“You’re seeing so many extraordinary individuals in the same place at one time. Though Father James is literally a pistol-packing preacher, Gleeson gives him depths, doubts, and a humanity way beyond that.Īround him is a constellation of characters, none of whom, save perhaps Father James’s daughter, played by Kelly Reilly, is anything more than a type.īut, says McDonagh, it’s not meant to be realistic. He is more than the rock at the centre of the film in truth, he dwarfs all its other elements. That the film veers successfully into this territory is largely down to Gleeson’s towering performance. In Calvary, Father James is tolerated at best, disrespected at worst - it’s easy to imagine many Irish priests nodding in recognition. Priests are living representatives in their communities of an institution that, to many, is no longer legitimate. It’s a dilemma of our moment: the priest remains a visible public figure in Irish life, but robbed of his past status and power. Then, they can get all the other stuff around it.”Īll that “other stuff” amounts to one of the most convincing film meditations on the priesthood in Ireland. So I hope audiences see that thriller hook and come in for that. This isn’t a film about abuse it’s a film about a good priest who’s threatened that he will be killed in seven days. I read a lot of crime novels, so I like to have a crime hook. I thought it was a little more aggressive than that. I hope The Guard wasn’t perceived as that. “I always like to entertain,” says an unabashed McDonagh. The opening scene takes place in a confession booth, as a survivor of clerical abuse tells Father James that the best revenge on the Catholic Church would be to kill a good priest instead of a rapist in a Roman collar. (The daughter is explained by Father James’s late vocation.) For many directors, that would be more than enough material for one film - a character study, leavened with a good dose of pathetic fallacy, and finishing in an ambiguous minor key.īut McDonagh, living up to the family reputation, turns the action on a B-movie plot device: the audience knows, from the outset, that this hard week in the life of a local priest could end in his murder. Mind you, it reads like one: a priest struggles to maintain his status among the irreverent parishioners of a west-of-Ireland town, while also dealing with the fallout of his daughter’s suicide attempt. His iconic look is a reminder not to take the film too literally. If Calvary is a western, then Gleeson’s Father James is a preacher man straight out of Sergio Leone: standing erect against the windswept Atlantic coast, clad in a soutane, his hair and beard biblically straggly. So, I decided to put the priest in that town.” And with the waves and surfers, this was it. “A film that you wanted to watch on widescreen. “I always wanted to make an Irish film that had scope,” says McDonagh. The town is now a top surfing destination - the boards and wave-riders garnish the film’s aerial shots of waves breaking on remote rocky shores.
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