First Draft: Read the 2018 Oscar Nominees for Best Original and Adapted Screenplay

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Written by Martin McDonagh

Writer and Director Martin McDonagh wrote the screenplay with Frances McDormand in mind for the lead role. He was inspired to write the movie after seeing billboards about an unsolved crime while traveling “somewhere down in the Georgia, Florida, Alabama corner.”

“Twenty years ago I was on a bus going through the southern states of America, and somewhere along the line, I saw a couple of billboards in a field that were very similar to the billboards that we see in the start of our story. They were raging and painful and tragic, and calling out the cops,” McDonagh told Deadline. “I didn’t plot anything out before starting. I just had that idea of this woman putting this thing up there to chastise the cops. Everything that happens after that fact is a reaction to that, and then she reacts to that reaction, and the film is kind of organic that way. There isn’t too much imposed from without.”

Click here to read Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

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