In ‘Under the Banner of Heaven,’ DLanceBlack weaves a true-crime tale of faith and family—with a little help from Andrew Garfield.
Under the Banner of Heaven,’s best-selling account of two gruesome murders in ’80s suburban Utah and the fundamentalist Mormon orthodoxy that fueled them. Grazer and his producing partner,tapped Black to write the feature film more than a decade ago. For Black, who grew up in a devout Mormon household, the book unlocked the dangers and ugliness of a religion he never fully understood. The material was deeply personal, but he couldn’t quite crack it. “My drafts were incredibly long,” he says.
He needed time, it turns out—to grow as both a writer and a human, to be sure. But an ever-evolving media landscape also needed to shift to meet his vision. The prestige limited series, a format that skyrocketed in popularity years after Black got to work onproved the perfect vehicle for his adaptation, tripling the number of hours he could block out to tell a complicated, sweeping, blistering tale of faith and family.
Now, at long last, his 10-plus years’ worth of work reaches the screen in FX’s searing new thriller, premiering next Thursday. You could say the wait was worth it. “I hope I’m coming into my own. It’s taken a long time to get here,” Black says. “I’ve learned I have to hold myself to a very high standard, and I think I’ve done that on this show in a way I haven’t in quite some time.
Black had a tough time figuring out how to approach that historical scope before landing on an investigative frame. After speaking with real detectives involved in the case, who asked to not be identified or depicted, Black took the freedom of fiction to create characters to guide the audience—Pyre and his partner, a Native American non-Mormon named Bill Taba . They follow the real bones of the case as Black came to understand them through interviews as well as the book.
Black says it was a relief, when he first read the book, to finally understand “just how patriarchal the church had been, and in many ways still was, and how such an absolute patriarchal structure threatens the safety of many women.” He also “felt an obligation to let people know.
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