I went to Bruges for a weekend away from London. I was supposed to be meeting a girl there the next day. It was a tentative arrangement. From the moment I saw the town, I thought, 'This place is just so cinematic, so gorgeous.' Every corner seemed to offer a new image.

Martin McDonagh

Martin McDonagh

Mom Men Age

I fell into the theatre because I felt I was doing it well, and I stuck to it for the same reason.

Martin McDonagh

Well Use Us

I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.

Martin McDonagh

Time Wit Way

With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.

Martin McDonagh

Age You Wright

Ireland was an idyllic place for us as children. We had all these cousins and all this green countryside. Given what I've written about rural Ireland, my memories of it are all blue skies and endless play.

Martin McDonagh

Written Us UN

I can go anywhere. In fact, for 'Three Billboards,' I was just getting on trains around America. I wrote everywhere from New York to New Mexico. I always write with pencil and paper.

Martin McDonagh

York Wrote Write

There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies. See, I always suspect characters who are painted as lovely, decent human beings. I would always question where the darkness lies.

Martin McDonagh

Mom Men Love

'Beauty Queen' will always be a favourite because I think it's a really tight play, and when it's done right, there is a sadness to it that I love.

Martin McDonagh

Sad Love Will

I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.

Martin McDonagh

Work Time Write

I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.

Martin McDonagh

Work Time Good

All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.

Martin McDonagh

Work Sad T

Plays were really my last option. The reason I didn't write plays initially was because I thought theatre was the worst of all the art forms.

Martin McDonagh

Art Write Worst

I think as a writer you never have to flee from fame because you're not that visible in the first place, but, after the Broadway success of 'Beauty Queen,' people were coming up to me all the time, and I wasn't really prepared for that level of attention.

Martin McDonagh

Time Success You

I don't feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don't feel either. And, in another way, of course, I'm both.

Martin McDonagh

Way Use Us

Though it may not seem like it, I never try to write about a place, per se; it's always, first and last, about story. Story is everything. Story and a bit of attitude.

Martin McDonagh

Attitude Write Ways

I never, ever drink while writing. Never have from the start, and I'm happy that I never have to. A lot of my stuff is plot-driven and mathematical, and I think you need a clean and sober mind to pin down the logistics of that.

Martin McDonagh

Art You Writing

I hope there's some kind of morality in all my work.

Martin McDonagh

Work Hope T

As a kid, as a poor-ish, working-class kid, even visiting America seemed like an impossible dream. Every time I ever went anywhere in America, it always felt cinematic and dreamlike and like a movie from the '70s or something.

Martin McDonagh

Work Time Working-Class

I can't stand up in front of people. It just fills me with horror.

Martin McDonagh

Wit Us Up

The fact that ticket prices are way too expensive, and there's only one bunch of people going to see Broadway shows, is something I've never liked.

Martin McDonagh

I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.

Martin McDonagh

I never feel like a smug or a smart-alec film director, and there are plenty of those around.

Martin McDonagh

I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.

Martin McDonagh

I pick and choose what I want to do at any given time, and what not to do, importantly. My agents, I won't hear about any offers or options.

Martin McDonagh

I seldom feel comfortable in a theatre. I always feel like I own a cinema. I feel equally happy in an empty one as a full one. Probably happier in an empty one!

Martin McDonagh

My plays are always pushing towards cinema anyway. They're down and dirty, real and more fun.

Martin McDonagh

It's like two years straight out of your life doing a film. It's very enjoyable, especially working with the guys, but I kind of like the idea of traveling and growing, and developing as a writer and as a filmmaker.

Martin McDonagh

When you've got good actors, they're going to come up with good stuff, but you're never quite sure how the dynamics are going to work between them.

Martin McDonagh

I realize that I am never going to grow up.

Martin McDonagh

Dublin people think they are the center of the world and the center of Ireland. And they don't realize that people have to leave Ireland to get work, and they look down on people who do.

Martin McDonagh

Theatre was an art form that I didn't really respect, and because I wanted to shake it up and do different things on stage, I was able to combine all the things I'd learnt through writing on my own.

Martin McDonagh

When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.

Martin McDonagh

'Pulp Fiction' is an amazing film, and I haven't made one nearly as good.

Martin McDonagh

My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I've never been to.

Martin McDonagh

I'd love to do something like 'A Canterbury Tale,' because I love the English language.

Martin McDonagh

I don't write all the time. But if I'm writing something, I'll just bang into it every day until it's finished. I write pretty quickly.

Martin McDonagh

I never really tell anyone what I'm writing beforehand because I usually don't know what it will be.

Martin McDonagh

I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.

Martin McDonagh

I'm not really into the fame side of things, so I'm very happy with making a film every four years or so.

Martin McDonagh

I loved 'The Master' a lot. I'm not going to get to work with Daniel Day-Lewis, but Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best around, I think.

Martin McDonagh

I've learned not to be such a show-off and to have a bit more empathy with humanity. Or at least to fake that.

Martin McDonagh

When I heard the Pogues, I connected with the songs immediately, but it was also the first time I didn't reject out of hand the kind of music that my parents had always tried to push on to us when we were growing up.

Martin McDonagh

I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.

Martin McDonagh

I don't find it easy for me to talk about me.

Martin McDonagh

I never lie in interviews.

Martin McDonagh

When I started out, I was very vociferously against theatre or what I saw theatre as being, so I tried to make my plays the opposite of that - something a bit more cinematic. I'm a film kid, so I'll never have the same love of theatre as I do of movies. It's just the way I was brought up.

Martin McDonagh

Everything went perfectly on 'In Bruges.' It was constant warfare, but I won all the battles and was really happy working with the actors and everything on the film.

Martin McDonagh

I probably haven't had enough gay characters in my stuff. When you're writing something, you're thinking, 'Why couldn't this person be black, white, gay?'

Martin McDonagh

There's no point in me meeting with a bunch of producers or studios, because I'll write my own scripts in my own time.

Martin McDonagh