When writer-director Dustin Lance Black thinks about how long he has been working on his new FX limited series, “Under the Banner of Heaven,” his answer points much further back in time than when he first read Jon Krakauer’s book by the same name.
“I’ve been preparing almost my whole life for this, all the way back to the ’70s,” Black said on a recent video call with The Chronicle. As its creator and showrunner, he was in Los Angeles putting the finishing touches on the series’ seven episodes before returning home to London.
Krakauer’s 2003 nonfiction bestseller told the chilling tale of the 1984 murders of a young mother and infant daughter, Brenda and Erica Lafferty, in a Salt Lake City suburb. The dark true crime thriller connects the double homicide, committed by two brothers in a fanatical, insular Mormon sect, to the violence and secrecy surrounding the religion’s founding in the early 19th century.
这是一个非常个人化的故事为黑人,born into a Mormon family in Sacramento in 1974 and spent his childhood in Texas. He came out as gay to his devout mother when in college at UCLA and has written (in his 2019 memoir“Mama’s Boy,”currently being adapted into a documentary) about struggling for acceptance within the conservative faith.
Black won a best original screenplay Oscar in 2009 for his Harvey Milk biopic “Milk,” which grew out of his conversations with San Francisco activist Cleve Jones. Black’s acclaimed 2017 miniseries “When We Rise” is based onJones’ memoirand chronicles the birth of the modern LGBTQ rights movement.
As a committed activist himself (Black was instrumental in the fight to overturn California’s Proposition 8 in 2013 and legalize federal marriage equality), Black explained that when he read Krakauer’s book, he was riveted by a story set among the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faithful that plumbs the depths of homegrown American fanaticism within an offshoot of the religion in which he was raised.
He spent more than 10 years adapting the deeply troubling story to the screen, and much longer wrestling with its central question of why people turn to fundamentalism as a salve for uncertainty.
“People seek definitive answers in uncertain times, so they often turn to God,” Black said, “but when they return to fundamentalist rules, whether in religion, law or politics, it’s a very dangerous journey. It can lead to bloodshed.”
Black stressed that he “tried incredibly hard to make the distinction” in “Banner” between contemporary mainstream Latter-day Saints and their fundamentalist fringe.
He devised the fictional lead character Detective Jeb Pyre — who is played with quiet intensity by Andrew Garfield — as a way to illustrate how a pious man’s convictions are shaken not only by the gruesome acts he must investigate but also by doing the very thing his faith forbids: asking difficult questions.
“There’s a saying in the Mormon church: ‘Put your doubts on a shelf,’ ” explained Black. “You’re taught to doubt your doubts, which means you’re raised to not ask questions about the tough stuff. But I’ve had a lot of questions my whole life. I wondered, ‘Why were women treated as inferior to men? Why are they told not to have passion or purpose outside the home? What kind of a God believes men are superior to women?’ ”
“There’s so much about the Mormon church that I still love. And at the same time I cannot abide how it treats most of its members.”
Garfield, fresh off his Oscar nomination for“Tick, Tick … Boom!,”explained in a virtual news conference for “Banner” (joined by Daisy Edgar-Jones, who plays Brenda Lafferty, and cast members Rory Culkin, Sam Worthington and Wyatt Russell) that he has noticed himself being drawn recently to playing men who are experiencing a crisis of faith, whether Jeb Pyre or televangelist Jim Bakker in last year’s“The Eyes of Tammy Faye.”
“I think questions of spirituality, faith and doubt, questions of how to live one’s life and the meaning of life are … the questions I feel compelled to ask as a storyteller and creative person, and just in my life personally as well,” he said.
Black admitted that he is bracing himself for the church’s reaction to the series. He knows he is defying its edicts “against having their history or their faith discussed outside of the church and outside of membership.”
But he believes deeply that the most cherished views — about marriage, gender roles, God’s will — should be able to withstand scrutiny.
“It’s never comfortable having a mirror held up to you and to your beliefs, but I think that there is something important to be learned.”
十四年后,黑色的突然启动成名with his Academy Award win andpowerful acceptance speech, he said he sees a personal connection between the impulse that drove him to make “Milk” then and “Banner” now.
“I suppose I’m a little bit lazy and I like sleep, so I don’t want to get out of bed unless I feel like I am breaking something that needs to be broken,” he said, smiling after an adorable interruption: His 3-year-old son ran by in the background wearing a green hooded dinosaur towel, followed by Black’s husband of five years, British Olympic diver Tom Daley.
Continuing, he said, “With ‘Milk,’ I felt like it was time for us to break the status quo of the gay rights movement and return to a far more aggressive, prideful strategy that Harvey Milk believed in. And in this case, I want to challenge and attempt to crack open this status quo that there, somehow, exists a God who would create 50-plus percent of the population as human beings that are somehow inferior. I think that is a lie that people passively seem to accept and believe in, and I’d like to start to try to shatter that.”
“Under the Banner of Heaven”(TV-MA) premieres with two episodes Thursday, April 28, exclusively on Hulu. Subsequent episodes air Thursdays through June 2.