Playwright McDonagh makes move to film

NEW YORK, Feb. 15 (UPI) -- The new dark comedy "In Bruges" marks the feature-film writing and directorial debut of award-winning British playwright Martin McDonagh.

McDonagh is best-known for writing "The Lieutenant of Inishmore," "The Pillowman" and "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and making the Oscar-winning short film "Six Shooter."

"I was really scared of the move (from stage to screen,)" McDonagh told UPI in New York recently.

"I was never brought up on theater. I always had kind of a healthy disrespect for it. I always tried to write plays that a film fan, which is what I was, would like in some ways; plays for people who don't like plays," he said. "Because I had a disrespect for the form, at the outset anyway, it was easy to write plays that were kind of different and shook things up a little bit but then with film, I'd always loved everything about great cinema. From the time I was 12 or 14, I watched everything from Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick to Akira Kurosawa and …Orson Welles and people. So, it was much harder to even write a script because of fear of that kind of company. So, it took a while."