Martin McDonagh Quotes
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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.
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I fell into the theatre because I felt I was doing it well, and I stuck to it for the same reason.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I've never been to.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I hope there's some kind of morality in all my work.
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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.
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I've got a fondness for rabbits.
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I never really tell anyone what I'm writing beforehand because I usually don't know what it will be.
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I never lie in interviews.
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I never feel like a smug or a smart-alec film director, and there are plenty of those around.