At the 78th Academy Awards in March 2006, a small piece of arithmetic injustice took place. The people who had made the film brought it to the Kodak Theatre to collect its statuette. Meanwhile, the actor in the second-biggest role was sitting in the holding room at Los Angeles airport, being fed chips and instant noodles, before being put on a plane back to London—with the wording: “If you behave yourselves, we won’t put you in handcuffs.” The reason for all this was a visa that had expired by two days, eight years earlier.
The film was called Six Shooter (2004)—the 27-minute screen debut of playwright Martin McDonagh, future author of In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and The Banshees of Inisherin. That night, his short won the Oscar. The actor who played opposite Brendan Gleeson did not make it to the ceremony—and his was the name McDonagh said from the stage. But first things first.
“Random Film of the Day” turned up a short I had never laid eyes on—Six Shooter. I went looking into what exactly props up the reputation of “that McDonagh debut,” and pulled out three stories, any one of which would have been enough for a separate piece: a hidden parallel with Beckett, an exploding cow as manifesto, and the immigration drama of a real man whose seat in the auditorium remained empty while the film collected its statuette.
One methodological point of honesty: I have not worked with the film itself—only with the documentation around it. Everything below comes from Wikipedia, RTE, the Irish Examiner, Variety, an article in the Irish University Review, and the official page of the Irish Film Institute (IFI), where the short can be watched legally (link in the sources).
By 2004, Martin McDonagh was no longer “promising”; he was already a fully formed classic. At twenty-seven, he became, in Variety’s words, the first playwright since Shakespeare to have four new plays running simultaneously on the London stage. The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Cripple of Inishmaan—the Leenane and Inishmaan trilogies had already played everywhere from Broadway to Sydney; the texts had been translated into 28 languages and staged in more than 40 countries (the figures come from the Irish Film Board’s Oscar press release).
In film, meanwhile—zero. Not a single frame. Yet there was a gesture of profound respect: Ireland (the Irish Film Board), Britain (Film Four Lab—Film4’s experimental division, created specifically to work with first-timers), and three production companies pooled their money so that a man who had never storyboarded a single scene in his life could begin straight away with proper cinema—even if it was a short.
Six Shooter was shot in 2004 in southern Ireland: along the Waterford–Rosslare line, with a Class 141 locomotive and Cravens coaches (Campile and Wellingtonbridge stations, the bridge over the Barrow, and departure shots from Waterford have all been identified), plus locations in Wicklow and near Rosslare. For railway-film fans, this is now historical evidence: the Waterford–Rosslare line closed in September 2010—McDonagh managed to shoot his classic on a branch line with six years left to live.
It premiered on 14 October 2004 at the Cork Film Festival. Running time: 27 minutes. The cast included Brendan Gleeson (by then the star of The General, 28 Days Later, and Troy), David Wilmot, Aisling O’Sullivan, Gary Lydon. And in the buffet car: 21-year-old Domhnall Gleeson, in his first role in major cinema—father and son on the same screen, and for the son, that line in his filmography would remain the first forever.
The plot: Donnelly (Gleeson) lost his wife the night before and is travelling home by train when he runs into the “Kid”—endless swearing, fidgeting, stories that make the other passengers want to get off while the train is moving. The couple opposite have just lost an infant. The Kid casually mentions that his own mother blew her head off that night. And this is where McDonagh begins.
There is a shot in the film that fits into no academic study of “quiet” Irish cinema: a cow explodes on screen. Completely, on camera, with demonstrative relish.
The simple question, “Why does McDonagh need a cow?” leads to a foundational discovery: the short turns out to be a disguised reply to Samuel Beckett.
In Beckett’s radio play All That Fall (1957), the blind old man Dan Rooney goes to the station, where his wife Maddy is waiting for him. The train has been delayed: “a child fell out of the carriage, madam, on to the line.” The entire machinery of the play is sound: clucking, the braying of a donkey, a cartwheel and—the play’s most famous gag—the sound of a chicken being run over. After the radio broadcast, Beckett prohibited stage productions: the play was written “for the ear”; everything had to remain in the listener’s imagination.
In an article in the Irish University Review (2015), David Clare shows that Six Shooter is an inside-out adaptation of All That Fall: a train, the death of children, childless couples, animals, reflections on Christianity. Only backwards. Beckett lets the listener imagine a chicken being run over. McDonagh makes a film—and flagrantly shows a cow exploding, the most spectacular and least philosophical thing imaginable. Somewhere between a smile and a slap: “There, Samuel—that’s what you could have done with a camera.”
Even in the cameo. McDonagh puts himself in the frame—by the cow pen, Hitchcock-style—and says nothing; the cow story grew out of childhood impressions in Connemara and Sligo (Fintan O’Toole, writing in The New Yorker in 2006, unpacks McDonagh’s “punk” irreverence toward his own teachers).
Still, McDonagh should not be swept into the “skilful imitators” section (a critic once gave him the label “a highly skilful pasticheur”). Clare closes the article with a precise conclusion: Six Shooter’s debt to All That Fall is so delicate that it risks going unrecognized altogether. An imitator does not write in such a way that the trace of the model cannot be seen.
And speaking of children. Dan and Maddy Rooney had only one daughter—and they lost her; Dan’s fantasy of killing a child (“Did you ever wish to kill a child? Nip some young doom in the bud?”) is expressed through hints. McDonagh puts it on an assembly line: the Kid on the train wonders aloud why parents so rarely kill their children: “I'll bet they banged it on something... A few bangs on the head never did me any harm.” And the passengers sitting across the aisle endure exactly the categories of loss listed by the doctor in the first scene: a dead infant, a dead wife, a mother who shot herself in the middle of the night. The statistics of the monologue become the train’s casting list.
Then came the awards carousel: Best First Short by an Irish Director (Cork, 2004), Best Irish Short (Foyle), a BAFTA nomination (2005), BIFA and IFTA wins in 2005. And on 5 March 2006—an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film at the 78th Academy Awards. That same night, Crash would win Best Picture. The LA Times (the quote migrated into the Irish Film Board press release) called the work “original and daring,” while Simon Perry, CEO of the Irish film agency, called it “really fresh and arresting.”
As McDonagh went onstage, he did what an adult director does: he named the person who was not in the room—Ruaidhri Conroy, who played the Kid. Conroy was not in the auditorium, or the city, or even the country. He knew why. The world did not—yet.
This story deserves a chronology, because it unfolded like a perfect queueing-theory problem—except in a human life.
Conroy was no random person. As a child, he had played Tito in Into the West (1992), the Irish fairy tale about a Traveller boy and a white horse—one of the most recognizable child performances in Irish cinema. On Broadway, he had appeared in McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan in 1997–1998. Young, experienced, with an American visa history—in 1998, he overstayed in the United States by two days.
For eight years, those two days interested nobody. Then the film won an Oscar, and Conroy flew out to collect the statuette.
A chronology of fate breaking down:
The total: four days from the Oscar to an official apology. The experience of the “star of an Oscar-winning film” differs from that of an ordinary passenger in precisely no way: the system has no category for “a person flying in to collect a statuette”; it has only the boxes “compliant / non-compliant.”
There is a subtle irony worth emphasizing separately: the Kid in the film is a concentration of all the uncomfortable questions facing the republic, a character marked by family trauma and state care. The man who played him was himself filtered out by the American border over a two-day overstay from the very year he performed on Broadway in a McDonagh play. In the film, McDonagh looks at an Irishman the state cannot hold onto; in life, the United States looks at an Irishman it cannot let in. Between one and the other—one week.
What happened next—according to the record, without speculation.
After the Oscar, McDonagh tells Variety (Adam Dawtrey, 2006) that theatre is abandoned and that he “chases his original dream — becoming an auteur.” The motivation is absolute: “With playwriting, you’re allowed so much that your contribution is almost absolute. In film, the writer is the lowest form of life in the room, so you have to cut your role out”—cut it out, or get behind the camera himself, which is what McDonagh did. The self-irony was fitting: on the Six Shooter DVD, he refused to record a director’s commentary—“I didn't know what I was doing, so I couldn't think of anything to say.” McDonagh’s first-ever director’s commentary never happened.
In 2008, In Bruges came out—Gleeson, Farrell, two hitmen, a cathedral, and psychotherapy in close-up. RTE writes bluntly in retrospect: after the Oscar for Six Shooter, the move to a feature “seemed inevitable.” In 2022—The Banshees of Inisherin: Gleeson again, again a man-with-grief who solves a problem in the only way available to him. Eighteen years between the boy with a revolver in a carriage and Colm with his severed fingers—and the engine remains the same: grief that cannot be spoken because everyone around it has long since digested it into a joke.
The acting trail lives on too. After the buffet car and the cashier, Domhnall Gleeson would go on to General Hux in Star Wars, Ex Machina, and The Revenant. Conroy’s career unfolded differently from what that debut promised—but it, too, is inscribed in this short forever: many actors can put “Oscar-winning short film” in their filmography, but only one person in this category also has “LAX holding room, 22 hours.”
And the Waterford–Rosslare line, along which the Class 141 hauled Cravens coaches, has been closed since 2010. There are no trains there anymore. The footage remains.
The short film, as a format, has a quality the industry keeps rediscovering: there is nowhere to hide in it. You cannot raise a 27-minute budget large enough to buy the softening of an inconvenient idea; there is no screen time for exposition; you cannot hire enough extras to create the “correct” audience reaction. Six Shooter is beautiful precisely because the entire palette of late McDonagh—Beckett beneath the tablecloth, a cow on fire, a child with a revolver, a buffet-car cashier—fits inside a 27-minute membrane.
Hollywood loves stories about a visa holding up a star, but refuses to acknowledge that an immigration officer with chips can become the final authority standing between a person and their Oscar. There is no half-tone between “compliant” and “non-compliant”—and therefore no exceptions. After this, McDonagh made films precisely about such systems: small communities where the rule has no user interface, and grief has a buffet-car cashier.
And in that sense, the debut short turned out to be his biggest work: everything else is scaling.