McDormand talks of living on the edge
In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Frances McDormand takes on police who fail to find her daughter’s murderer. The actress explains why her own life experiences are at the performance’s centre, while director Martin McDonagh and co-star Sam Rock
FRANCES McDormand’s rage is sizzling off the screen.
Not her own rage, but that of her character in the unusually named Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — which took home four awards at the recent Golden Globes.
In the black comedy, McDormand plays a grieving mother, Mildred Hayes, who is furious that the local police have not found her daughter’s murderer.
It’s a foul-mouthed, combative and violent role that leads the Oscar-winning actress to channel a female variant of the classic western hero.
“I really latched onto John Wayne in a big way as my physical idea,” she says, “because I really had no female physical icons for Mildred.
“She is more in the tradition of the spaghetti western’s mystery man, who comes walking down the centre of the street, guns drawn, and blows everybody away — although I think it’s important that the only weapons Mildred ever uses are her wits.”
Her grief and her anger as a mother are at the very centre of her performance, and something that 60-year-old McDormand, who has an adopted son with Fargo director Joel Coen, acutely related to.
“As a mother, you live on the edge of disaster,” she admits. “You just do.
“I didn’t give birth to my son, I met him at six months old, but from the minute I held him and smelled him, I knew it was my job to keep him alive.
“And as a parent, you also come to see how the worry and the anxiety that goes along with protecting someone who you give yourself to in that way — that you surrender to — can become degenerative.”
In the full force of her grief, Mildred decides to take out three billboards on the road leading into the town, with a pointed message directed at the town’s chief of police.
This does not go down well with his second-in-command, the racist, immature mummy’s boy Officer Dixon, played by Sam Rockwell.
“He’s got a lot of anger, a lot of rage in him,” Rockwell explains, “but in working on him, you think about his back story and that all comes from fear.
“I recently played a racist in another movie and I talked to a white supremacist and he said it’s not that you hate black people or brown people, it’s that you hate yourself — and I think that is really the key, there is a lot of self-hatred with a lot of these people.”
“The first thing you do is ask, ‘What qualities do I have that this character has?’. That is something I heard Gene Hackman say once.
“You go from there. I’m not a racist, a I don’t come from that, but you can find moments. Everyone is capable of being a coward or a hero at any given moment so you just find that part of yourself.”
The film reunites Rockwell with Irish playwright Martin McDonagh best known for writing and directing In Bruges, and with whom he worked on his other film, Seven Psychopaths.