This spillway was also used in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Director of True Detective, Cary Fukunaga, worked on a short film with Beasts director Behn Zeitlin.

Fukunaga ended up hiring the production designer of Beasts, Alex DiGerlando, to create the haunting atmosphere of the first season of True Detective. (source: vulture)

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The burned-downed church in True Detective was constructed for the show near the Bonnet Carre Spillway. The flats surrounding the levee were not easy to reach. As the True Detective production designer recalls in an interview with vulture:

“You had to get to it by driving down a service road over a levee, down a mud road, and then we even had to drop down gravel to make it reachable. There was a lot of, Is this worth it?”

The result was the toxic verdant green of a watershed swamp, pocketed with light reflecting off the refineries and industrial-sized construction.

Constructed in 1931 (and about 12 miles west of New Orleans), the Bonnet Carre Spillway allows floodwaters from the Mississippi River to flow into Lake Pontchartrain and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

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