Martin McDonagh

I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.

All my work shares a kind of balance between black comedy and sad and despairing melancholy.

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.

I fell into the theatre because I felt I was doing it well, and I stuck to it for the same reason.

I probably haven't had enough gay characters in my stuff. When you're writing something, you're thinking, 'Why couldn't this person be black, white, gay?'

I'm not really into the fame side of things, so I'm very happy with making a film every four years or so.

Ireland was an idyllic place for us as children. We had all these cousins and all this green countryside. Given what I've written about rural Ireland, my memories of it are all blue skies and endless play.

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.

I went to Bruges for a weekend away from London. I was supposed to be meeting a girl there the next day. It was a tentative arrangement. From the moment I saw the town, I thought, 'This place is just so cinematic, so gorgeous.' Every corner seemed to offer a new image.

There's no point in me meeting with a bunch of producers or studios, because I'll write my own scripts in my own time.

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.

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.