Essay Questions

Why does Mildred rent the billboards?

Mildred is grieving and she is angry. This combination of raw emotions comes together to enable her to act in a way that in a normal situation she would not. She feels that already her daughter has been forgotten and the case pushed to the back-burner. She also feels that people's shock about what happened to Angela has worn off and that they have simply moved on to other things. To the rest of Ebbing, Angela is yesterday's news, but to Mildred, the pain of her murder is only getting worse.

The billboards are designed to both call out the police department for what she sees as a lack of effort to find the killer, and to remind people of what was done to Angela and why it is imperative that her killer is identified and brought to justice. The first billboard reminds about what happened to Angela - that she was murdered first and that as she was dying she was raped. In terms of solving the case, this is the most helpful of the billboards because is suggests that someone with known necrophilia tendencies and almost certain psychopathy must be the perpetrator. The other two billboards create more ire within the community. "Still No Arrests" screams one, suggesting that the police are either lazy, incompetent or both. "How Come, Chief Willoughby?" is a direct attack on the chief of police and implies either that he is running a sloppy investigation, or that he knows who killed Angela but has chosen not to arrest them for reasons known only to him. Either way, the billboard is an indictment of his character.

Mildred does not want to impugn his character, but she feels genuinely that the police are not trying at all and that as the head of the department the responsibility for this falls squarely on Chief Willoughby's shoulders.

What was Martin McDonagh's inspiration for the story?

McDonagh came upon the story told in the film quite by accident. He was driving across Texas and saw some billboards relating to the murder of a young woman whose case had not been solved. The billboards were very accusatory in nature, and he felt strongly that they had been put there by the victim's mother, although he had no concrete evidence for this. He found it hard to get the image out of his mind, and to comprehend the pain that must be behind the billboards, as well as the frustration that had driven her to complain in such a public way about what she saw as police incompetence.

McDonagh always wanted to write about strong female characters and so he came up with the idea of building a story around a mother who put up billboards about her daughter's murder. Although the actual billboards he had originally seen were real, he never did find out about the girl whose murder they related to, or the person who had put them there; he created a fictionalized account of the story behind them, revolving around a strong female lead, a mother, who realized that the only person who would push her daughter's case forward would be herself.