Director John Michael McDonagh, author Lawrence Osborne and the stars of the film discuss personal salvation, simplistic critics and why ‘you can’t build a culture out of non-stop moral hysteria’
Everyone loved John Michael McDonagh’s first film, The Guard, with Brendan Gleeson as a sloshed cop. They admired his second, Calvary, in which Gleeson played a priest reconciled to his own murder. His third, a black comedy with Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Peña, was mostly loathed. McDonagh anticipated these reactions, he says in a pub in south London. He had assumed people would like his first two, “and War on Everyone was meant to be divisive”.
So he would be forgiven for having felt perky before the premiere last year of his fourth film. “I love watching the film!” he says. It’s an old-fashioned noir: tense, starry, good-looking. “So I was like: Everyone’s going to love it.” He puts down his pint and laughs.
