McDonagh wrote arresting comedy ‘The Guard’ in a mere thirteen days

Date Published: {J}

I don’t really like writing at all,” says screen writer and director John Michael McDonagh, whose latest film The Guard, shot in Galway, is one of the highlights of this year’s Film Fleadh.

The Guard which opened on Wednesday at the Fleadh and goes on general release from this Thursday, is the story of an anarchic West of Ireland garda (Brendan Gleeson) who joins forces with a straitlaced FBI agent (Don Cheadle) to tackle an international drug running gang.

For a man who doesn’t like writing, John McDonagh is managing to do pretty well, with The Guard winning praise at film festivals worldwide since it premiered at America’s prestigious Sundance Festival in January. And as a result of that screening Sony acquired the rights for North and South America.

But success did not come quickly to John, who was born in London to a Galway father and an Irish mother.

He left school in his teens and started writing “really bad novels”.

“At 24 I switched from writing novels to screenplays and found I was good at that,” he says, adding that screenplays are mostly about character and dialogue, which play to his strengths.

“A novel is about 300 pages and requires a lot of descriptions. I’m a bit OCD so I’d get obsessed at getting the right word. With screenplays there should be about 90-120 pages and I found that mine always came out at the correct length.”

It was like he had an instinct for it. Mind you, he had a lot of research under his belt, most of which involved sitting on the couch at home watching films with his younger brother Martin, who also became a screenwriter after gaining fame as a dramatist.

“From 19 to 24 I didn’t go out that much. I’d terrible acne so I wasn’t inclined to go out,” says John, the older brother by three years.

In addition to the troublesome acne, it was a question of money as the brothers were on the dole, he explains.

“At an economic level, you don’t have much money on the dole. I remember manuscripts flopping through the letterbox in the morning and that stands out because I’d be thinking ‘what else can you do?’. My heart would sink because there was nothing else I was good at,” he recalls.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried.

He started working at 15 and did the 9-5 jobs in his late teens but just couldn’t take it.

“I saved up all my money for a year and a half and started writing.”

Although Martin started writing later than John, it was Martin who first tasted success, when his Leenane Trilogy was staged by Druid, receiving plaudits in Ireland and worldwide.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.