McDonagh back for more with 'The Guard'

John Michael McDonagh at the premiere of 'The Guard'. Photo / AP

John Michael McDonagh and his playwright brother Martin are about as different as chalk and cheese. When I had met Martin during his promotional rounds for 2008's In Bruges (starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson), he had barely cracked a smile. Yet his directing debut had been one of the funniest and most poignant crime capers ever made.

"He's funnier on the page than he is in real life," admits his elder less famous brother, who today wears a blue and white checked shirt and a pink tie. "I like to think I've got more personality. Martin's a bit more monosyllabic."

There's no doubting that McDonagh, a screenwriter best known for Gregor Jordan's Australian movie, Ned Kelly, has a broad sense of humour which we can see in his directing debut, the black comedy, The Guard. For the first time in a while, Gleeson (The General, Mad-Eye Moody from the Harry Potter series) plays the undisputed lead as Sergeant Gerry Boyle, an irascible maverick Connemara cop who takes on an international drug syndicate together with straight-laced FBI agent (Don Cheadle).

Just don't ask Gleeson, who also appeared in Martin's Oscar-winning short film, Six Shooter, to compare the directing brothers.

"If you think I am going to get in between two brothers, you have another thing coming!" he protests vehemently in his distinctive brogue. "They have different voices. Martin has a slightly higher one, ha ha! They both are extraordinarily meticulous with regards to the words."

John Michael admits a penchant for certain cinematic masters. "I don't know if it shows in the movie but beforehand I watched a lot of John Ford movies, like his cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache, Rio Grande and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Ford's family were from Spiddal in County Galway where the movie is set. Also I'm a big fan of Preston Sturges who used good character actors and a lot of witty dialogue."

Likewise he says that Ned Kelly, which starred Heath Ledger as the Australian bushranger, was meant to be an homage to Terrence Malick and Sam Peckinpah. "It ended up as an average studio biopic. Apparently a lot of 13 year-old girls were keen on it, but that wasn't my intention when I wrote it. They probably needed more money. It was budgeted incorrectly and there were sequences that were gone three weeks before shooting."

McDonagh openly expresses rancour for Jordan. "There are certain directors who are threatened when anyone comes up with a good idea because they're insecure egomaniacs or whatever, so they dismiss it and he's one of those people. The movie was not meant to be as humourless as it came across in the end."

So how did he come up with the character of the guard?

"All that bitterness and anger from Ned Kelly I put into The Guard!" he bellows, clearly joking, while obviously possessing a similar sense of humour to the character. "So I am the guard basically; I am that person who hates everybody. He's very bitter and disappointed in everybody and he's pretending to be stupid but he's not. Some people don't get it. Some people think he's racist but he's only saying things to deliberately provoke them. He knows those cops in the conference rooms are racists and his way of judging them is by getting a reaction."

Although McDonagh had met Gleeson at the Sundance premiere of In Bruges, he didn't write the screenplay with the actor in mind. "Once it was written it was difficult to see anyone else playing that part. If he said no I don't know who else could have done it. When British actors do Irish accents they're appalling. And Brendan does everything: the comedy, the melancholy. It all comes across in his face."

Gleeson welcomed the chance to play such an all-encompassing lead. "I loved the challenge of working the dynamic of the performance when portraying such a contradictory character. I came to realise how many lies we tell at home just for a laugh. The kind of lie Boyle tells, he just kind of spins people around and then he irritates them a little bit too. I think essentially what it is, is about taking and skinning the onion and seeing if there is integrity at the centre of this person or not. Is all the political correctness just to cover over a massive bigotry in some other direction?"

Next year McDonagh hopes to make another film with Gleeson. "The post production went on for so long with this film that I actually wrote another film in the meantime. It's about a good priest who's tormented by his community. It's called Calvary and is set in Galway where my father's from and the next one will be set in Sligo where my mother's from - and she's very happy about that. She's already telling everybody."

Some of the most poignant scenes in the film, where we truly discover Boyle's heart, take place with his feisty mother. "I wouldn't say my own mother swears as much as Eileen Boyle (she's played by the formidable Fionnula Flanagan from Lost) but she's 65 and is quite a robust woman who lets you know what her views are." As of course does her son.

Ultimately it's curious that the McDonagh brothers (Martin is considered one of the most important living Irish playwrights) work principally with Irish material.

"I think for me it's a way of differentiating yourself from the UK films," says John Michael. "I don't find that there's a lot going on in Irish cinema. Basically if you make one good Irish film you're right at the top because there's no one else. Whereas in Britain there are still a few hanging around who are quite good. Other screenplays I'd written aren't set in Ireland but they never got made."

Interestingly Martin is currently preparing Seven Psychopaths, an American dog kidnapping comedy starring Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken and the pooch-loving Mickey Rourke.

"He is going for the big time," admits John Michael, who like his brother loved the experience of directing. "Making films is often like having a baby. You forget the pain you had going through it and afterwards you only remember the kid-especially if it turned out to be a good kid. And then you go back for more."

-TimeOut