In Bruges: The Ending Martin McDonagh Cut

The finding

The In Bruges screenplay: two endings, one line

The In Bruges shooting script is dated 29 December 2006 and runs 98 pages. Its last five pages take place in London. Ray, three months out of hospital, sits on a bed with a newspaper clipping about three deaths in Bruges pinned to the wall beside him. By the end of page 97 he has a gun to his head and the phone is ringing. None of it is in the finished film, and the In Bruges ending most people argue about, the ambulance and the voiceover, is not in the script.

That much has been known since 2012, when a screenwriting blog read the same draft and described the London scene. The In Bruges script has circulated online for years, and forum threads have quoted its last page. This page is not announcing a lost ending. It reads the one that circulates against the film, line by line, and the walk turns up three things the earlier accounts do not have: a sentence that moves from Harry to Ray, a list that reverses, and a set of motives for the first killing that the film declined to keep.

Where the two endings part

What the reading turns up is one sentence in two mouths. On page 92 of the In Bruges screenplay, Harry says “You’ve got to stick to your principles” and shoots himself. On page 97, in London, Ray says the same sentence, word for word, and cocks his own gun. The draft hands Harry’s code to Ray as the last thing he says. In the film that sentence belongs to Harry alone, and Ray’s last words are a hope to live. The voiceover that carries that hope does not appear in the 2006 draft; when McDonagh wrote it is not on any record found for this page.

The sections below walk the draft against the screen, scene by scene, with the on-record interviews alongside. The only screenplay text quoted is the 2006 shooting script. Film lines carry whole-minute timestamps from the disc. The academic and video-essay readings that shaped how this film is discussed get their own section, kept apart from the textual comparison.

On the record

Where the two hitmen came from

The story McDonagh gives Charlie Rose is the same one he gave Sundance and Film4 that winter, and the repetition is worth noting because it means the account was settled before the film opened. He took a two-day trip to Bruges about four years earlier, knowing nothing about the town. Day one went to every church and museum. By the middle of day two he was bored enough to want a drink and a way out. Those two halves of the weekend became two characters. In his phrase, the culture lover and the drunken whore started talking to each other. Asking why two such people would be stuck in Bruges against their will produced the hitmen.

Three gangsters become two Irishmen

Two other details from the same interview bear directly on the draft. The characters were originally three London gangsters; making Ray and Ken Irish once Farrell and Gleeson were cast took, by McDonagh’s estimate, about twenty words of changes. And asked whether the film changed from what he wrote, he says they pretty much stuck to the script while staying open to changes of tone and of scenes. He does not mention the London pages. No interview found for this page does.

That is McDonagh describing Ray, not explaining a cut, and the two endings answer his question differently. Farrell, in the same conversation, describes three weeks of rehearsal. After the first week the cast stopped playing the comedy and played the truth of each line, and he spent three days playing a suicidal man. McDonagh told Ain’t It Cool News the same month that Farrell had pitched the film to him as a man trying not to kill himself for two hours. The draft’s coda would have asked him to keep trying in London.

Page one

Page one, screen one

The first line of scene description calls the streets of Bruges “other worldly,” two words. The line after it says the town could belong to any of the last five hundred years, and the film opens on exactly those images. Ray’s voiceover over them is the only voiceover Ray has in the entire In Bruges script: the 2006 draft opens with narration and never returns to it. At 101m the film closes that frame. The draft leaves it open.

The twenty words

The Irish switch is visible in the narration’s wording. On the page Harry’s instruction is to get out of London, addressed to “you dumb fucking cunts.” On screen, at 1m, it is “youse dumb fucks,” and Ray washes the residue off “me hands” rather than “my hands.” That is the twenty-word revision McDonagh describes, doing its work in the first thirty seconds. The two aliases the hitmen check in under, Cranham and Blakely, survive from page 4 to 3m unchanged. Kenneth Cranham and Colin Blakely played Pinter’s two waiting gunmen in the 1985 BBC production of The Dumb Waiter. Fintan O’Toole drew the connection in the Irish Times the week the film opened, and David Clare took it up in 2012. Nothing in the draft explains the names, because nothing needs to.

Both voices McDonagh describes are audible before the picture is. Scene 2 of the draft is a black screen with sound only, two men walking and a train behind them. Ray calls Bruges a shithole; Ken denies it. At 2m the film keeps the black screen and the exchange, and the town does not appear until the argument about it has started.

The other town

One film is named inside this one. At 14m Chloe calls the production she works on a pastiche of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, then a homage, then settles on a nod of the head. The exchange is on page 13 of the draft as it plays. McDonagh told Ain’t It Cool News in February 2008 that Roeg’s film was in his mind as a model for a town that is a character. What he took from it, on his own account, was the town. What else the two films share is a comparison for another page.

The flashback

The church, the note, and the order that changed

Scene 20 of the draft is the London church. The boy waits outside the confessional going over his sins on his fingers, cannot remember them, and reads them off a scrap of paper. After the priest falls, page 17 lists what the paper says: being moody, being bad at maths, being sad, in that order. The film’s version of the scene runs from 24m and keeps the confession dialogue almost verbatim, down to Ray asking whether the priest is deaf.

The note returns on page 97, the last page of the draft, in the London bedroom. Ray takes it down from the wall and the script gives the reader his point of view on it. This time the list reads sad, bad at maths, moody. Same three items, reversed. Whether that is a deliberate inversion or a writer typing the list from memory nine months apart is not knowable from the text, and no interview addresses it. What is knowable is that the note is the last physical object Ray touches in the draft; he folds it into his breast pocket, beside his heart, before he cocks the gun. The film, having no London, has no second appearance of the note at all.

What the film does with the priest

The scene description on page 15 has the priest’s crucifix signet ring glinting in the dark. The draft sets that detail up for a payoff the release cut removed, covered below in Harry’s section. On screen the ring is a detail the audience has no way to read.

The museum

Purgatory, on the page

Purgatory comes up twice in the film: at 27m, in the Groeningemuseum in front of Bosch’s Last Judgement, and at 74m, when Ken tells Harry that Ray keeps going on about Hell and purgatory. Scene 23 of the draft names three paintings in a single paragraph of description: the Gerard David flaying, the Provoost skeleton collecting his due, and then Bosch, whom the two men end up in front of. The page does not stage a hanging order; the men wander past the first two and stop at the third. Video essays that read the three as a deliberate sequence are reading the cut, and they are covered below.

The in-betweeny one

Ray’s definition of purgatory, the in-betweeny one for people who were not really shit but were not all that great either, like Tottenham, is identical on page 19 and at 27m. So is the exchange a few minutes later in which he clarifies that the boy is gone from the world, “not here in Belgium,” at 30m. The joke confuses the afterlife with Belgium, and the character making it is the one who cannot tell them apart.

The museum scene did not change between draft and screen. It matters here because the purgatory idea is complete on page 19, long before either ending, and both endings had to decide what to do with it. In the draft, Ray is seen in London afterwards. In the film, he is not seen anywhere after the ambulance.

The boss

Harry’s priest: three motives in the script, none on screen

Why was the priest killed? The film never says. The draft answers twice, in dialogue, on page 54, in the hotel room the night Ken takes Harry’s call. Ray says he assumed it was some paedophile thing, given how Harry is about kids. Ken says no: the church sat in the middle of one of Harry’s housing developments, and the priest was on the action committee against it. The release cut drops both Ray’s guess and Ken’s answer; the subtitle track has neither line. On screen the job is a job.

Two strands of flashback

Two strands of flashback in the shooting script were shot and left out of the release cut, and both belong to Harry. The disc carries both as deleted scenes, and McDonagh pointed Ain’t It Cool News to them the week the film opened. The first is scenes 47 and 48, set in the 1970s. Ken, in his early twenties, holds the body of his murdered wife in a London brothel. Harry, the same age, walks into a police station, asks for Detective Potter by name, and beheads him with a machete he lets slide down from his sleeve. Matt Smith played the young Harry. The film keeps the fact, in Ken’s dialogue at 54m, that his wife was killed by a white man in 1976 and that Harry dealt with it. It cuts the image.

The boy of seven

The second strand is stranger and changes the plot. Scenes 60 through 63 follow Harry through Bruges on the day he arrives, remembering the town as a boy of seven, hand in hand with a man dressed in black whose face the camera never shows. Up the belfry the boy races, the man following. In voiceover the man asks whether Harry liked Bruges and whether, seeing as the trip was for him, he would do something in return. The boy answers “Anything, Father!” The description then specifies that the hand caressing the child’s cheek wears the same crucifix signet ring as the priest in scene 20, and the smile leaves Harry’s face.

What the ring proves, and what it does not

The page stops there. It does not say what the man did, and it does not name him. The draft rhymes two rings, on page 15 and page 70; that the man in black is Father McHenry is a strong inference from the rhyme, not a stage direction. Read beside page 54, the draft is doing something odder than explaining the hit. Ray guesses a paedophile; Ken corrects him with a planning dispute; then the flashbacks give the reader a reason to think Ray guessed right and Ken was told a story.

Asked by Ain’t It Cool News why the priest was killed, McDonagh said the DVD extras carry more of Harry’s backstory, a trip to Bruges as a kid and, on the way home, things not going so well with the priest. That is the only on-record gloss, and this page goes no further than it. The release cut keeps one line of any of this: Harry on the phone at 40m, calling that trip the last happy holiday he ever had.

What the cut changes

Without page 54 and the flashbacks, Harry’s honour reads as a principle held for its own sake, which is how Ken describes it and how Harry demonstrates it at 100m. With them, the priest is a grievance, or a planning obstacle, or both, and Harry’s rule about children has a possible source. Which version is better is a judgment. That the release cut declines to give Harry any reason at all is on the screen, and the ring stays in the church scene either way.

The partner

Ken’s choice, page and screen

The scene the film is best remembered for, Ken with the gun behind Ray’s head and Ray with the gun at his own, is on the page as written. Ken’s argument follows, that killing himself will not bring the boy back and that he might save the next one. It is at 63m on screen and on page 62 of the draft with no material change. Ray’s answer, that he would need exams to be a doctor, is the same on both.

The will on the pillow

What the draft adds is a small scene the film does not have. In scene 59, before Ken goes to meet Harry, he dresses in a neat suit and tie, hides Ray’s gun in a cupboard and checks his own. Then he leaves a sealed envelope on the pillow of his made bed. The envelope reads “MY LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.” On the page Ken walks to the tower knowing how the conversation ends.

The envelope comes back on page 87: Ray, sprinting into the hotel room for his gun, sees it on the pillow and almost cries before he hears Harry downstairs. Neither beat is in the film, so on screen Ken’s foreknowledge has to be read off Gleeson’s face. Farrell, on Charlie Rose, describes Ken as the first person in Ray’s life to show him that much care; the draft gave Ray one second to register it, and the film gave him none.

The belfry

Like Robert Powell

The belfry conversation is the section of the film where page and screen are closest. Ken’s declaration that he loves Harry unreservedly for what Harry did in the past is at 82m and on page 80. Harry’s complaint that Ken is standing about “like Robert fucking Powell” follows at 83m, with the explanation that Powell played Jesus in Jesus of Nazareth. Harry’s line describing the whole situation as a Boschian nightmare is at the same minute. The draft has all of it.

Cleanest of the film’s setups and payoffs is the coins. The setup is a ten-cent shortfall at the ticket window at 6m, where Ken tries to get rid of his change and ends up paying with a fifty. Scenes 81 through 86 of the draft spend six numbered slugs on the payoff. Ken buttons his jacket over his gun and drops a few coins into the fog. The square below clears. He drops the rest; the square clears further; Ray looks up; Ken lets himself fall. The description of what lands is two words on the page and does not need quoting. The film shoots the sequence as written.

What the Christ-figure reading is built on

David Clare’s 2012 essay reads Ken’s climb back up the stairs as a Via Dolorosa and the Robert Powell line as the film naming what it is doing. That is a reading, not a fact about the text, and it is covered in the readings section below. What the draft supports without interpretation is narrower: McDonagh wrote the Powell joke, the unreserved-love line, and the coins into the same three pages, and none of them moved.

The standoff

Marie and the canal

The hotel standoff is on pages 88 to 90 as it plays at 95m: the pregnant Marie refusing to move, Ray proposing to jump into the canal so that Harry can shoot at him outside. What follows reads differently on paper than it plays. Ray, in the boat, says quietly that Harry is way too far away to hit him. Harry, on the canalside, says the same words to himself, “I’m way too far away,” and fires. It is a rhyme, at 97m on screen, and not the one the draft is building toward.

The description as Harry runs to cut Ray off is three words: it is beginning to snow. Everything after this point in the draft, from the dock to the film set to the ambulance, is on the screen as written, until the ambulance doors close.

The film set

Stick to your principles

Page 92 of the draft, scene 98, is the canalside film set, its extras in masked costumes modelled on the Bosch triptych, some with a bullet wound identical to Ray’s. Ray says “The little boy.” Harry says that’s right, and fires twice through Ray’s back into Jimmy. With his head half gone and his school cap and uniform intact, the description says, Jimmy looks just like a little dead boy. Then it adds a sentence the camera cannot photograph: he looks that way to Harry, anyway. Harry says “Oh. I see.” Ray says “No, Harry. He’s not…” Harry says the line about principles, and the draft’s stage direction for what follows is blunter than anything the film shows.

The bottom of page 92

Every word of that is on screen between 99m and 100m. Ray’s point of view as he lies there is a list on the page. The sky and the rooftops. The Bosch figures looking down, Eirik among them looking as guilty as Judas. Chloe being dragged away screaming. The ambulance crew, whose faces do not hold out much hope. And Marie, from somewhere almost heavenly, whose smile makes him think it might work out. The oxygen goes on, the ambulance takes him, and his point of view fades to black. That is the bottom of page 92.

There the film ends, with a minute of narration laid over it. The draft turns the page.

The signature

The struck pages of the In Bruges script

Scene 99 is the only scene in the draft set outside Bruges after the opening credits. It occupies pages 93 to 97, and it is the last thing in the document. Each page is summarised below in the order the draft gives it; the description is paraphrased, the dialogue quoted only where a single line carries the point.

The added minute

The closing voiceover

The closing narration exists in print. David Clare, writing in 2012, quotes the hell-is-Bruges line from page 87 of the Faber and Faber edition published in 2008, and cites the ambulance crew’s grim countenances from the same page. The shooting script has the ambulance crew on page 92 and no narration. The Faber text follows the finished film at that point, not the draft the film was shot from. Whether Faber also drops the London scene, and when between December 2006 and the picture lock the narration was written, are not on any record consulted here. The disc’s deleted scenes include Harry’s flashbacks and not, on any listing found, a London scene; whether the coda was ever shot is open.

Three things separate the voiceover from the coda. The town is the last place seen as well as the first. Ray’s voice returns; the draft opened with it and never brought it back. And what Ray wants has changed. The coda’s last act is a countdown to a gunshot; the narration’s last sentence is a wish to survive, said twice.

The tense

The sentence is in the past tense. Ray does not say he hopes; he says he hoped, and the object of the hoping is a future conditional. The grammar places the narrator somewhere after the ambulance, looking back on a moment in which the outcome was still open, and declines to say what the outcome was. A dead narrator can say it. A living one can too. Either can say it, and the film has been argued about since 2008 because of that. The draft’s ambiguity is a different one. Page 97 tells the reader Ray will go through with it, and then a phone rings and the scene cuts; whether the ring is an interruption or a reprieve is the draft’s open question. The film asks whether a man who wants to live does. The script asks whether a man who has decided to die gets to.

Secondary sources

What the purgatory reading owes to the cut

The strongest version of the purgatory argument is David Clare’s, published in Emerging Perspectives in 2012. Clare reads Bruges as the waiting room where Ray is judged and purified, and Ken as a Christ-figure who lays down his life. He reads the cliff-hanger as essential, on the grounds that the audience is left in a purgatory of its own. He also reports, in a footnote, that McDonagh agreed with an interviewer who called the characters trapped in purgatory.

The original exchange is at Ain’t It Cool News, 5 February 2008, and it is less clean than the footnote. The interviewer says the characters reminded him of the people in the Bosch painting, trapped in purgatory. McDonagh answers that that is what he was trying to do, and finishes the sentence by describing the film-within-the-film as a European art film about Bosch with guns. Whether he was agreeing to purgatory or to Bosch is not decidable from the transcript. It is the only on-record remark on the question, and it is that ambiguous.

Which text the reading fits

The point this page adds to Clare is about which text he is reading. His argument needs the cliff-hanger, and he says so: the audience is left in a purgatory of its own because Ray is never seen alive after Bruges. The draft shows him alive in London on page 93. A purgatory reading could survive that page; purgatory in the Catholic sense ends, and a man three months later still holding the boy’s note is still waiting. What could not survive it is Clare’s version, the one built on the audience’s suspension. That version is a reading of the release cut. The shooting script offered a different last beat, and Clare, working from the film and the Faber text, did not have it in front of him.

The video essays

The 2016 Nerdwriter essay on the film, which credits Clare in its description, contributes three observations of its own. First, that the three museum paintings sit back to back for cumulative effect; scene 23 of the draft supports that. Second, that the boy’s list of sins applies to Ray; readers in the essay’s own comment thread dispute it, taking the list as a measure of the boy’s innocence instead. Third, that the closing line’s tenses are the film’s argument, which is the observation the section above takes further. A later video essay in the same space builds a triangle of judgment around Ray and offers three verdicts on the ending, leaving the choice to the viewer. Neither works from the draft.

The blog that read the same pages

A 2012 post at Good Screenwriting is the earliest piece found that read the shooting script’s London coda, and it deserves credit for that. It calls the scene clumsy, too long, and a betrayal of Ken’s sacrifice, and it describes the coda as Ray’s suicide. Later blog posts and forum threads repeat the suicide as fact. The page is closer to that than to an open question, since it tells the reader Ray will go through with it this time. But the last thing on the page is a phone ringing and his eyes opening, and the scene cuts before anything else. Good Screenwriting read the stage direction as the outcome. The page stops one beat short of one.

Questions

In Bruges screenplay and ending explained: questions

The draft

The cuts

The ending