Banshees of Inisherin cinematographer: 'Let's make it a John Ford Western'

There aren't many movies like The Banshees of Inisherin. Sure, director Martin McDonagh previously worked with stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on the beloved In Bruges, but that was a black comedy about hitmen in hiding that explored violent guilt against a Gothic European backdrop. Banshees is something else: a drama about the dissolution of the friendship for which no offered explanation makes sense on its face, and which continues to devolve into angry, surreal territory as the film goes on.

"The premise is very simple: A guy says, 'I don't want to be your friend anymore,'" cinematographer Ben Davis tells EW over Zoom. "But there are also these parallels with conflict, depression, men not being able to talk to each other. I think there are so many things going on in it, and I see that lots of people seem to take different things from the movie, which I think is a positive sign. Ambiguity is really important."

Luckily, Davis had a lot of time to make sense of Banshees before he shot a single scene. When he, McDonagh, production designer Mark Tildesley, and first assistant director Peter Kohn arrived in Inishmore (one of the islands off the coast of Ireland in Galway Bay) back in August 2021, they had to quarantine together for 10 days before they could begin filming. They spent the time well, going over McDonagh's extensive storyboards, as well as discussing the thematic and symbolic weight of each scene. They also watched several films that felt pertinent — particularly American Westerns.

"A theme that Martin alluded to very much in our prep period, and his storyboards dove into, was the Western," recalls Davis, himself a veteran of modern-day action movies like Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Chloé Zhao's Eternals. "We watched The Searchers, The Assassination of Jesse James, quite a few Westerns. We felt in the end that Martin's storyboards felt like a Western, with all these shots through doorways and windows, and then these big landscapes. So I thought, if we're gonna do a Western, let's make it a John Ford Western. Let's have those big wide shots."

Just as Ford's iconic Westerns were informed by the magnificent landscape of Monument Valley, so did the rocky, windswept terrain of Inishmore shape Davis' choices with the camera — which sometimes differed from McDonagh's plans. The film gains a striking rhythm, alternating personal enmity with shots of the wide open sky or the rolling ocean.

"Those shots weren't in the storyboards, but I felt that they were incredibly important," Davis says. "Inishmore is this slab of rock in the middle of the Atlantic. There's a latticework of walls, which you can see in the wide shots, that are basically there to stop the soil getting blown away by the weather. When I first arrived and we first scouted, it was drizzly and gray and overcast. And I thought, Well, how is this gonna work? But then I spent a lot of time there and fell in love with the place."

Davis adds, "You realize that actually every day is incredibly beautiful. It doesn't matter what the weather is, because you have this vast sky and this huge ocean. When you are there on this island, the rest of the world ceases to exist. That's played out in the film with the Irish Civil War happening on the mainland in the background. But that is actually what happens internally when you are there. You have this raging ocean between you and the rest of the world, and I felt that was very symbolic for the film."

The Banshees of Inisherin is in theaters now.

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