NIC PIZZOLATTO: "True Detective" takes the form of a manhunt.

So it's more of a thriller than any kind of whodunit.

SCOTT STEPHENS: It's a very unique story

told in a very unique way.

I don't want to live in history.

I don't want to know anything anymore.

McCONAUGHEY: It's not like anything

I've read or done before.

CARY FUKUNAGA: It's really about two men

and how they have to face who they are

over the course of seventeen years.

WOODY HARRELSON: It's like you're watching a film,

but it is episodic.

MICHELLE MONAGHAN: It's truly riveting.

As a fan, as an actor, I want more.

But you put a ceiling on your life

because you won't change.

MAN: You're only as the Lord made you.

MARTIN: Solution right under my nose,

and you're watching everything else.

♪

COHLE: January the 3rd, 1995.

I hadn't been on the job about three months till then.

♪

MAN: The story begins in 1995,

when Martin Hart and Rustin Cohle,

who were partners in state CID, catch the body of Dora Lang,

which Vermilion

Sheriff's Department

has called them in to take.

You ever see something like this?

No, sir.

During the course of the show,

we kind of try

to figure out who it was

that killed Dora Lang,

and it's a lot more complicated than expected.

McCONAUGHEY: It's really a story of what happens

in these two men's lives

when the come together

to solve this murder.

Our introduction to the series is our two guys in 2012

being interviewed

about this murder.

So you want to talk the whole case through

or just the end?

GILBOUGH: Whole story from your end

if you don't mind.

Like he said, the file got ruined.

Hurricane Rita.

What he didn't say is, this is about something else.

PIZZOLATTO: The narrative itself is the 2012 versions

of Hart and Cohle telling the story of their investigation

of the murder of Dora Lang and Cohle's later idea

and obsession that there might be more people involved.

TORY KITTLES: When we start looking down this road

and start putting together

the pieces of the puzzle,

a lot of the things

that we find,

they aren't adding up.

His record, his reports,

his stories, they don't add up.

MICHAEL POTTS: We come in to look at this case

to see if we can get

to the bottom

of why it hadn't been

solved correctly

and to see if we can find

the actual serial murderer.

McCONAUGHEY: This case has been reopened,

and he didn't get the guy, that's the main thing.

He wants to know what they know

so I can get back on the case and solve it myself.

You got to let me see what you got.

GILBOUGH: Well, let's hear your story first,

see how it fits with what we got.

Well, your dime, boss.

♪

HARRELSON: When you initially meet our characters together,

there's quite a lot of butting heads.

I'm a very sociable, gregarious person,

and he is just the opposite.

McCONAUGHEY: Cohle is a real loner.

He's never seeking a relationship

early on with Martin Hart.

He's not even a guy who wants to have a conversation in the car.

MAGGIE: Bring him in, Marty. Let's get a good look at him.

MONAGHAN: While they're very different on the page,

I really believe they're both tortured,

and I think that's what draws

them to each other.

I think that's what keeps them

together for seventeen years.

I said, your life

is in this man's hands, right?

Of course you should meet the family.

FUKUNAGA: The classic sort of buddy cop film

is always based on conflict.

Without conflict, you don't have drama.

One of the fundamental things I like with Matthew and Woody

is that these are men with children and wives

and they live with responsibility.

Watching Matthew and Woody work together,

they certainly bring out the best in each other.

It's fun to watch them interact

because they have a friendship

outside of this friendship that they're portraying.

HARRELSON: Matthew is really a good buddy of mine

for a long time.

So it's great to get to hang out with him on a daily basis.

Time I think you hit a ceiling,

you just keep raising the bar.

You are like the Michael Jordan

of being a son of a bitch.

♪

PIZZOLATTO: Writing these actual scripts

was very, very difficult.

It was 550 pages total, written in about three months.

HARRELSON: I was really gripped by the writing.

I thought it was just as good as it gets.

PIZZOLATTO: I wrote the last six scripts after they had been cast

and rewrote the first two to more fit into their voices.

You ever been hunting, Marty?

Yeah, ten-point buck year before last.

I'm not talking about sitting in a tree house

waiting to ambush a buck come to sniff your gash bait.

Talking about tracking.

Jesus, you're a prick.

McCONAUGHEY: Every time I read

what came out of Rustin Cohle's mouth, it turned me on.

Everything had bangs to it.

I keep things separate.

I like the way I can have just one beer

without needing twenty.

People incapable of guilt

usually do have a good time.

One of the biggest things you're trying to figure out

when you're direct on your own is breaking down characters.

So, you know, to have the writer on set to talk about character

collectively with the actors is a huge resource.

That social enterprise has actually been--

for me personally, as a guy who has spent a lot of time

alone in a room, typing on a keyboard--it's been fantastic.

OK. Everyone else should move back

past Video Village.

Let's do our last looks. Let's get ready to shoot.

FUKUNAGA: When your story is on a scale

that we're telling this one on, then the world

that it's set in becomes another character.

TIM BEECH: A lot of the buildings and topography--

this swampy, spookiness of the South--

is the backdrop that the story

already fits in.

FUKUNAGA: It's a really densely green sort of landscape

mixed with the sort of industrial detritus

of refineries and other industries,

and that's all kind of part of the texture of our story,

and I want to make sure we got all that.

Landscape is an important part of the story we're telling,

and he's shot this amazing footage of South Louisiana

that really nobody has even seen before.

Nic is from these parts.

He's from Louisiana, and we're here.

We're shooting it here.

It's really rooted in place,

and I think that that really makes is feel very well.

It's not New Orleans.

It's not, you know, Bourbon Street.

We're definitely in the sticks.

You listen on this roll,

you've got frogs and cicadas in the background.

They're part of our ambiance. Mother Nature is the queen.

She is the ruler down here.

The first thing you have to contend with here

is the weather.

When you're at a location and the weather comes in,

it can be daunting.

The sky turns black, and literally it can rain

so hard you can't see twenty feet in front of you...

[Thunder]

which makes it difficult to not only shoot,

but also to move equipment and manpower

and get people out of the way

of the weather.

Mainly the mud because we're dealing with so much rain

and, you know, hauling equipment in and out of places--

even to get, you know, 300 meters that way

with a bunch of carts that, like, tear up the ground

that's supposed to look pristine because it's supposed

to be untouched--makes it hard.

After you content with the weather, you have the critters.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

STEPHENS: We regularly employ wranglers that precede the cast

and crew through the bush and catch anything that might be

dangerous, such as cottonmouths, other poisonous snakes.

We had several adventures

with wildlife.

We pulled a six-foot alligator

out from where we were building.

Our greensman did that.

Granted, we built the set in the bayou.

So it was his set before it was ours,

but a six-foot alligator will definitely get your attention.

Something I've never done in my career is,

we had birds of prey on set.

We had an owl and a hawk purely to keep the mockingbirds at bay

so we could film because they're very noise.

To cameras and mark and the B mark.

KITTLES: We're shooting on 35-millimeter film.

So I think there's gonna be a texture to it

that's just gonna bleed onto the screen.

We have reached the point where film is probably dead,

but I wanted one last romance with film

before we're forced to shoot digital forever.

Every time you change a mag and stuff, you're like,

"Ah, I asked for this. I asked to shoot film,"

but I wouldn't have had it any other way.

I say stay 35.

Let's keep it a little more claustrophobic.

LePERE-SCHLOOP: As an art director

and as all of us in the art department,

we start pretty early on with the director and the writer,

and we work with them to come up with the kind

of physical concepts of what the show is going to look like.

Each set is its own

sort of thing.

So some, we're looking

for a location that exists

and figure out how to modify that

to tell the story that we need.

LePERE-SCHLOOP: We were trying to find the perfect location

for a remote, burned church,

and the spillway provided this amazing empty canvas

where you have a lot of natural beauty

but it's also surrounded by refineries.

So we put some roads in, and we built a church

from the ground up that actually looked

like it had suffered from a serious fire.

Place is trashed.

We also built a meth shack.

Again, we started with nothing.

It was a construction site when we got there,

so just sand on the grounds.

We asked the people to stop mowing,

and we sprinkled a little seed and added some ground plants.

In a very short period of time, there's plants knee height.

It's pretty spectacular.

STEPHENS: Part of the procedural nature is,

there's a lot of investigations of old case files.

All those case files have to show crime scene photos,

dead bodies.

LYNDA REISS: We have created every single crime scene.

So we've taken people,

and we've made them up