While British writer-director Martin McDonagh, a seasoned and well-known theater director, showed incredible promise with “In Bruges” and especially 2012’s underseen “Seven Psychopaths,” it’s safe to say that his Oscar-nominated 2017 film “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri” catapulted him to a mainstream he was not overly familiar with — nor, I bet, that he really wanted to get cozy with.
Going back and forth between comedy and drama, “Three Billboards” was an unpredictable ride, mixing both dark comedy and drama, accompanied by the kind of complex characters only McDonagh could invent. Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell both won Oscars. Alas, his next movie was surely going to grant him new freedoms to tell whatever story he’d like to splatter on-screen.
According to Variety, McDonagh has teamed up with Searchlight Pictures and Film4 on a new untitled feature which hopes to be in production later in the year. Meanwhile, Deadline is reporting that the untitled film will star Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who both worked with McDonagh on the Oscar-nominated film, “In Bruges.” The camaraderie Gleeson and Farrell had in ‘Bruges’ was infectious, chances are they will likely yet again have that chemistry for this new film which is said to follow two friends who live on a remote Irish isle and whose relationship is turned upside down after one of them abruptly ends the friendship, which results in “alarming circumstances for both.”
McDonagh’s last three features all came within a wide enough span of each other (2008’s “In Bruges,” 2012’s “Seven Psychopaths,” 2017’s “Three Billboards.”) If the timeline sticks then a 2021 release is all but assured, which would mean that this latest McDonagh endeavor would be released 4 years after ‘Three Billboards.’ The man works at his own pace.
His reasoning is simple: Cregger sees himself first and foremost as a writer, and he has little interest in shaping stories around the predetermined “data points” that come with established IP.