How True Detective's VFX Team Created One Of TV's Most Brutal Gunshot Scenes

The lead up to the fifth episode of "True Detective" season 1 is already filled with shocking twists and turns, as the Dora Lange case starts to take a murkier turn. In episode 5, detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) track down a covert meth lab in a Louisiana bayou, where Reggie (Charles Halford) and Dewall Ledoux (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) are camping out amid a minefield of explosive traps. Cohle pulls a gun on Dewall without hesitation while Hart checks out the interior of the hut, where he comes across two kidnapped children, who look severely traumatized. Enraged, he shoots Reggie in the face, while Dewall makes a run for it, and dies after tripping over one of the explosive traps. Body parts fly in all directions as the two detectives look on in horror, as the price for their impulsivity would be to concoct an elaborate lie that the two will go on to parrot for the rest of their lives.

Although Cohle and Hart's identical lies earn them promotions after the incident occurs, the truth comes back to haunt them during their separate interviews in 2012. While the two have not spoken to each other in years, they preserve the concocted version, as some truths are best left uncovered, even after a case reaches a turning point. Even Cohle, who refuses to do things by the book and embraces his wayward methods of investigation, holds on to this secret years after the Lange case is reopened.

How exactly did the VFX team bring this brutal flashback to life? Director Cary Joji Fukunaga spoke to Vulture and revealed the ins and outs of the scene in vivid detail, and here's what he had to say.

Fukunaga starts by explaining how Reggie's death scene was shot, where Halford, the actor, donned a "face makeup piece" that would make the bloody aftermath of the shooting look believable. The act of Reggie being shot was accomplished with an empty revolver, and after the character fell to the ground, another shot was set up with blank rounds with "three different kinds of exit material:"

"One was just a black bag full of blood, one was a bag full of brain matter, and one was a bag of like hair and bone. It was pretty nasty. Then, to finish off the shot, Felicity Bowring, our makeup artist, had spent the entire night coming up with this prosthetic device that went on the actor's head that was kind of like if a sunflower had opened up inside of his head. It was just disgusting."

After filming the aftermath of the shooting with these grotesque props and prosthetics, the VFX team stepped to streamline the trajectory of the scene, and Fukunaga chose to cut to Hart's face instead of lingering too long on Reggie's body. This was a smart decision, as the split-second glimpse of Reggie's blasted, battered head feels more impactful in conjunction with Hart's expression: a combination of fury and regret. We see Reggie crumple to the ground, but the focus shifts immediately to Dewall's blind dash to safety and Cohle's building anxiety, as he realizes that things have already escalated beyond control and might just get worse.

This brings us to Dewall's accidental death due to the self-planted Bouncing Betty mines, which, as Fukunaga describes, is "designed to be maiming and killing people, and it goes off at the midsection of the body." 

While the Ledouxes planted the explosives to keep intruders at bay, Dewall's death by the same devices is pretty ironic, yet fitting. Even if both men had been apprehended with by-the-book means, the justice system's fickle nature could have swayed in favor of the powerful and the corrupt. The fact that the Ledouxes die a dog's death inches toward the ideas of true justice, but the detectives can never let this uncomfortable truth come to light. Fukunaga explained that when Dewall's body explodes, the shrapnel hits the car near Cohle, highlighting the severity of the explosion and the danger it could pose within a set radius.

VFX was used to simulate the effect of an exploding mine, followed by a "blood and guts explosion" that was filmed on a dummy enveloped in rest mist, and the fake body was switched out when the mist cleared. After the mangled torso hit the ground, Cohle's perspective of the moment was shot:

"Then on Matthew McConaughey's coverage of the same moment, we had set up this junked out car that was behind him with pre-rigged bullet holes. Then when we put it all together, we were able to digitally erase the holes in the car and make those appear within a number of frames on the edit. We did the same thing with the car windows that explode behind him."

This was done to induce an effective, visceral sound effect of metal shards flying in Cohle's direction, adding to the intensity of the mess that the two detectives have to clean up. Everyone happens in the blink of an eye, gearing "True Detective" towards more revelations that feel more violent than a grisly mishap in the bayou.