These characters don’t come around that often.’ When she did sign on, it was, ‘Well, I don’t want to do rehearsals, especially with the cops’ – Woody and Sam’s characters. Then Joel read it and said something like, ‘Just do it, Fran. “Eventually, we switched the age of her daughter around and still, she wasn’t quite there yet. “There are a 100 reasons why Mildred would have kids when she was older – she’s not your typical woman at all,” he continues. I’ll write you a grandmother part, but it ain’t gonna be this one! I think she suggested making her a grandmother, which, no – so then what happened to the girl’s mother? I’m not interested in that story. “It was the age question that gave her pause: Frances was dead set on playing her own age and she questioned whether a working-class woman in a town like that … she didn’t quite buy it, that Mildred wouldn’t have kids at 20 instead of 30. “Listen, she loved it straight away, to be honest – no matter what she says about it,” McDonagh declares, grinning widely. After a gala screening at the Toronto Film Festival in September (where the film would walk away with the fest’s Audience Award), McDormand told the crowd about their first meeting after he’d sent her the script: “I was in a production of the ‘Scottish Play’ that Martin came to see … afterward, we were talking about his screenplay, and I said, ‘You’re no Shakespeare, Martin.’ And he said, ‘No … not yet.'” (“Shakespeare never did any films,” the director replied, “so I win.”) Getting the Oscar-winner to sign on, however, still took a bit of persuading. Mildred was one of two Billboards characters that McDonagh claims he wrote with specific actors in mind when he started outlining the story eight years ago, and the idea was always to convince the Fargo actress to play his cracked, cantankerous heroine.
“And” he adds, “I’d really wanted to write something for Frances.” Once I’d decided the character would be this woman consumed by grief, Mildred really sort of wrote herself. “But this wasn’t meant to be a corrective to that – it’s really how the story presented itself to me. “Which may be why some people say the violence in Psychopaths is a little too broad. “Yeah, my movies have had a lot of male energy,” McDonagh says. Mildred would likely take one look at the rogue’s gallery in Seven Psychopaths and kick them all right square in the crotch – something she has no compunction doing to, say, teenagers who throw a drink at her car either. She’s mourning, mad as hell and capable of being both maternal and rattlesnake-mean. Steel-willed women have anchored his plays (see The Beauty Queen of Leehane and The Cripple of Inishmaan), but Mildred feels like she occupies a singular space in McDonagh’s cast of characters. But if you only know the writer-director’s movies In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012), you might be surprised to see that he’s crafted and placed such a strong female character at the center of this particular story. Sort of intricate, eloquent, rapid-fire-delivered dialogue that spins heads – imagine Tarantino if he wasn’t so preoccupied with proving how many
Profanity aplenty, offbeat plot twists, often brutal violence and the If you know the bulk of McDonagh’s work, you know what to expect: a caustic wit, “It was more about Mildred being at war with the world than Frances being at war with me.” How, you ask? She posts a trio of signs asking why, six months later, there are “still no arrests?” – a public shaming that quickly escalates into an act of war between her, the sheriff (Woody Harrelson) and his dim-witted racist deputy ( Sam Rockwell).
What if that mother was Mildred Hayes, a flinty, take-no-shit fiftysomething woman – played to the hilt by the flinty, take-no-shit fiftysomething Frances McDormand – who decides to “inspire” the lackadaisical local law-enforcement regarding the investigation of her daughter’s rape and murder. this weekend and goes wide throughout November, takes that idea one step further. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, McDonagh’s new film that opened in New York and L.A. When he finally decided he wanted to do something with the idea, his first thought was: Who rents out giant signs to chastise the police about not solving a crime? His second was: What if it was a grieving mom?
It was so angry.” For several years, McDonagh admits, he kept wondering if he’d simply dreamed the whole thing, if the sighting had really happened at all. “But what stuck with me,” he continues, “was the rage.