True (True) Crime: Making Dennis Lehane’s “Black Bird”

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Here’s your choice: Serve a 10-year jail sentence, or go free after transferring to a maximum-security prison and getting a potential serial killer to confess. That seed feeds the drama of Black Bird, a true-crime saga adapted by thriller novelist and screenwriter Dennis Lehane.

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“The thing I locked in on was the sense of being dropped into a type of hell and having to navigate without a map,” says Lehane quoted by TV Insider. 

The AppleTV+ series stars (Taron Egerton as charismatic drug dealer Jimmy Keene) and Paul Walter Hauser as serial killer Larry Hall with Keene’s father played by Ray Liotta in his final TV role.

As the story unfolds, many gray areas emerge. Says Lehane, “I don’t think too many people are just straight-out evil.”

The 6-episode drama is based on the real James Keene’s 2010 autobiography, ‘In With the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption.’

Game Rant spoke with Lehane, who is also showrunner. “This might sound strange, but I've been looking to tell a story that has a clean mythological line, and this was it,” he said. “If you look at it, it has all the trappings of a classical hero's journey: you have this young man, he is sent out by his village to confront an ogre that is threatening members of the village, he heads out into a dark forest and battles the monster, and he comes back a changed man. It's as old as time.”

In the Just Shoot It podcast Lehane explains that the tone for the show was influenced by Netflix shows Mindhunter and Ozark among others.

“I was really clear with the production designer and with the DP and the directors that that I had a strong visual palette for what I wanted to see. The palette that I wanted for the pastoral scenes was a Days Of Heaven Terrence Malick vibe, and I wanted Jimmy's life to be Michael Mann. I wanted it to be very sleek, very cold. So that the juxtaposition of the two worlds is that they can't really ultimately come together. And then into this pastoral world comes the [serial] killer.”

He says he also made a point not to show any of the actual murders on screen, preferring to suggest horror in much the same way that Hitchcock did in Psycho.

The podcast hosts also ask about of Taryn Egerton, who is also a producer on the show, “Are we ever allowed to cast American actors to play Americans? In America?

“I'm worried those days are coming,” jokes Lehane. “I feel like with Taryn, it just goes back to you know, the Brits, man. Gotta love working with the Brits. You just get so much range and you get a lot less BS. You know, they're not like running around going out and shooting dogs at night. So they can authentically play a psycho. They're trained, classically trained actors.”

Lehane was a writer on The Wire and earns most praise for his dialogue. The Guardian judges “this allusive, switchbacking dialogue Lehane’s finest work yet.”

Indiewire’s Ben Travers thinks Black Bird “a stealthy piece of storytelling that works quite well as a tense, cat-and-mouse thriller.” he continuing investigation into Larry’s murders “creates a familiar rhythm that the show can be a little too eager to lean on, but Lehane still subverts the traditional TV detective genre by illustrating law & order’s systemic limits.”

THR is less convinced, finding the true crime tale “never especially authentic or convincing on any factual level. It is, however, thoroughly unsettling and anchored by exceptional performances who collectively more than compensate for myriad flaws of structure and focus.”

Reviewer Daniel Fienberg singles out Liotta who died last month aged 67.  “There’s a raw immediacy to Liotta’s work here that I’m sure would hit home without the real-life grief.”