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Mexican horror filmmaker Issa López may not have
been an obvious pick to spearhead Season 4 of True Detective, the
latest in HBO’s anthology series.
article here
López, who created, wrote and directed all six
episodes of True Detective: Night Country, is best known for her
2017 crime film, Tigers Are Not Afraid, which earned rave reviews
from critics and gained a cult following after its relatively small opening in
the US.
“If I can bring back the feeling of two characters
that are carving entire worlds of secrets within them, and trying to solve a
very sinister crime in a very strange, eerie environment that is America, but
it also doesn’t feel like America completely, and then I sprinkled some
supernatural in it — I think we’re going to capture the essence of True
Detective,” López told TheWrap’s
Loree Seitz.
Season
4 of True Detective introduces the franchise’s first female
detective duo in detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro
(Kali Reis), former partners who reunite to investigate the disappearance of
six men working at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station in small town Ennis,
Alaska.
During lockdown Lopez had been developing her own
murder mystery scripts when HBO came calling. “I believe they saw Tigers
Are Not Afraid, which is very gritty and ultra-real and violent, but at the
same time has elements of the supernatural and [is] very atmospheric,” she
told Matt Grobar at Deadline. “So I think that [they saw] something in that
movie, they were like, ‘Oh, this could be an interesting point of view
for True Detective.’”
Showrunner/Writer/Director/ EP
Issa López on the set of “True Detective: Night Country”
On developing her idea for the format created by
Nic Pizzolatto she revealed that David Fincher’s Seven was a
big influence. Like True Detective it has two different
odd-couple characters who come together to solve a mystery.
Isabella Star LeBlanc as Leah
Danvers in “True Detective: Night Country.” Cr: Max
“I’m sure that was one of the references that
informed Pizzolatto’s writing, at least unconsciously, so I was thinking
of Seven. It was two detectives, a forgotten corner of America with
its own system of culture and rituals, and it just clicked massively with True
Detective. It didn’t take a lot of effort.”
The new series shares with the first
season an undercurrent of the supernatural but it also layers in the politics
of environmental change, of marginalized communities and, most clearly, male
violence on women.
“The environmental theme came when I
started to understand the inner workings of northwest Alaska and the industries
and the conflicts in the area,” she said to Grobar. “You just start to create
this town, and the forces that pull energy inside it. Mining is a huge deal in
that area of Alaska, and there’s constant conflict around the benefits of a
burgeoning energy industry, but at the same time, the damage that it creates in
an environment where people need the environment to survive. So, it’s just rich
grounds to create the story.”
Finn Bennet as Officer Peter
Prior in “True Detective: Night Country.” Cr: Max
After focusing on women that had been
taken and killed in two of the four films López had previously directed,
spotlighting the story of a missing Iñupiaq women felt like the “natural
continuation” of her interests.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s Mexico,
the US or Canada … this violence doesn’t care for borders,” López said.
When it came to casting, López knew she wanted at
least one of the characters of the two main characters to come from a native
community, and was impressed by Reis, a professional boxer who broke into
acting with 2021 film Catch the Fair One. Reis is of Cherokee,
Nipmuc and Seaconke Wampanoag ancestry.
Erling Eliasson as Travis in
“True Detective: Night Country.” Cr: Max
“I knew that one of the characters
had to be indigenous because I don’t believe in bringing agents of justice to
fix the situation in the native community. I simply don’t believe in that,”
López said. “It was a challenge because there were not indigenous stars in the
tradition of ‘True Detective,’ but that needs to change,” she said.
“Now we have a Lily Gladstone [Killers of the
Flower Moon] and now we have a Kali Reis,” López said. “This is the year
that changes.”
López worked closely with Germany-based DP Florian
Hoffmeister (Tár, Pachinko, Great Expectations)
on each episode. Hoffmeister told Mia
Funk and Halia Reingold at the Creative
Process podcast why the story’s wider scope appealed to him.
“It’s about the transient nature of
life up in the polar North,” he said, “Permanent settlement is only possible
since the Industrial Revolution, because normally the indigenous cultures were
living and communicating with the land in a whole different way.”
He describes his experience of
filming in a region (Iceland stood in for Alaska) where for months on end
daylight is restricted to just a few hours a day.
“Further North you get no sunlight at
all. And it was an interesting creative decision to embrace how lighting has a
whole different utility and necessity than just regular light. if I come home
at nights here in Berlin, I might switch on a few lights but if you live in
darkness, your relationship with lighting changes. If you live in darkness, you
tend to over light.”
The locations in True Detective: Night
Country included an ice rink and a police station, which he lit as if
every light were on, “because you’re literally craving light, and you don’t
want your workspace during the day to be moody and dark.”
Since the murder mystery genre tends
to have moody lighting, this presented an interesting conundrum. “If you go to
the supermarket, and it’s minus-20, you will keep your car running while you’re
inside. Because if you switch the car off the engine might freeze,” he
explained. “So there’s a whole different way to deal with what we take very
commonly as the achievements of our industrialized living environment. I wanted
that to be reflected in the lighting. So [scenes] in the police station and ice
rink are really bright, basically switched everything on.”
They started prepping the series in
summer in Iceland during which time it barely got dark because of the region’s
“endless summer” but finished shooting in almost perma-darkness in the winter
months.
“If you light at night in a
snowfield, the first thing to burn and [overexpose] will be the snow. So the
whole lighting chain outside had to be tackled differently,” he said. “I think
there’s some really exciting footage where we shot right on the blink (of
darkness) where we can still see and you get the scale of the landscape, but
it’s almost disappearing into blackness.”
Hoffmeister also suggests that one of
the themes of the show is this feeling of a disconnect. “It feels like the end
of the world because I think you have this disconnection between us and the
environment. And the biggest contrast with the indigenous people that used to
live there is that obviously they had to live connected with their
surroundings, but we don’t. Not only are we disconnected from our environment,
but we also disconnected from each other.”
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