Three billboards true story
Though the crew quickly scrambled to cover them up, it wasn’t easy because of their size. “We had become slightly desensitized to these big, shocking billboards because we’d been working on them for so long,” Weinberg says. That quickly led to black lettering in a font called - no joke - “Impact.” As soon as the blood-red billboards went up, the location manager began getting calls from local residents about the eye-opening additions to their once-serene road. The production didn’t consider the change of scenery.Īfter several weeks of Weinberg’s team offering up ideas with different colors, fonts, and word placement for Mildred’s manifestos, McDonagh suggested giving the billboards a crimson background. For those keeping score, in addition to the abandoned ads, the billboards are shown as Jerome (Darrell Britt-Gibson) puts them up when the notices are new after Dixon sets them ablaze post-burn during Jerome’s reinstall and finally, when they’re redone.
“We had to be really specific in terms of script continuity, and work closely with the assistant director and script supervisor based on what was going on with the billboards,” Weinberg says. During the course of the film, the billboards go through seven phases - all of which had to be synced with the shooting schedule, not only because you see them from Mildred’s house, but also because at one point, Dixon sets them on fire. Though Mildred and her volcanic anger - as she lays into Willoughby, and his racist, mama’s-boy deputy, Dixon (Sam Rockwell), among others - get maximum screen time, her inanimate co-stars surely come in at a close second.
The billboards dictated the shooting sequence. McDonagh’s sense of humor being what it is, he asked Weinberg to cut out part of the baby’s eye. The remnants can be seen in the first (Ozarks) and third (Ebbing) billboards the Huggies’ baby sits in the middle one. Local billboard companies printed the designs, old-school strip-and-paste style (as opposed to modern, stretch-vinyl sheeting), and they were cut apart. In addition to creating a diaper ad, Weinberg and her team researched vintage Missouri tourism billboards, and designed fictional ones for the Ozarks and Ebbing. “So we went with the idea of a mosaic,” she says. Much more work went into making the old ads after Weinberg ran with a script detail that said a 1986 Huggies ad was the only vestige from the patchwork of old posters. Ironically, less time was spent designing Mildred’s display of moral outrage than on the dilapidated billboards they replaced. The disintegrating signs got more attention than the new ones. McDonagh, Weinberg, and the director of photography even went to the site with large posts strung with ribbons to see how they’d look before getting a local outdoor advertising company to build the structures. Leaving nothing to chance, the design team also did 3-D-computer and Styrofoam models of the three billboards on the road to get the scale right. But before structures could be installed, his livestock and fencing had to be relocated, and new grass planted, landscaped, and tended to within an inch of its life by a greens crew - so it would look neglected. After scouting countless roads in the western part of the state, Weinberg says the production team finally found the cattle grazing meadow of a “super helpful ” Black Mountain farmer, improbably named Brown. The director wanted to be able to shoot the billboards in the same frame as the house with them looming in the distance - and without CGI. While Sylva, North Carolina, provided the perfect stand-in for fictional Ebbing’s main street, it didn’t have an isolated road with a house that could double as Mildred’s, something McDonagh insisted on. For the complete billboard blow-by-blow, we spoke with Three Billboards’ production designer Inbal Weinberg, the brains behind Mildred’s advertising war. And everything about them - from the design and classic construction, to the custom structures that display them - is authentic. On a sleepy Ozark mountain back road, enraged and grieving mother Mildred Hughes (McDormand) puts police chief Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) on blast with a trio of billboards that say: “Raped While Dying,” “And Still No Arrests?” “How Come, Chief Willoughby?” They’re the justice-seeking, jumpsuit-wearing woman’s way of calling out local authorities for letting her daughter’s seven-month-old rape and murder case go cold.
THREE BILLBOARDS TRUE STORY MOVIE
If the signage in a movie has top billing over Frances McDormand - as it does in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - you can bet a whole lot of thought went into its conception and execution.