The Guard

John Michael McDonagh's The Guard came out in 2011 and won Best Film at the Irish Film and Television Awards (IFTA) that year, alongside audience recognition at the Galway Film Fleadh. On release it became the highest-grossing wholly Irish-financed independent film in the country's history, taking over €4 million at the Irish box office on a budget of approximately €5.7 million.

It was McDonagh's directorial debut (he is the older brother of Martin McDonagh) and the first of a loose Connemara trilogy that continued with Calvary (2014) and The Forgiven (2021). Brendan Gleeson plays the lead, with Don Cheadle, Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot and Fionnula Flanagan in support. Casting Cheadle as the FBI agent was the production's big decision with international distribution in mind, and it helped bring Sony Pictures Classics on board for the U.S. release.

The shoot took place in Connemara on the west coast of Ireland (Lettermullen, Roundstone and the Aran Islands) over an unusually compressed forty-day schedule. The cinematographer was Larry Smith, for years Stanley Kubrick's gaffer, who had moved into cinematography on Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson two years earlier. McDonagh has been outspoken about setting the film against the nostalgic, rural-melancholy tradition in Irish cinema. Its tone owes far more to the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino than to the Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan lineage that had dominated Irish film through the 1990s.