Armed with a cast and crew he knows and loves, making a feature back home for the first time, McDonagh tells me he came into Banshees “more confident” than in his past films. “I [used to] try to make every single decision about every little thing, from costumes to everything, and I think after you’ve made a couple, you realize that some of that is a waste of time,” he says. “You should expend all energy on the things that will really matter in the end.”

The performance of Three Billboards likely aided in the confidence boost too: The movie made over $160 million at the global box office, won acting Oscars for lead Frances McDormand and supporting star Sam Rockwell, and was nominated for best picture and McDonagh’s original screenplay. “I was just overjoyed that it did cross over,” McDonagh says. “My other stuff had been sort of a small, culty, good reaction, but this was the first time when things exploded as it was released.” He even took the backlash in stride. “When the backlash happened, I was like, Okay, if this is still true in 10 or 20 years, whatever, but it felt like I was outside of it,” he says. “And I think the film’s good, and I disagree with those arguments.”

The breakout success means more eyeballs, surely, are on what’s next. But this “breakup story,” as McDonagh calls it, seems designed to defy expectations. “It is my quietest movie,” he acknowledges, even as it builds toward an interrogation of themes familiar to his work—love and hate, beauty and brutality, the senselessness of death. That last one is right there in the movie’s title, teased in symbolic gestures and plot reveals until Banshee’s final moments, in appropriately tragicomic fashion. “It’s just aiming for the truth and hoping for the best,” McDonagh says. One thing’s for sure: He tells it like nobody else.

The Banshees of Inisherin will be released in theaters on October 21, via Searchlight Pictures. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.