The snowballing reputation of the Irish playwright Conor McPherson reached a peak with The Seafarer, which he directed at the National Theatre in London in 2006; last year, the Broadway production won the actor Jim Norton a Tony Award, to go with the Olivier Award he'd won the year earlier for his performance. McPherson himself has directed three feature films, the latest of which, The Eclipse, was recently picked up for distribution after playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. McPherson's first produced screenplay was for I Went Down, an Irish gangland buddy comedy that was a huge indie hit in Ireland in 1997 but achieved only measly distribution here. At that time, McPherson was an unknown quantity here, and for the most part, so were the movie's stars, Peter McDonald and Brendan Gleeson. It was the John Boorman film The General, released here the same year as I Went Down, that helped raise Gleeson's profile as everybody's favorite Irish gangster, a position he shored up last year when he co-starred with Colin Farrell in the playwright Martin McDonagh's movie writing-directing debut, In Bruges. That movie actually has a striking family resemblance to I Went Down, though I Went Down is both lighter in tone and the better, more well-sustaned movie; unlike McDonagh's, it doesn't fall off a cliff overreaching for significance.

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