he Hollow was born out of both my desire to write a noir-ish crime drama and to write a piece set squarely in my home state of Mississippi. I had long wanted to write something that hearkened back to the work of some of my literary heroes and to Mississippi’s rich literary legacy, to Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Shelby Foote. eir works burst with the unique, cultural stamp of the deepest part of the Deep South, for well and ill. I had long admired Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and the Coen Brothers’ mesmerizing cine- matic retelling of it. So, I endeavored to write a script that captured the pathos and mood of that work (and some of the literary preoccupations of the aforementioned Mississippi writers) set squarely amid the thorny, gothic beauty of my home state. A er e Historian (my rst feature), I also simply wanted to write something that was slightly more accessible to a larger audience.

I very much liked the idea that a senseless act of violence brings together these tortured, complicated characters with their own enormous baggage and forces them to reckon with their own demons, that it is the conduit through which they rise above or succumb to their baser inclinations. Everybody’s something of an ex- posed nerve. And it’s hard to locate a real “hero,” at least in the modern sense of the term. I liked the idea that our two main characters are both veterans and have been “wounded” physically and mentally, that they have not yet come to terms with their past and so cannot fully live in the present. ey literally bear scars that have not—perhaps cannot—heal. How do they move past that fact? e landscape, the Mississippi heat, the ies, the wildlife … in a way, they’re all players in a kind

of old school western about redemption and retribution. e story fed into a lot of things that had been swirling around in my head for a long time and ruminates on themes that have always and continue to fascinate me.