You cast Matthew McConaughey at the beginning of his “McConaissance”—before seeing any of his more recent dramatic performances in Killer Joe, Mud, or Dallas Buyers Club. Were you surprised by how well he was able to inhabit such a tortured character?
I wasn’t surprised as much as I was thoroughly entertained. We did the interrogation scenes in two or three days . . . before we did the rest of the 2012 scenes. We actually did 30 pages [of dialogue] in one day. It was pretty badass to watch him monologue and go off into the camera. Up to that point, he had been playing a more buttoned-up [version of his] character [in the flashbacks], intense still but like a boiling pot of water.
Lastly, I read that you thought the title True Detective was “too pulpy” for the series. What were some of the other titles you guys bounced around?
I think Nic and I both liked this one version called The Murder Ballads, but he was more in love with True Detective in terms of the broadness of the anthology. Since we were creating a brand, as much as we were creating a title for this series, we had to go more broad. Titles are tough. It’s hard to find something that everyone likes. We spent hours trying to do just that.