How Banshees crew built the pop-up pub of Inisherin by hand
ACADEMY Award-winning director Martin McDonagh has revealed that he and his crew built the spectacular, cliff-hugging bar that features in Banshees of Inisherin with their bare hands.
The acclaimed new film starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson arrived in Irish cinema screens on Friday and McDonagh and his cast are already being tipped for Oscar glory.
The trio, who previously worked together on dark comedy In Bruges, this week told DMG Media’s website Geek Ireland how their production team had to build Jonjo’s – the fictional pub on earth’s edge – themselves. Banshees was shot on the Aran island of Inishmore as well as beautiful Achill Island, with McDonagh admitting he was keen to showcase Ireland’s stunning west coast.
He explained: ‘We, the DP [director of photography] and the production designer and the first AD [assistant director], we lived in a house in Galway for about a month a year before we started shooting, finding out exactly what we wanted to see, even like the design of Colin’s house. We wanted it to be in a place that showed the most of Inishmore and the most beautiful way. Similarly, with the pub that we built, we wanted to see
this beautiful coast road in Achill. You wouldn’t have thought you needed to [build a pub] in Ireland, but that meant we could film inside and outside. And if the weather was fantastic, we could just forget that scene inside and go outside and capture it. I think that’s partly why it looks quite beautiful.’
On capturing the beauty of the west of Ireland on camera, Gleeson added: ‘I guess it gave it an epic kind of a quality where it was always teetering on the edge of a kind of a madness and a maelstrom that cannot be tamed.’
Meanwhile Farrell had been so impressed by the structure, and the spectacular Atlantic cliff-edge views that hits you the second you walk out of its front door, that he had hoped to show his son – but that plan didn’t really go as he had hoped.
He said: ‘I went back six weeks after we finished shooting, I took my youngest son back – I went back to Los Angeles and I took him back and we did a little tour. And the f***ing thing was gone.’
The Dubliner, 46, said the unlikely pop-up pub’s setting was – almost – out of this world, and with good reason. It was used as a tool to juxtapose the film’s main themes of community and isolation. ‘The power of that vista when you came out of the pub – and there were these two things rubbing against each other – one was it was the centre of the community, the pub and the church, but then you walk outside and you’re looking at the loneliest – now beautiful as well – but the loneliest ol’ f***ing thing in the world.’
When asked about all the Oscar buzz surrounding the film, McDonagh modestly avoided any mention of himself in the mix, instead saying he had high hopes for the Banshees cast.
He said: ‘It’s nice [to hear the buzz]. If they want to talk about it that way, it usually means it’s good and usually means that people will go to see it, to check what the fuss is about. All of the performances, I think, deserve the awards buzz.’
‘I went back and the thing was gone’