Martin McDonagh's early plays, including The Pillowman, brought him notoriety and fame as a writer, both in the United Kingdom and the United States. He was praised for his darkly comic and haunting plays about human tragedy, and for his unsentimental approach to theater as a form. In the years since these successes in the early 2000s, McDonagh has made a successful pivot to writing for film as well.
McDonagh's first film was a short in 2006 called Six Shooter, which won the Academy Award for Best Short Film that year. 2008's In Bruges, starring Colin Firth and Brendan Gleeson, which he both wrote and directed, is what catapulted him to fame in the film world. The film received praise from critics and audiences, with McDonagh winning the BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay and getting nominated for the Academy Award in the same category. It tells the story of two hitmen in Bruges who meet many horrifying and comic obstacles along the way.
In 2017, McDonagh wrote and directed the controversial Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which earned two Academy Awards and won McDonagh a Golden Globe and BAFTA for his screenplay. His shocking subject matter and irreverent writing style lend themselves towards both the stage and the screen. In a 1998 interview with BOMB, McDonagh said of the connection between his theater and film work, " I’ve written plays that I respect, even as a film boy. That was always the place I was coming from, this respect for the whole history of films and a slight disrespect for theater. But now, I’m in a place where I like the plays I’ve done, and even in comparison to the films I love, they still stand up. And I think they would also stand up for any other film fan who goes to the theater. So being in that position, having written things that even film fans would like, bringing people like me—who grew up like me—into the theater, that’s a lovely position to be in. To maintain that and do even better work in theater, I would like to continue that."
