INTERVIEW: Troy Duffy has more stories from ‘The Boondock Saints’ universe
Image courtesy of artist / Provided by Gold Dust PR with permission.
The Boondock Saints, the cult crime thriller from the late-1990s, continues to live on as the little-film-that-could that somehow bucked the Hollywood system and found an impressive, and ever-growing, audience. The film, starring Norman Reedus, Sean Patrick Flanery and Willem Dafoe, was the brainchild of Troy Duffy, who wrote and directed the movie. Now Duffy is back with more stories from The Boondock Saints universe, but this time the tales are being told in print form.
The Boondock Saints, Volume 1: Blood Origin, which is now available, serves as a prequel to the successful film and a present-day sequel to the events surrounding Connor and Murphy. “It’s basically a love letter to the fans,” Duffy said in a recent phone interview.
The writer-director, who can now use the term novelist, said it has been a long 25 years since the original film premiered — a sequel also came out more than 15 years ago.
“Essentially, yeah, I had ideas about the origin story as the years went on, maybe even right after I did the first script,” he said. “But I have to be honest, one of the things that really fueled this was fan questions over the years. They’d ask me … ‘They grew up in Ireland. How did they come to the United States? Do they agree on killing?’ They asked me all these questions, and I would kind of develop answers in my head. So brick by brick over the last 25 years this story has been building, and with Volume 1, I’m beginning to tell it.”
What Duffy is most happy about with this new book is that he’s left behind the entertainment world of agents, lawyers and producers. He described this writing exercise as coasting, without having to check with anyone else or receive approvals from the higher-ups. He wants to deliver his vision straight to the fans, of which there are many.
“We’ve done a unique thing here,” he said. “Yes, it is an origin story, but it contemplates the brothers, boots on the ground, here in the present day. We start them off as 13-year-old children in Ireland. We show what their life is about, how they grew up, their young adulthood, how they worked and America was the ideal. They wanted to get here and have their slice of the American pie, the American dream. They worked hard, raised all the money they needed for their nest egg, yet they had to flee Ireland in a violent exodus that puts targets on their backs.”
Duffy added some more details to this summary of the saints and their past, but those will be kept a secret for the reader who check out Volume 1. They eventually end up in Boston, and that’s roughly the end of chapter 10 in the book, but there are 35 chapters more. That’s where the “present day” comes into play.
“What I thought from the very beginning was that in a movie they’re almost ready-made vigilantes,” the writer said. “We don’t have to go into the past or anything like that. You can pull that off in a movie. In a book, brothers don’t come here from foreign lands and just start killing bad guys. There’s a story there, so I wanted to show the step-by-step process of them getting slowly lured into the dark world of vigilantism because there is one hell of a story there. This is something that these two characters don’t take lightly. These aren’t the kind of guys that kill the guard in order to get in and get the mafia guy. They are very, very surgical about this, and, for lack of a better word, they care about it.”
In other words, Connor and Murphy keep getting sucked back into this world of crime and vengeance because they see no other choice. “What if we took the brothers, did show an origin story that I’ve always wanted to tell, but then got them here in the present day so they are walking by what we’re walking by,” he said. “They’re seeing, hearing, smelling all the things that we do.”
Duffy added: “It’s a way to lock it into our present-day world, yet give a cool origin story and give a brand-new story, kind of weaving in some of the things we know and love about the movies, every now and then along the way, but reengineering those movie moments so that the fan has almost a nostalgic experience, but also a brand-new one.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Boondock Saints, Volume 1: Blood Origin by Troy Duffy is now available. Click here for more information.
