Question: three billboards outside ebbing missouri is a real story

Answer: No, 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. This incident, combined with his desire to create strong female characters, inspired him to write the story for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. 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''.