It was a story that would lead to Oscar-winner Frances McDormand channeling a modern, female variant of the classic western hero in a showdown-style performance. “Mildred was someone strong, determined and raging, yet also broken inside. “I decided the buyer of the billboards was an aggrieved mother and from there things almost wrote themselves,” McDonagh recalls. It all begins with Mildred Hayes and the three billboards she rents on Drinkwater Road. The film is the third from Martin McDonagh, the Irish playwright, screenwriter and director known for the hit thriller In Bruges, with its Oscar nominated and BAFTA winning Screenplay, and the crime comedy Seven Psychopaths. When his second-in-command Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), an immature mother’s boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing’s law enforcement is only exacerbated. The story is a war between two people who are both to some degree in the right,and that’s where so much of the tension and drama arises.Ī last stand erupts in Martin McDonagh’s trip into small town America in the mesmerising Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, as a mother is pushed to the edge by her daughter’s unsolved murder.Īfter months have passed without a culprit in her daughter’s murder case, Mildred Hayes (Academy Award® winner Frances McDormand) makes a bold move, commissioning three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at William Willoughby (Academy Award nominee Woody Harrelson), the town’s revered chief of police.