It was a bus trip through America 20 years ago that gave the British/Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh the inspiration for his new movie, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
“I saw something on a couple of billboards that was very similar to what was on our billboards [in the movie],” McDonagh said in a phone interview.
In the movie (which opens Wednesday in Salt Lake City), a woman in a small town, Mildred Hayes (played by Frances McDormand), rents three billboards on the road into town. The message is a pointed call to the town’s police chief, Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), to make an arrest in the rape and murder of her daughter seven months earlier.