The Boondock Saints became a giant cult hit when it hit home video and, indeed, is a movie both loved and hated on this site. The film seemed to come out of nowhere. No one seemed to remember its theatrical run, but word of mouth soon made this film a huge underground hit. Why was this film so unknown? A multitude of factors played into the film’s mystery. Bad timing for the release, possibly bad word of mouth from a very famous studio head, and the biggest problem with the whole thing, the writer/director.
Troy Duffy had moved out to Los Angeles to try and find success with his band, The Brood. They booked gigs playing in numerous taverns but hadn’t made much headway in securing a studio contract. While he waited for his big moment to happen, he got a job slinging drinks at the bar J. Sloan’s. While not at work, he lived in an apartment building where he would constantly witness guns and drugs making their way down the hallways. He finally got fed up one day when he said he witnessed a drug dealer stealing money off a corpse.
Duffy said he and his brother used to fantasize about being able to actually do something about all the disgusting stuff they had seen happening around them. This gave him an idea for a movie. He said that writing the movie was almost a form of therapy for him since he couldn’t stop all the crimes he saw happening around him and the victims it left in its wake.
During his breaks at his bartending job, he began to write out different scenes. He says he wrote it in three parts. The first part was the setup of everything. Then he said he spent time coming up with cool ideas for the second part. The third part pretty much dictated itself.
When the screenplay was done, he showed it to a friend of his that was a producer’s assistant at New Line Cinema. He passed it up to his boss, who read it and loved it. After a while, the script made its way to all the major studios. What happened was that suddenly, an all-out bidding war began for the property. Troy Duffy could have his pick of any studio he wanted to produce the film.
In The Boondock Saints, fraternal twin brothers Connor (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy (Norman Reedus) get caught up in the Russian mob trying to take over the pub they are in celebrating St. Patrick’s Day. The two brothers end up killing the Russians. They turn themselves in, and the FBI agent investigating the case, Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe), interviews them. Finding that they acted in self-defense, he lets them go.
The brothers believe they have been given a sign from God to punish wicked men and help the innocent. What ensues is the brothers attempting to take out high-ranking members of the Russian mob with their new friend Rocco. One of the bosses hires a hitman, known only as Il Duce, to track the brothers down and take them out. As they begin to get more and more notoriety for their deeds, and support for their holy mission, their enemies begin to close in, and all hope may be lost.
Duffy seemed to jump right into the spotlight after his script became a coveted item in Hollywood. He had every major film studio offering him more money than the last to get their hands on his script. While he looked over the different offers that were coming in, he decided he wanted to do the movie his way. While it wasn’t the biggest offer on the table, Miramax offered up $450,000 for the script, a $15 million budget for the film that he would direct, his band would be hired to do the soundtrack, and as a bonus, Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein would buy the bar that Duffy worked at for both of them to co-own.
The deal was a big deal and even made it onto the cover of USA Today. It was labeled as a Rags-To-Riches story and highlighted Duffy as the new big player on the block. To document the whole process, Duffy asked his friends Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith to film a documentary about the movie called Overnight, a film whose existence he would come to regret. They began to follow him around and found out very quickly that Troy Duffy was very full of himself and his newfound “talent”. Hollywood stars began to hang out at Duffy’s bar in hopes of getting to know the new hot filmmaker. This leads to Duffy having a giant ego that doesn’t seem to help much in every aspect of his upcoming movie.
While he is deciding on his cast, he decides to run down the list of some of the actors he is considering for the movie. He mentions Brad Pitt but says he already played an Irishman in The Devil’s Own, and he hated his Irish accent. Ethan Hawke comes up but calls him “a talentless fool”. Finally, when Keanu Reeves is mentioned, he labels him “a f*cking punk”. An easy way to make friends in Hollywood.
Some of the actors he actually did consider for the twin brothers in the film included Stephen Dorff, Brendan Fraser, Nicky Katt, and Ewan McGregor. According to a Mental Floss article, Duffy flew to New York to talk to McGregor about the film. He planned on offering one of the lead roles to him that night. After a night out, a drunk Duffy got into an argument about the use of the death penalty. Because of this, McGregor passed on the film.
For the FBI Agent Paul Smecker, Duffy was considering Patrick Swayze, Robert De Niro, Kevin Spacey, or Kenneth Branagh. Miramax actually wanted to use Sylvester Stallone, Bill Murray, or Mike Myers. They obviously were not seeing eye to eye with some of the casting. As time wore on, Duffy began to get annoyed that the film took so long to get moving. In the documentary, Duffy is seen multiple times calling Harvey Weinstein’s office and screaming on the phone at his assistants. This caused Miramax to eventually put the film on hold and eventually drop out of the deal altogether. While Weinstein is the equivalent of human garbage, at the time, he was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. Making him mad enough to drop the film was not a good move.
This entire scenario now put the movie in jeopardy, his band’s hopeful record deal in jeopardy, and the deal to buy the bar never ended up happening. As Duffy began to seek new financing for the film, he began to wonder if Weinstein had blacklisted him in Hollywood. The offers from the other studios never returned after his break with Miramax. He is convinced that Weinstein was keeping him from getting the film made.
After some haggling, he finally decided to go into business with Franchise Pictures. The budget they offered for the film was less than half of what Miramax had originally promised. He took the deal and started working on the film. During this time, his relationship with his bandmates and other partners began to break down. On camera, he is seen telling everyone they wouldn’t be paid until the film was done and eventually saying that none of them deserved to be paid. His abusive behavior became more erratic as the filming of the documentary went on.
He finally got the film cast with Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus playing the twin brothers. Willem Dafoe signed on to play FBI Agent Paul Smecker and Billy Connolly as Il Duce. Connolly was excited to do the project as he would finally get to play against type as an evil hitman.
The film shot most of its scenes in Toronto, with a few select scenes in Boston. Duffy stated that when he sent back dailies of the scene where Flanery’s character throwing the toilet off the side of the building, they hated it. It was in slow motion, and they were considering firing him off the project. He was able to edit the scene together and put the music behind it that is seen in the film and that calmed them down.
When the film was finally done, they began to shop it around. Just as they were setting up screenings for distribution companies, in Columbine, Colorado, a horrible tragedy began to unfold. Two students would load themselves up with multiple guns and shoot up their high school. The shooting was all over the news as, at the time, school shootings were still rare. Even the ones that were reported on were not of this magnitude.
There started to be a discussion about the role that violent movies and video games played in such events. Movies like The Matrix and The Basketball Diaries were shown as examples of characters participating in fantasies of shooting their teacher, or showing the main characters using machine guns in cool slow motion on screen. Suddenly, every American film company wanted nothing to do with any projects with the high use of guns. No one wanted the bad press that would go with releasing a violent movie that fetishized the use of guns after the Columbine shooting.
The Boondock Saints was taken to the Cannes Film Festival a month after the incident in hopes to find a distributor. Every major studio from the United States turned the movie down. A small company would finally pick the movie up but only put the film out for a limited run in theaters. It ran in five theaters for seven days. After that, it went to the home video market. 20th Century Fox would pick up the rights for video and strike a deal to make the film a Blockbuster exclusive.
The film seemed dead on arrival. The hope and promise that the initial bidding war the script created didn’t seem fulfilled. Those involved with the film believed thought they had made a great movie. Timing and soured relationships doomed the film to be lost to history. And the film faded into obscurity.
Except . . . it didn’t.
People began renting the film, and suddenly more people were renting it. And more. And more. The word of mouth began to push the film forward to find its audience. It quickly rose on the rental charts. The film became an instant cult classic. Over its initial home video release, it would rack up a whopping $50 million. That was almost unheard of at the time for a movie no one seemed to have heard of before it hit rental shelves. This film became a complete success. Well, almost a complete success. Some people were left out of the home video fun.
When Troy Duffy signed his original contract with Franchise Pictures, it didn’t include any royalties from home video sales. Not a single penny would make its way to Duffy. He would later file a lawsuit against Franchise Pictures and other undisclosed companies stating that neither he, his producers, nor his principal cast got paid for the film. The lawsuit went on for a long time but finally ended when Duffy and everyone else involved got an undisclosed amount of royalty payments. The decision also included Duffy winning back the rights to produce a sequel.
In 2009, the movie The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day would be released into theaters. It would make $11 million against an $8 million budget. While it didn’t set the box office on fire, it did give the fans what they had hoped to see. More Saints. When it hit home video, it seems that the audience was eagerly awaiting it just as they had the first. This film would also bring in $50 million in home video sales.
There has been talk of a third film ever since the second film’s release. Duffy has stated multiple times that it was being worked on and that he had hoped to get it into pre-production soon. After some back and forth, in 2017, Sean Patrick Flanery stated that he and Norman Reedus had walked away from the project. He cited the unethical production of the project as their reasoning. The talk of the sequel died down, but back in 2021, Troy Duffy once again stated that the third film was moving ahead with Flanery and Reedus back for the film. Production was supposed to start in May of 2022, but there has been no word on the film since.
This very condensed video/article can only shine a small light on what really happened during the journey of making The Boondock Saints. The documentary Overnight, about the making of the film and troy Duffy’s experience making the film, is a must-watch for any Boondock Saints fan. Let it be a cautionary tale to not let you be the one that nearly destroys the very dreams you hope to create. Troy Duffy has gotten to make a couple of films which is more than some people. Let’s just hope he cherishes the chances he has been given. And now . . . let us pray.