“Whatever story you’re telling in Louisiana, the landscape is going to become a character in it,” says Pizzolatto. “I grew up in Louisiana and spent my formative years there. There’s a contradictory nature to the place and a sort of sinister quality underneath it all. Everything lives under layers of concealment. The woods are thick and dark and impenetrable. On the other hand you have the beauty of it all from a distance. One Southern writer who’s meant a lot to me is William Faulkner. His understanding of the South and its paradoxes is one of the most comprehensive and legitimate artistic portraits of the South that exists. That’s something I’ve tapped into a lot: the dissonances of contradiction. In the South the sacred and the profane exist hand-in-hand.”