Martin McDonagh, writer-director of In Bruges, returns with an escalation of his twisted dark comic visions in Seven Psychopaths.A screenwriter (Colin Farrell) struggling to write a serial-killer script gets more real-life inspiration than he can handle when a dognapping scheme goes badly wrong and brings a galaxy of crazies to his doorstep.A top-notch cult- movie cast – including Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson,Tom Waits, Harry Dean Stanton – anchors this wacky, blood-spattered madness, the audience winner of Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness section.
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What is the attraction to psychopaths, killers and rabbits?
Martin McDonagh: Rabbits are a definite one. I love them. Psychopaths and killers, not so much. I guess I share Colin Farrell’s character’s feelings towards psychopaths and killers, in the film. I know how cinematic they are and how interesting films can be with them, but I question the morality of only having films about guys with guns. It’s playing those two ideas off each other that is my interest in them. Also, if I’d written a film called Seven Accountants, I wouldn’t really get much interest. Christopher Walken wouldn’t be the same in that part. This movie operates on so many different meta levels. Was this the story you set out to write, from the beginning?
This is exactly how it developed. I think I had the Quakers Psychopath short story, and then I had the title of this. And then, I was stuck, like Colin’s character, and didn’t know how to come up with the others. I wanted it to be about love and peace, and then his two friends show up and the dog thing just snowballed. It developed naturally, like that, and then the meta things came. If you’re writing a film that’s about a writer in Hollywood who doesn’t want to write a film called Seven Psychopaths, it’s going to be meta, no matter what you do.
Leeds-List are sponsors of the Friday 9th September screening of Seven Psychopaths. List-List is a Leeds Events, Music & Culture site. Please visit leeds-list.com.
BBFC Cert 15.
