. Not that John McDonagh necessarily sees it that way.
He’s drawn to “literary crime novels”, he concedes, and stories “that don’t have any contemporary attributes, where people are on their phones or on their computers – they could be timeless”. And he has noticed “all my films end in some kind of suicidal situation, as if I myself want to die. They end with the lead characters going into a situation where they’re not sure if they’re going to survive, and they don’t seem to care if they’re going to survive.
“And let’s be honest, if we flip the narrative and follow Abdellah [the father], am I gonna get $9 million to make that story? No, I’m not. Why am I not going to get it? Because nobody wants to distribute it. Whether audiences will see it, we don’t know, because they’re not being given those films. But the financiers and distributors don’t want to make them.”