'This is what I need you to do to make it right': Conor McPherson's I Went Down

Conor McPherson’s first film project, I Went Down (1997), is all about screwing it up, then making it right. The film follows the fortunes of two hapless and somewhat accidental gangsters as they careen around the Irish countryside in a series of stolen cars desperately seeking a fugitive and a set of forged dollar printing-plates. McPherson’s characters are familiar types: inarticulate Irish men trapped in narrow identities because of their inability to change. Yet what makes I Went Down a successful black comedy is the way the McPherson’s screenplay, and the finished film, modulate these character types with a genial humanity that is, in the end, redemptive.