 00:54

“In Bruges” filmmaker Martin McDonagh has been scoring rave reviews on the Fall film festival circuit in recent weeks for his Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson-led dark comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin”. The new film follows on from his last directorial outing “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” which also scored critical acclaim in Venice, but subsequently hit choppier waters with regular reviewers and prompted a backlash over its sympathetic approach to its racist cop character played by Sam Rockwell. Rockwell won the best actor Oscar for his performance, only intensifying the criticism. Speaking with The Guardian recently, McDonagh says he understands where the talk has come from, and it hurt him to hear it: “I could see where that debate could come from, but I thought it was not seeing what I see in the film. The bait in the whole idea was: what’s a villain and what’s a hero? But I don’t know. Basically, if someone’s calling your film racist, and you wrote and directed it, that means they’re calling you a racist. And I’ve always been so anti-that, that, yes, it’s hurtful. No one wants to be called that.” He’s taken one issue with a review for ‘Banshee’ that called it a return to form after the “gross misstep” of ‘Billboards’ to which he asks: “Was it that bad?”. McDonagh still stands by the various characters of his works and refuses to let theater companies censor his plays: “Put a warning in the program notes, sure, but let the character be who they are. Trust your audience to have the intelligence to know I’m not using these words. Characters need to be whatever they need to be. If they’re nice, fine. If they’re homophobic, you’ve got to know it’s the character. If there are racist words, then that’s to show an audience that this part of Ireland is racist. Or we’re going in a direction of a bland, inoffensive nothingness.” Searchlight Pictures will release “The Banshees of Inisherin” in theatres October 21st. The post McDonagh On “Three Billboards” Backlash appeared first on Dark Horizons.