In a Screen Rant exclusive interview, Under the Banner of Heaven's creator explains how his true-crime series was initially planned as a movie.
Andrew Garfield's new true-crime show Under the Banner of Heaven was initially planned to be a movie. Garfield is coming off a string of top-shelf performances in the Oscar-nominated films Tick, Tick... Boom! and The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the former of which earned in an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. He also returned to the role of Spider-Man in Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film that currently holds the title of the highest-grossing film of the pandemic era with nearly $2 billion.
Now, Garfield's latest project has debuted. The actor stars in Hulu's true-crime limited series Under the Banner of Heaven as Jeb Pyre, a detective investigating the 1984 murder of Brenda Lafferty and her baby daughter Erica. Based on the book of the same name by Jon Krakauer, the series will explore the ideologies of the Mormon religion, its fundamentalist groups that still practice polygamy, as well as the extremist sect the School of the Prophets to which the Laffertys belonged. In preparation for his role, Garfield traveled to Utah to meet with current and former Mormons to immerse himself in that culture.
Screen Rant caught up with Hulu's Under the Banner of Heaven creator Dustin Lance Black for an exclusive interview. The writer-director explained that he originally planned the story as a film but quickly realized that he needed more room to adequately explore the Laffertys' family as well as the history of the Mormon church thoroughly. Read what Black said below.
"The biggest challenge, hands down, was recreating that feeling when you read it. Frankly, let's be honest, I set it up as a movie first and, it was a mistake. There wasn't room to do that. There wasn't room to tell the Lafferty story in the detail it needed to be told to understand all the characters involved. And then to also include the history of the Mormon Church, which would act as the clues to understanding the Laffertys and solving the crime. But then I would come to understand, over the 10 years of trying to crack it, I also needed that investigative story. Because, though it's not in the book... It felt like an investigation. I think that's what bothers the Mormon Church, that it felt like an investigation. I want the audience to be engaged, and that took about 10 years to figure out. But here we are."
The original non-fiction book by Krakauer was not written as a detective thriller as the series presents itself but as an in-depth examination of the crime, its possible motives, and the Mormon community and religion. Therefore, to accurately adapt the book while presenting the story in a manner that is engaging, Black needed more than a two-hour theatrical runtime to cover the breadth of the context within Under the Banner of Heaven. Garfield's Detective Pyre was not originally in the book and was created by Black to help focus the investigative narrative.
With the advent of streaming services, creators have found a new platform that have allowed them to fully realize their visions in a way that would have been ineffective in a film format. Apple TV+'s The Afterparty was originally conceived as a film in the vein of Akira Kurosawa's multiple point-of-view masterpiece Rashomon, but was later adapted as a series so writer Chris Miller could have the room to fully flesh out his characters and explore the differing genres presented in each episode. Scott Frank's western film script Godless was shopped around in Hollywood for years before finding a home on Netflix as an expanded seven episode limited series. Although feature films provide the filmmaker with a format that allows for a tight and concise story to be told in only a couple of hours, with Under the Banner of Heaven, sometimes the extra time is needed to truly dissect all aspects of character and theme within a narrative.
Next: Under The Banner Of Heaven True Story: Who Killed Brenda Lafferty
