By Shanee Edwards.
Calvary, the latest film written and directed by John Michael McDonagh (The Guard), will twist your insides from the opening first line of the film to the brutal and bitter last image. This film is dark and ironic while managing to be pure of heart at the same time, a feat rarely achieved. We sat down with McDonagh to find out why writing a solidly good-hearted protagonist is so much more difficult than writing a jaded or cynical one.
In Calvary, Father James (Brendan Gleeson) is the head of a dwindling Catholic parish in a tiny seaside town in Ireland. During a confession, an anonymous man who’s suffered years of sexual abuse by another priest, declares that he is going to murder Father James in one week’s time. His plan to kill Father James is not because he’s also a corrupt priest, but instead because he is a good, honest one. Someone must pay for the sins of the other priests, particularly the ones who have died without paying any penance is the man’s rationale.
With the feel of an old-style Western like High Noon, the time-lock in Calvary keeps you on the edge of your seat in what isn’t so much of a “who dunnit” as it is a “who’s gonna do it” drama. As we meet various shady characters in the town, the mystery continues to grow.
In person, McDonagh is sturdy, handsome bloke in his mid-forties with a shaved head. Before we begin our chat, the man who calls himself “London-Irish” fixes himself a bourbon with Seven-Up and before declaring he’s “all set up” in a cheery tone.
John Michael McDonagh
Though Calvary is often quirky and darkly comedic, the subject matter is anything but funny. The opening shot of the film sets the camera squarely on Gleeson’s face as he listens to the confession of a man he cannot see. The penitent’s first line of dialogue is, “I first knew the taste of semen when I was seven years old.” The statement is shocking, disgusting and heartbreaking all at once. We asked McDonagh if he always knew that would be the opening line of the film.
“My flippant response is that I can’t compete with Michael Bay (director of the Transformers franchise), in terms of explosions, CGI and budget. But I could compete, in a sense, by having a great actor, really intense dialogue and visuals.”
The actual line of dialogue was inspired by a documentary McDonagh saw many years ago about sexual abuse. “The person didn’t use that exact line, but said something similar. It always stayed with me, I thought it’s so terrible, terrible. I knew I wanted to set up this movie in opposition to The Guard. I wanted to tell people in the first line, you’re not going to see the The Guard 2. Calvary has a similar, black comic edge to the movie but I really wanted to rock people back in their seats. Of course Brendan’s [Gleeson as Father James) response, ‘That’s certainly a startling opening line,’ makes people laugh and then go, ‘oh, should I be laughing?’ so they’re edgy already. I thought, that’s how we’ll set it up, to make it so the audience doesn’t know how the film is going to play out, they don’t know where it’s going to go just based on that first sequence.”
We asked McDonagh why crafting an honest, good-hearted character is so difficult in terms of making him compelling. “I think good people are seen as being passive, they’re also seen as being naïve. I’m a cynical person, but I think we see good people as being genuinely innocent, or not worldly-wise, so I wanted to get away from that. That led me to think, okay, he’s going to be a good person, but he’s going to be someone who led a full life. He’s not somebody who entered the priesthood at 16. He was married, had a child, his wife suffered and died, he’s got alcoholism problems. So that was the main idea, to have a genuinely good man but who also has a moral authority as well because of what he’s experienced. You certainly don’t want someone who’s experienced nothing telling you how you should behave.”
Another powerful character enters the story when Father James’ daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly), arrives for a visit with bandages around her wrists from a recent suicide attempt. McDonagh admits that a lot of the father/daughter scenes were expanded upon once Gleeson had read an early draft. “Brendan wanted the scenes to be more emotional, more moving and I agreed with him. I think I have a tendency to be too detached, too nihilistic.” By expanding the scenes, making them more emotional, McDonagh says there’s a feeling of loss when she gets on the train to return home.
Brendan Gleeson and Kelly Reilly
“That’s what led me to create the scene with the phone call between them. Visually, behind her is modernity, Dublin, and behind him is a crumbling ruin. So that wasn’t in the original draft and it’s now one of my favorite scenes.”
About writing interesting female roles, McDonagh admits it’s a challenge for most writers with an XY chromosome. “I think a failure of a lot of male writers is that the write a lot of male characters, so I’m always trying to find other female characters within a script.”
McDonagh is self-taught when it comes to screenwriting. His first writing attempts were with five separate novels, each one getting rejected. He remembers hearing the “plop” on his doorstep every time one got returned. “It’s sort of depressing, because you go, oh…I want to be a writer but I’m failing. But I knew I couldn’t do a nine-to-five job, I tried to do it, but I couldn’t. So I thought I have to find some other way out.”
He and his brother Martin (writer/director of In Bruges) would watch old movies everyday in their house like Barbara Stanwyck flicks and the Australian New Wave films on Channel 4. “I thought, okay. I’ll get a book and find out how you format a screenplay. So I wrote a screenplay and in comparison to the novels, I got immediate response. I realized maybe I have a facility for writing screenplays.”
While the first two screenplays he wrote got positive responses, he claims, “It was still a lot of work. I still persevered a long, long time before I had a film get made.”
Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle in The Guard
The story for Calvary was conceived in a pub in Galway during a late night conversation with Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle just before they finished shooting The Guard. “I was saying I want this idea about a good man and possibly a good priest and Brendan said, ‘I had a great mentor when I was young who was a priest.’ And I said, okay let’s do that, because they’re probably going to make loads of movies about bad priests. My thing with writing is to look at whatever they’re making in America and I try to write the exact opposite.”
Another unexpected technique that McDonagh likes to employ while shooting is to use storyboards. “It helps me in two ways. It takes me quite a long time because I’m quite obsessive about drawing them, but it helps me with the shoot. I also find that as I’m going through it, it helps me refine the shooting script. As I do the storyboards, I realize there are certain sections of the scene I no longer need, so it just tightens up the script.”
As a first-time filmmaker making The Guard, it really helped him feel prepared. “I assumed all directors did that. It was only when the actors said they found it unusual that I realized they didn’t. But I think the less money you’ve got, the more prepared you should be. To not be as prepared as you can be on a low budget film is lazy.”
One thing he and his DP Larry Smith both agree on is their hatred of TV-style coverage. “To me it implies that you don’t know the meaning of the scene. If you’re shooting it from every angle, it means you have no idea what you’re trying to say at all.”
Brendan Gleeson and Chris Dowd
Another gem in the film is the dramatic performance by Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids). We asked McDonagh how the normally funny actor made his way into this drama. “Chris O’Dowd the was host of the British Independent Film Awards, which is meant to be a balance to the BAFTAs. Chris was drinking through the course of the show and he was saying, ‘Oh, The Guard, what an amazing movie. It was just missing one great Irish actor,’ meaning himself. But as the night went on, he got more and more acerbic. When the show finished, my wife turned to me and said, ‘What about him for the guy?’ At that point, we hadn’t sent the script out to anybody. We sent the script to him and he read it within 24-hours, set up a meeting within 48-hours and within 72-hours, he agreed to do it. I don’t expect that in America actors get back to you in three days.” No, John Michael, they don’t.
John Michael McDonagh was kind enough to share two of his storyboards with Creative Screenwriting, which appear below.
