Martin McDonagh: Personal Hero

For a long time I only wrote dramatic action stories. I tried a couple of time to write sitcom episodes back when I was still considering television, and it always turned out kind of crappy because I can't do "jokes" very well. I figured, even though in person I'm a cheeky bugger, in script form I just couldn't do comedy.

Then people kept telling me to do comedy and I kept saying no, no, I'm no good at it. Then my friend Mel at PitchQ listened to my pitch for Not Dead Yet and told me that my pitch was so high energy and kind of humorous, but the story I pitched was so serious that it didn't match.

I got that a lot. Tone doesn't match the story.

So I thought, to hell with it, and wrote a comedy. And what do you know, I enjoyed it. So I wrote another one. And now I'm working on a third. It feels more natural in many ways, but there are still times when I find myself struggling to turn a scene funny.

So now I get the note that the tone is uneven. Sometimes funny, then suddenly serious.

I'm too funny to do drama and too serious to do comedy.

That's why my hero is Martin McDonagh. He was a playwright who won an Oscar for his first film endeavor, a short called Six Shooter that you can see on ITunes. It's a beautiful little flick starring Brendan Gleeson, about a train car full of messed up people in different stages of grief. In this little movie we have death of a child and a wife and a mother and a horrible suicide, and in the middle of it all there's this long joke about cow farts. You laugh and then you feel kind of sick about laughing.

It reminds me of Catch 22. There's a scene in the book where you're just roaring with laughter over some stupid Army regulation or whatever, and suddenly out of the sky comes an airplane flying super low over the water because the pilot is fucking around, and the propeller slices a guy in a raft into pieces. That scene was one of the pivotal scenes in my development as a writer. I didn't know stories were allowed to do that.

So here's Martin McDonagh with his short film, and he goes on to make In Bruges. I came out of the theater pissed off than nothing I'd written was anywhere near that good. But In Bruges has this tragic child death and suicide, yet it was billed as a comedy. In Bruges isn't a comedy, and yet it totally is. And it's also a tragedy.

I'm sure at some point someone told Martin McDonagh, "You can't do that! You can't have a child murderer be your protagonist and crack jokes!" and he said "Go fuck yourself" and made a brilliant film.

And now he's making Seven Psychopaths, a story about......

I have no idea what this story is. It's some dudes and they're writing a screenplay and it's all very meta, but there's a dog and a mobster and a lot of violence, and I don't know what all. All I know is I read it in an instant, and then I just sort of sat there in awe of its brilliance.

And once again there's gruesome death and I rooted for bad people and I laughed until suddenly I felt sad.

I love you, Martin McDonagh. I want to do what you do, but, you know, with some female characters.