"I feel worn out!," we heard one moviegoer remark as he prepared to leave Chelsea Cinemas last night. We don't blame him: thanks to the Cinema Society and Hugo Boss, he, like us, had just experienced the chaotic, complex, entirely fun but, indeed, rather exhausting Seven Psychopaths. In it, Colin Farrell plays a screenwriter (who shares a first name, incidentally, with the movie's writer-director, Martin McDonagh) who is attempting to write a screenplay called—yep—Seven Psychopaths, when he accidentally gets caught up in a ring of dog thieves (Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell) who've stolen the wrong shih tzu—one belonging to a cold-blooded crime boss (Woody Harrelson).

"In Bruges was quite like my plays—it was very quiet, mostly, two characters walking around a town and chatting. This, I wanted it to be a little bigger and frenetic and almost like a rollercoaster of craziness," McDonagh explained to us last night.

As for the film's crazily self-referential qualities, all that was consciously planned, too, McDonagh said. "I would've found it hard to do a film about guys with guns in Hollywood that wasn't questioning any of that. I think that's what made it meta for this script, for this film, is that I couldn't do a slick, gangster, car chase, shoot-'em-up kind of movie. I think there's maybe a better, more interesting way to go about all that. And I think that's what this is. And the meta aspects helped on that journey."

Given that Bonny the Shih Tzu plays such a prominent role in the film, we had some canine preoccupations on the red carpet—and when we saw Jewel, whom we know has both a dog and a toddler, we asked how the two get along. "They've been doing really good! I'm very surprised, my dog hated children his whole life, so I was very nervous about them, but he's been very good with my baby," she laughed.

While she was pregnant with Kase, Jewel wrote a book for him, That's What I'd Do, which is out now. "It's a poem, really, about all the things you would do because you love your child. I really wanted my son to know that he was loved," she said. The singer is, of course, no stranger to poetry—as a nation of 12-year-olds with noses in copies of A Night Without Armor could've told you in 1998—and cites Pablo Neruda, Charles Bukowski, and Anaïs Nin as favorites (though the latter presumably wasn't much of an inspiration for her latest book).

After the film, guests including many of the film's stars along with Vanessa Hudgens, David Crosby, Helena Christensen, and Gabourey Sidibe decamped to No. 8 to get their heart rates down with some help from Appleton Estate cocktails.—Alexandria Symonds