The Missouri Policeman Who Prepared Sam Rockwell for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Sam Rockwell’s character, Officer Dixon, is by no means a model police officer in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. He’s violent, bigoted, temperamental and aloof. Yet, in order to play a character that gets everything wrong, sometimes you have to know what it looks like to get the job right. To research the role, Rockwell turned to Springfield, Missouri police officer Josh McMullin to learn the ropes.

Three Billboards dialect coach Liz Himelstein first contacted the Springfield Police department to research a Southwest Missouri accent.

How Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri‘s Production Designer Fire-Proofed an Entire Location

By the time Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri production designer Inbal Weinberg joined up with Martin McDonagh, the writer-director had already spent months traveling the south in search of a title town. He found it in Sylva, North Carolina. Hired over Skype on the strength of her Americana-themed designs for Frozen River and The Place Beyond the Pines, Weinberg met McDonagh in person for the first time at the Asheville airport,