Under the Banner of Heaven creator Dustin Lance Black on his decade-long journey to adapt the show

Dustin Lance Black has been thinking about Under the Banner of Heaven for a very, very long time.

The Oscar-winning Milk writer first started working to adapt Jon Krakauer's book about a decade ago, with plans to turn it into a feature film. The book chronicles the real-life double murder of Mormon housewife Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, a horrifying killing that rocked 1980s Utah and made headlines for its ties to fundamentalist Mormonism. Not only does the book recount the crime, but it also explores the very origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, raising questions about the church's history and its most foundational principles.

Now, Black hopes to do the same with his long-gestating TV miniseries, which stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Brenda and Andrew Garfield as the fictional detective investigating her murder.

"It's a bit surreal," Black tells EW of finally bringing Under the Banner of Heaven to TV. "There are many times in the past 10 years that I thought this would never see the light of day. [At the premiere], I was pinching myself quite a bit and literally going, 'Is this happening? Did we find a way to get a story like this to screen? Did we find people courageous enough to participate?'"

For Black, adapting Krakauer's book presented both creative and personal challenges. The writer himself grew up in an LDS household, and he says that the first time he read the book, he was shaken by how it raised many of the same questions he had as a young boy. Much of Black's work has dealt with themes of faith and gender — he wrote several episodes of the HBO series Big Love, about a fundamentalist Mormon family who practices polygamy — but Under the Banner of Heaven is his most personal work yet, and one he was determined to get right.

"This wasn't one that I did for the money, that's for sure," he adds. "This is one I did for passion. I did it because I believe it's a necessary message right now."

With the first two episodes of Under the Banner of Heaven now streaming on Hulu, EW spoke to Black about his long journey to adapt the show.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This is a true story, but the show is framed through the eyes of the fictional Detective Jeb Pyre, played by Andrew Garfield. Why did you decide to structure the show through Pyre's eyes?

DUSTIN LANCE BLACK: I was taking my cues from my own experience reading the book, which I must have read 20 years ago when it first came out. The book demands that the reader be very, very active to try to put together [the pieces]. How did the past plant the seeds of a crime that would take place in the '80s? The founders of this faith in the 19th century decided on the laws and the rules, and how did that turn to bloodshed later? I wanted the viewer to be as active as the reader had to be. In order to do that, I had to present not just the Lafferty story, but also the history of the Mormon church and how that's pertinent in terms of solving the case in 1984. And I needed one other element, which Jon Krakauer provides in the book as the writer, but we don't have here: a perspective, a point of view, a way in. When I was reading the book, it felt like an investigation, so I thought, well, that's what we ought to do.

I looked into the actual investigation. The more I looked into it, the more it was clear that there is a true-crime thriller here. This case was not solved overnight. It was 10 days of trying to figure out, who did it? Why did they do it? And where are they? There was a list discovered of more people to be killed, and I thought, well, this has a real classic thriller heartbeat to it.

I thought if I told those stories, then perhaps I can recreate that experience I had when I read the book. That probably also explains why it took 10 years and why those three, four years of trying to make it as a two-hour feature film were doomed to fail. There just wasn't room to tell all those stories.

When did you shift from writing this as a feature film to a miniseries?

I worked incredibly hard for a very long time to crack it in a two-hour format. People today don't want to see a drama that's over two hours. I kept having to pull stories out in order to get it to fit in two hours, and even then, I was down to only telling the Lafferty story, and it still felt like bullet points. There are so many characters, and there were so many steps in how these brothers went from being admired and respected in the Mormon world to stepping into constitutionalist circles and then stepping into fundamentalist religious circles. It was those steps towards fundamentalism that led to the bloodshed. I needed enough room to tell that story honestly.

I want people to be able to make comparisons between what the Laffertys were going through in Utah in the '80s and what so many people in the world are going through right now. We've gone through some very dark days, much like Utah in the '80s — economically, physically in terms of health and surviving a pandemic, the threats of war and violence. [These are] the scenarios that we've all dreaded and thought perhaps we'd never have to see, and well, they're on our doorstep. Sadly, it seems humanity has this instinct to go back to fundamentalist texts, whether it's the Constitution, ancient law, or the Bible, and to try to follow those texts word for word, thinking that's going to be the path back to happiness and abundance. Well, it's not true.

This story is a cautionary tale to say that if you see a loved one, or if you yourself are stepping down a fundamentalist path, you are following rules that were written almost exclusively by men in a time when we did not know better. So, you might want to ask yourself, who wrote those rules? Why did they write those rules? Who do they harm today now that we do know better? And don't we owe it to ourselves and our children to do better? When you know better, you can do better. That's the lesson of this true-crime thriller. Stepping back into the fundamentalist religious text is saying that you're okay with a misogynist God, and I'm not okay with that.

Like Jon Krakauer's book, this story is interspersed with the origin of Mormonism, and we see flashbacks to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. As a writer, how did you figure out how to structure that and when to deploy those flashbacks?

In the pursuit of wanting it to feel like an investigation, the decision was to make the entire series live inside of Pyre's head. So, we see the investigation as he is investigating, but we see the Laffertys' story only as he is hearing those tales. And we only see the Mormon history when he is either remembering that history or being told that history in service of solving the crime.

A lot of true-crime stories treat the victim as a plot device, but this show takes care to dive into Brenda Lafferty's story and who she was. How did you want to approach Brenda's story?

I never wanted to see Brenda as the victim, because that's not the woman who I came to know in my research. I looked at her and her family with admiration when I read the book. Having grown up Mormon, I understood that wow, this is a pretty modern Mormon home she grew up in. A pretty loving, egalitarian Mormon home, if that's possible. I met her family up in Kimberly, Idaho, and got to know them and adore and admire them. They eventually trusted me with her journals and with the letters she was writing to her sister, who was on a mission in Argentina when all of this took place. I felt like I knew her once I read all of that. It was as if I was able to interview her. Her curiosity — particularly for a woman in the Mormon faith at that time, and I would argue still today — is an act of courage. Brenda was courageous enough to ask questions, to challenge assumptions of what the roles of women should be.

The fact that she was murdered is heartbreaking. It's tragic, it's gruesome, it's wrong. And I wanted to get that out of the way as soon as humanly possible. We make that known, and we do that in this series in the first 10 minutes, so we can get on with the business of getting to know her and to see her courage. We know she risked her life and gave her life in this pursuit, and I think that helps us understand the stakes as we see her doing things that should be mundane. Why can't women ask the leadership of their church a question? Part of that is because it's all men, and those are the rules that men have made. And is this a problem exclusive to the Mormon church? No.

When I talk about courageous women asking questions and challenging assumptions, it goes beyond the Mormon church. I would like anyone who's listening to this, reading this, or watching this to say to themselves, does my faith believe in a God who believes that men and women are equally capable and should have equal opportunity? Or do I pray to a misogynist?

You've talked about how this is a personal story for you, having grown up in a Mormon household. Did you have any hesitation about diving into this narrative?

I didn't have hesitation, but it was a long road to get to the place where I thought I could tell this story. I grew up as a devout Mormon, and I loved my Mormon home. I still see great value in some of the things we believed in and what some of our priorities were. But I had a lot of questions as a kid, and I learned pretty quickly that was dangerous and not allowed.

Most of my questions had to do with how I saw my mother being treated and other women in the Relief Society, which is the women's group. It didn't make sense to me that my mother was treated less than the men leading the church because frankly, I could tell she was more capable and smarter than most of them. But I had to put those questions on a shelf because that's what we're taught to do.

My mother would leave the church, and I would follow her out because the church failed to protect her. It's not too dissimilar a story in some ways. But it would be many years before I got answers to any of my questions. This book was one of those lightning strikes. It answered so many of the questions I had, and it answered questions I didn't even think to ask. I challenged the book, as well. I read the church's criticisms of it, and I looked into those, and I got to have those conversations with Jon Krakauer once I got the property.

I don't think I was ready to tell this story until I was on the other side of Big Love. I loved helping write that, but I didn't create it. The tone of that show kept me from examining the faith in the way I felt it needed to be, and this book provided a framework that I thought could help me honestly and deeply examine my childhood faith.

Was there anything you learned from Krakauer's book or your own research that really surprised you?

I learned a tremendous amount. Before the book, I think I was resigned to just not knowing. I wasn't going to church anymore. There were things I missed about it and about that community, but [the book] lit a fire under me to ask the tough questions. I think for most mainstream Mormons, almost all of Mormon history is a surprise. When I was growing up, there were absolute flat denials that polygamy ever existed within the Mormon church. Gradually, the Mormon church is starting to recognize that and admit that, but these were all secrets kept from us. Some of the, I suppose, more outrageous claims by the church aren't things you learn in Sunday school. You don't learn them until you've been in the church for a very, very long time, when you're so deep in it you can't leave. So yes, around every corner, there lies a surprise in a faith that says to doubt your doubts, or don't dig into the history and just listen to your prophet today.

But those surprises are a relief. They might be a shock for a second, but there's nothing that feels better than finally understanding something that didn't make sense. It makes sense why women are treated the way they're treated in the Mormon faith, if that's where it began. There is such comfort in finally understanding. I hope that like the book, some mainstream Mormons might [watch the show]. They might not talk about it in church, but I hope that if they watch the show, they will be illuminated, and there will be some relief to be had in knowing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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