How meta is too meta for a movie? "I don't know, you search that line without ‑‑ you know, there aren't any rules or boundaries. You push it as far as you can go. You know when it's smug," director Martin McDonagh said in an interview about his latest black comedy "Seven Psychopaths." And there are many things you can call the upcoming film, but smug is not one of them.
Reuniting McDonagh with his "In Bruges" star Colin Farrell, and putting together a massive cast that includes Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Tom Waits, Abbie Cornish, Olga Kurylenko and Gabourey Sidibe, the film centers on a screenwriter struggling to come up with ideas for his screenplay, who gets roped into a dognapping scheme with his best friend, which sets off a chain reaction that goes to some truly violent and funny places. The movie recently premiered at TIFF to a rapturous reception with Midnight Madness crowds (though we were less enthused), and hopefully it will help Farrell rebound from the summer flop of "Total Recall." Not that he's worried about it.
"I have no idea [why the movie didn't work with audiences]," Farrell told Movefone recently. "There's a chemical process that is present in whether films work or they don't work or they find an audience or they don't. If I could answer that question I would be in those f*cking films every single time.
As for McDonagh, he's hoping to continue working with Waits as the pair are apparently plotting a music collaboration, with the director telling Movieline that the two are putting together "a creepy fucked-up musical" entitled "A Very Dark Matter." The project is based on the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale "The Shadow" about a man who's overtaken his own shadow, which sounds pretty amazing. And while it's not firing on all cylinders yet, McDonagh says "it's in the back of my mind to do."
Until then, you can seem them at work in "Seven Psychopaths," which opens on October 12th. [Photos via Empire/CBS Films]
