Martin McDonagh Has a Vision for Hope. It's Not for the Faint of Heart.

David Marchese begins by describing Wild Horse Nine as a film about two CIA agents, played by Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich, sent to destabilize Chile’s democracy after Salvador Allende’s election. The film draws on the real American-backed effort against Chile’s democratically elected government and its aftermath under Augusto Pinochet. Marchese asks how McDonagh understands America’s place in the world when public debate often reduces it to “a force for good” or “a force for bad.” McDonagh says he is currently bewildered about what America stands for. He grew up in the United Kingdom and says children across the West were taught a simple moral story: the CIA and America were the good guys, while the KGB and Russia were the bad guys. Learning more about the CIA’s role in Chile—including helping overthrow a democratic government that was followed by 15 years of fascist horrors—made him feel that the West’s moral outlook had not been fully explained. He says he and Malkovich did not discuss politics much, but both share a questioning, disbelieving perspective. McDonagh emphasizes that even when a character’s views overlap with his own, his characters are not mouthpieces: he tries to treat opposing views fairly and let characters become dangerous and unpredictable.

Marchese points to recurring bleak statements in McDonagh’s work, including Wild Horse Nine’s “life is sad, everything is sad” and The Pillowman’s “the world’s a pile of shit,” and asks whether they reflect McDonagh’s own worldview. McDonagh rejects that reading. He says such lines are often setups for jokes spoken by tough, unpleasant characters, not expressions of his personal beliefs. Although his writing can be dark, he experiences the process as joyful because of the jokes, performances, and beauty of the films. He compares this response to Leonard Cohen: what others call depressing, he finds beautiful and hopeful. McDonagh says making art is itself hopeful, especially when audiences laugh and learn something about subjects such as Chile or Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. He agrees that his work is provocative and sometimes designed to produce recoil, but says it is not intentionally offensive. He distinguishes outrageousness—which can delight an audience by presenting an unfamiliar idea—from offense, which deliberately tries to hurt or attack the audience. He illustrates the distinction with a Wild Horse Nine scene in which Malkovich’s character claims that liberal or “gay countries” make the best cheeses and links democracy, homosexuality, and cheese quality. McDonagh calls the scene naughty and outrageous, but says the large laughs it gets do not make it automatically offensive.

McDonagh tells Marchese that debates over offense and political correctness have become worse, particularly over the last decade. He has been asked to change words in plays written 25 or 30 years earlier because audiences now object to language that was not challenged at the time. His position is that racist characters may need to use racist language if the point is to portray their racism truthfully, and that people who dislike a play should choose not to stage it rather than rewrite it decades later. He says the words in question were not the N-word, but softer language that could still be considered racist or offensive. Marchese raises criticism from Hilton Als of A Behanding in Spokane and Wesley Morris’s criticism of Three Billboards, including Morris’s view that a character’s use of the N-word was glib. McDonagh says he reconsidered the language in the play Als discussed and would take more care in future work, while disagreeing more strongly with the Three Billboards criticism because he saw that film as offering a redemption different from the one Morris perceived. On violence, he says critics have also called his work gratuitous. He was raised on English plays consisting largely of people drinking tea and wanted theater to be as exciting as cinema, including the possibility of violence, but says it should have a moral dimension. He also believes his work has become less violent: apart from the fingers in The Banshees of Inisherin, he says there is very little violence, and he has tried to question rather than celebrate gun violence.

Marchese connects Wild Horse Nine and The Banshees of Inisherin through characters concerned with what their lives will leave behind. McDonagh says each work is an attempt to add something good to his body of work, and that leaving behind good films can provide a route to happiness. He prefers film partly because theater disappears after its run: he cannot simply show someone the beauty of The Beauty Queen of Leenane or The Pillowman as they existed onstage, whereas films remain available. He wants his work to contain strong acting, funny moments, historical truth, or an underexplored emotional subject. He describes Wild Horse Nine as the middle of a loving male relationship, unlike Banshees, which showed the end of one. Rockwell and Malkovich’s characters bicker like an old married couple but retain a fundamental love in every scene. McDonagh says his male friendships are deep, sad, open, and gentle—qualities culture more readily acknowledges in female friendships—and he wanted the film to show that rather than offer an empty “buddy movie.” Marchese then describes the suicide of his own best friend and his continuing uncertainty over his ethical responsibility, including how much blame belongs to his friend and how much reflects mental illness and failures in care. McDonagh does not offer a solution, but says this kind of difficult ethical conversation is the sort of material he tries to explore.

McDonagh explains that he lost his Catholic faith around age 12 while beginning to listen to punk rock, especially The Clash. He says The Clash gave a working-class child a way to question everything and imagine a life beyond a factory, office, or other predetermined future. Their criticism of governments naturally led him to question the Catholic Church as well. He has not regained his faith, though he retains some moral ideas drawn from the stories of Jesus, and says he has become increasingly anti-religious because he sees fundamentalism as a worsening global problem, including its effects on women’s rights. He acknowledges that his early public image—a confrontational, anti-theater punk figure who once told Sean Connery to “fuck off” at an awards event—was partly cultivated. He was shy but did not want interviews with playwrights to sound dull, so he adopted exaggerated claims such as saying a play was the best anyone would see for ten years. His underlying circumstances were much darker than the swagger suggested: he left school at 16, had little money, few prospects, and wrote while taking mundane jobs or living on unemployment benefits. At 24, his first play reached the West End, then Off Broadway and Broadway, taking him from unemployed and poor to a Broadway run within a year. He says Wild Horse Nine is the first film that might make Joe Strummer proud because of its anger and political viewpoint, though his younger self would criticize his wealth and complacency.

In the second interview, Marchese asks why the new film is called Wild Horse Nine. McDonagh refuses to explain the “nine,” saying audiences might discover its meaning on a third viewing—or that he may simply not know. He says his titles are usually peculiar, vaguely poetic, and not designed by Hollywood: The Banshees of Inisherin, In Bruges, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri all resist simple marketing, though Three Billboards was his most successful. The original title was Wild Horse Nine, Easter Island, which he agrees was worse. He cannot precisely define his dialogue style, but identifies heightened theatricality, repetition, lines that sound quotable, and a mixture of poetic language with how people actually speak. He names Harold Pinter and David Mamet as influences. Marchese also suggests Quentin Tarantino’s influence through sudden violence; McDonagh says Tarantino may have influenced his early writing, but he no longer sees the work as similar and is trying to move away from the coolness and gratuitousness of cinematic violence. McDonagh calls Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag “game-changing” and says Fleabag’s second season taught him about love’s importance and the beauty of reaching it. He admits that awards season would have seemed irrelevant to his punk-rock younger self, but now he enjoys tracking the changing odds and contenders. He will not alter his work to make it Oscar-friendly, yet he finds the awards race fun because filmmaking and the Oscars are both worlds he never expected to enter.

Marchese returns to the film’s skeptical view of political action. In Wild Horse Nine, Malkovich’s character mocks a young left-wing student’s plan to attend a march and argues that power and violence accomplish more than protest. Marchese asks whether McDonagh’s belief in art or Malkovich’s character’s cynicism is closer to the truth. McDonagh gives a bleak answer: art may change things, but murder has probably changed more things. He adds that he is not going to murder anyone, so he has to continue trying through art. Marchese then identifies a counterargument within the film itself: Chilean activist and folk singer Victor Jara was targeted and killed by the Pinochet regime, suggesting that oppressive governments recognize the power of art. McDonagh agrees. Pinochet’s regime is gone, while Jara’s songs remain. He says art may not directly change a particular politician or immediately alter society, but the world is better because of the poems, books, films, paintings, and music people love. Art becomes a new piece of beauty in the world, and that is not merely wishful thinking. The interview ends with McDonagh joking that the conversation felt like therapy. He says it left him wondering whether he is doing enough to help, but returns to filmmaking as the action available to him: a film can communicate a political viewpoint to millions, even if no one can prove in advance whether it will change anything.