three billboards outside ebbing missouri is a real story
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri While traveling through the Southern United States in around 1998, Martin McDonagh came across a couple of accusatory billboards about an unsolved crime, which he described as "raging and painful and tragic [sic]". The billboards highlighted the incompetence of police work and deeply affected McDonagh; he said that the image "stayed in my mind [...] kept gnawing at me" and presumed that they were put up by the victim's mother.[5][a] This incident, combined with his desire to create strong female characters, inspired him to write the story for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.[5] McDonagh discussed the creative process, saying that it took him about ten years to "[decide] that it was a mother who had taken these things out. It all became fiction [...] based on a couple of actual billboards".[7][8]