With a lesser actor, the part would have had to be drastically rewritten." I'd seen Killer Joe and knew he was one of the few actors who could say Rust's dialogue and make you believe it. "When Matthew expressed an interest, it was right before his renaissance. "That was another way I got lucky," says Pizzolatto. It helped that the newly in-demand McConaughey saw a copy of the script and lobbied to play the enigmatic Rust Cohle, a man plagued by hallucinations and his own pessimistic vision of an unjust world. "At that point, I'd only written two episodes and had a rough outline of where the show would go. "I'm still a little amazed they agreed," he says. Incredibly, he got it: he is True Detective's sole writer, executive producer and showrunner, an almost unheard-of deal in America, where writing teams and copious notes from producers and studio execs are the norm. "But by the time HBO expressed an interest, I still had no real experience." Despite this, Pizzolatto held his nerve and demanded complete creative control. "I knew True Detective wasn't something I could allow anyone else to develop," he says. It's a meteoric rise by any standards – and it doesn't stop there. He is now being hailed as the hottest thing in Hollywood by everyone from the LA Times to the Daily Beast, with Galveston set to become a film, too. In the month since True Detective premiered in America, Pizzolatto has been compared to the three Davids ( Simon, Milch and Chase – the men behind The Wire, Deadwood and The Sopranos) and has just signed a two-year deal with HBO that will allow him to develop a second series, while working on additional projects.
The result is already being talked about in the same hushed tones normally reserved for the likes of Breaking Bad and The Wire, no small achievement for a 38-year-old former academic with next to no TV experience. The point wasn't to write another serial-killer show." "I wasn't interested in doing what everyone else was doing. The big question is: why have their lives fallen apart so dramatically? "I wanted to look at the relationship between these men and how it changed," says Pizzolatto. Pizzolatto switches the action between 1995, when his two detectives (blustery family man Harrelson, obsessive loner McConaughey) are investigating the ritualistic murder of a young runaway, and 2012, when those same detectives, now long since out of the force, are being interviewed in connection with a new death.
The show feels less like a standard TV procedural, and more like a crime novel come to vivid life. A thriller unlike any other, True Detective is melancholic, dense with symbolism, and features astonishing performances from its leading duo, who play a pair of detectives searching for a possible serial killer. It is now a new HBO drama starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. "I wrote about everything I could think of – and one of those scripts was True Detective." He wrote for 48-hour stretches, crashing out only to dream about his characters. That sentence doesn't quite do justice to what Pizzolatto did next – which was quit DePauw, move his young family to Los Angeles, and start churning out scripts like a man possessed.