Have you travelled much around the so-called ‘red states’? You mentioned your bus journey across the South. So Mildred literally just popped out, fully formed - that pain and the bravery to go out of your way to stand up to the police publicly. I never was able to find out what or where it was but I decided it must have been a mother. Very similar - calling out the cops, and graphic about the crime.
How similar was it to the signs Mildred puts up? This sign flashed by and it stuck in my mind, just bubbling away… the pain and rage and sadness of the person who would put that out there. So that was part of it, but I also saw something similar to what’s on the billboards in the film about 20 years ago when I was on a bus through one of the southern states. Film people only remember your films so it felt like no one knew I can write a good female character I thought, “I’m going to change that.” I tried to create not just a good female lead but an outrageously different one. I had done strong female parts in my plays but not in films. Was making a film with a strong female lead character a driving inspiration for Three Billboards? Screen International met up with McDonagh at the Soho Hotel in London. Released in the US on November 10, it had grossed $21.4m for Searchlight at the time this issue went to press UK release is January 12. During this awards season, it has already garnered nominations for six Golden Globes (including best motion picture drama, and director and screenplay for McDonagh) and four Screen Actors Guild Awards (for the three principal actors and outstanding cast). The film premiered at Venice Film Festival in September, where McDonagh was awarded the best screenplay prize, before taking the audience award at Toronto International Film Festival. While the fictional town of Ebbing was situated in the Missouri Ozarks, Three Billboards shot in Sylva, North Carolina for 33 days in May and June 2016. Produced by Graham Broadbent and Peter Czernin of Blueprint Pictures, who also produced McDonagh’s previous two features, the $15m film was co-financed 50/50 by Fox Searchlight and Film4 - one of the first productions greenlit under then-Film4 head David Kosse as part of his strategy for the company to take “bigger swings” in the marketplace. Like much of McDonagh’s work for stage and screen, Three Billboards deftly balances its comedic and dramatic elements, emerging as the writer-director’s most rounded work to date thanks in part to sterling performances from Frances McDormand as the righteously vengeful Mildred and Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell as the town’s police chief and violent, bad-egg cop respectively. With Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, his third feature after In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012), UK-Irish playwright-filmmaker Martin McDonagh moves from the world of hitmen and Los Angeles gangsters to rural, small-town America to tell the tale of a grieving mother trying to shame her local police department into solving her daughter’s brutal murder. Frances Mc Dormand, Peter Dinklage, Lucas Hedges and Martin McDonagh filming ‘Three Billboards’
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