Martin McDonagh and the Creative Process

Martin McDonagh is the Irish playwright, writer/director, and all around bad ass responsible for the oft-quoted cult favorite In Bruges (2008). His most recent endeavor, released 12 October 2012, is entitled Seven Psychopaths. It focuses on the attempted authorship of a screenplay, to be called Seven Psychopaths. The catch: the screenwriter, Marty, only has one psychopath to write about. He needs to find six more. And find them he does, as the darkly hilarious and highly entertaining film details.

New York University was privileged enough to welcome McDonagh to a Q&A session following an early screening of Seven Psychopaths. Both the film itself and the interview with McDonagh gave some fascinating insight into the processes and problems associated with the act of writing.

McDonagh, unlike Seven Psychopaths' protagonist with which he shares a first name, denied having run-ins with the monster known as 'writer's block.' He said he oftentimes works quickly and efficiently, explaining that he wrote the initial draft of the Seven Psychopaths script in five weeks. McDonagh also explained that the version that appears on the screen and the prototype, which he wrote shortly after the release of In Bruges, are almost identical. 

McDonagh readily admitted that writing quality material did not always come so easily, however.  He revealed that he didn't begin to produce work that he considered to be "decent" until he was twenty-three or twenty-four, only a few years before he was awarded The Critics' Circle for Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright (1996).

He advised other aspiring writers in the Cantor Center's auditorium to develop their craft by writing constantly, and recommended that, in order to objectively judge the quality of their work, they compare it to movies and plays that they admire. 

Martin McDonagh (right) speaks about Seven Psychopaths at NYU's Cantor Film Center on 11 October 2012

When we strip away the fast-paced, darkly funny dialogue, the stylized violence, and the intimidating insanity of the plot, we find a movie that concerns itself at some level with the frustration that is inseparable with the attempt to fully realize an artistic idea. In the world that McDonagh creates, writing a script becomes much more than just a process. It becomes dangerous. Very dangerous. The featured psychopaths, initially existing solely in Marty's fictionalized world, manifest themselves as physical presences. They are real psychopaths. With real guns. Marty's creative process suddenly spirals out of control and a terrifying reality suddenly invades the fantasy world of his script. The frustration that inevitably walks hand-in-hand with writer's block becomes destructive.

This says something notable about the spontaneous, dangerous, and erratic nature of creativity. Indeed, one might, in fact, describe the creative process as inherently psychopathic.

Ultimately, though, something good does come out of all of the bloodshed and torment (besides a copious amount of black humor). Marty writes his script, distilling artistic inspiration from the chaos that exploded around him. Essentially, Seven Pyschopaths seems to be saying that although the creative process is violent and unstable, it is necessary to suffer in order to create meaningful work.

It is then very plausible to suggest that Seven Psychopaths exists on some level as Martin McDonagh's speculation about what might happen if he himself were to suddenly suffer from writer's block. He has managed to avoid it thus far; hopefully, this trend will continue far into the future.