by Gill Pringle
Speaking with Colin Farrell ahead of the multiple guild nominations for Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, his eyes are partly on the World Cup playing on his TV and partly on our zoom chat.
“I’m not sure anyone will ever accuse Martin of being guilty of creating Oscar bait. There are a few films I’ve seen in the last year, that I watched and go. . .” grins the actor making a funny trumpeting noise. “There’s a sincerity in what Martin does, and we’re just trying to match that sincerity and authenticity when we go to work.”
The relationship between Farrell, now 46, and his co-star Gleeson, now 67, was cemented in their first screen pairing twelve years ago, In Bruges, McDonagh’s directorial debut. It wasn’t a far stretch to reimagine them as fast friends whose friendship inexplicably reaches an abrupt end; the premise behind The Banshees of Inisherin.
Set in 1923, when Civil War was raging in Ireland, the fictional island of Inisherin is unaffected by the tension across the water on the mainland.
“Cannon roars and gunfire can be heard some nights and so we’re very aware on the island that there’s a civil war taking place,” says Farrell. “But we’re also kind of shielded from it by virtue of being out of the way and a coastal outpost.”
The Irish Civil War waged between 1922 and 1923, following the War of Independence and the establishment of the Irish Free State, which created an entity in one half of the country that was separate from the United Kingdom. Two opposing groups, the pro Anglo-Irish Treaty provisional government, and the anti-treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA), fought for dominance.
Locals on Inisherin, however, could care less. “It’s funny that the people on the island don’t seem to want to even address what’s going on in the mainland,” says co-star Kerry Condon. “They’re not bothered about the war. It’s like they’re a separate little country; a separate little everything.”
However, what takes place on Inisherin – the division between Farrell’s Pádraic and Gleeson’s Colm, and the growing rifts with other people on the island – mirrors what is happening on the mainland.
“There are allegorical aspects to the division between these two men and the division between both sides in the Irish Civil War,” says McDonagh. “It’s a story where a tiny little war is waging between two fellows at the same time as a bigger one is happening over there.”
Farrell has friendship foremost on his mind, as we discuss what the end of a friendship might look like.
He hopes that he is a good friend in his own life. “I suppose technology helps with that. I don’t have any social media, and as much as I’m not a fan of that, I do, of course, have a cell phone and I text and email. I’m not much of a talker on the phone, to the consternation of certain people in my life at times. But I can have the odd phone call, but usually texts. Friends from home; people who’ve meant a lot to me all my life – and I have a couple of friends that I’ve known since I was born, literally from around the corner – and then the majority of my old friends from Dublin, are people that I’ve been housed with since I was 14 or so. We’re all still in each others’ lives,” he says.
“These are friendships that don’t need to be constantly watered. They can go and live their lives and do other things and I go do my things. There’s been periods where we haven’t seen each other for 18 months other than a texts, but as soon as we see each other we pick up where we left off.
“There’s a depth of friendship that I’m lucky enough to have in my life with a few people that hasn’t fallen foul of the distances I travel. My big concern is, you have friends and family, but you just have to check in and the people who are really close to me in my life understand, to a certain degree, the nature of travel and the nature of distance and focus on that I get lost when I go off to work. I might not be in communication for the first month and then once I get up and running and feel some comfort in the job and there’s a rhythm, I may open up to communication again a bit. But there’s no rule,” says the father-of-two who mainly lives in Los Angeles where his sons live.
Farrell is fascinated by the priorities families and friends play in the life of an artist, quoting Orson Welles’ own thoughts on the subject, mimicking the legendary filmmaker’s accent as he asks McDonagh and Gleeson if they ever saw an old Welles interview that he sent them both.
“I found this thing about Orson Welles talking about friendship and how he always put friendship before art. It’s brilliant. He says art is way down the pecking order. He’s asked, have you ever put friends in films? Yes. Have you ever put friends in films for the wrong parts? Yes. Have you ever regretted it? Yes. Would you do it again? Absolutely. But I think the people that mean a lot to me, know that they mean more to me than any of the films or work that I do. And so, if I do go missing for a while with work, they know that I’m just focused on one at a time,” he says.
Two decades Farrell’s senior, Gleeson is proud to see how his friend’s artistic career has progressed.
“Going back to all the stuff that he’s done since Terrence Malick [2005’s The New World], it’s like watching somebody emerge. And his trajectory was so explosive. It was almost like the Harry Potter years, where you watch these kids grow up within the film – and you watch this young man sort of emerge and be honest with you. I think there’s a place where his craftsmanship and his honesty has always been there and his accessibility to the emotional side of things. But just watching him strip away, more and more, and his heart has always been massive. And I just find it, in the last couple of years, the choices that he’s been making, particularly since In Bruges have always been exploratory and incredibly brave and so it’s an artistic journey that he’s on,” says Gleeson.
The older actor agrees that the breakdown of the relationship between their Inisherin screen characters could never have been so powerful had their own real life relationship not been so strong.
“We spoke about it before and, certainly our job is to make each other’s lines as difficult as possible to say, because I’m looking at somebody whose heart is visibly breaking and trying to tell him that there’s no place in my life for him anymore. And there was a degree of honesty that we shared across that, because you don’t actually see us as friends prior. It had to come from what was communicated when the sundering was happening. I can still remember every frame, every altercation and how difficult it was to get these lines out,” says Gleeson.
If Farrell’s Pádraic aches from the pain of his lost friendship then, likewise, his character is emotionally attached to his miniature donkey, Jenny.
As much as he tries to be flippant, Farrell cannot disguise his emotions regarding his adorable four-legged co-star and the film’s unsung hero.
“I was well fond of her. She was very sweet and as cute as a button. Film sets can be a very overwhelming place because everyone has a particular purpose. I’m not sure that Jenny knew we were on a film set, as much as I told her,” he smiles. “She had a support donkey called Rosie so, if Jenny got a bit nervous, they’d bring Rosie in and then Jenny would see Rosie and she’d be alright and do the scene.
“The best thing is that there’s not too much stage parenting involved, and animals are totally honest. When Jenny was in the middle of a scene, she’d get up and she’d fucking go, and that’d be the end of it. Cut! Okay. What do we do? And then the trainer came in and spent 20 minutes with her and Martin and everyone were incredibly patient. There was no pressure. There was no ‘Come on, get her to do it’.
“It was her first film and I think it might be her last one. She shot through the cinematic stratosphere. One and done, as they say, she’s out to pasture,” he says.
Between Jerry Skolimowski’s EO and McDonagh’s Banshees, this must surely be the first time in award history where two donkeys have vied for award glory.
The Banshees of Inisherin is in cinemas now
