The last time actress Jodie Foster took on the role of a police officer was 33 years ago. On this occasion she played Clarice Starling, an FBI rookie who was called in to help find a serial killer with the help of a sociopathic and anthropophagous psychiatrist named Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins. That year, 1991, “The Silence of the Lambs” won Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Picture at the Oscars. The film by the late Jonathan Demme is considered a cult work and one of the best horror and psychological thriller films in history.
More than three decades later, at 62, the Los Angeles-born actress takes on the role of detective as veteran police officer and agent Liz Danvers from Ennis, a fictional and remote town in Alaska, tasked with investigating the disappearance of Ennis employees in an Arctic Station. At his side he will have Evangeline Navarro (played by Kali Reis), an intimidating state trooper with whom he must work to find answers in an area where darkness reigns 24 hours a day at a time of year. in addition to the cold. Extreme and isolation. With two female protagonists and with the Mexican Issa López as main director – director, writer and executive producer – the popular television anthology “True Detective” returns, entitled “Night Land” for its fourth season.
Foster, who came to Mexico City to promote the series and hosts EL PAÍS with her co-star and director at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mexico City, says that the similarity she sees between “The Silence of the Lambs “ and “True Detective: Tierra Nocturnal” was in the text because he thinks both are “wonderful” and both works can be found there. “Danvers has over 30 years of experience, which is completely different than a rookie. I would like to think that Clarice [Starling, su personaje en la película de Jonathan Demme] If he had left the FBI many years ago, he would have done something different with his life. But I think that in both cases, seeing the tragedy again and again is something that changes you,” she says, smiling.
What fascinated him about the character of Danvers was how “vicious, terrible and frightening” she can be. He describes her as a stubborn person who is afraid of suffering and doesn't want to feel anything. “As we meet her in the series, we learn why she tries to hide her intuition and her emotions. I find it interesting to see that. And she also has a great sense of humor, that's what I really love about her, but especially her relationship with the character Navarro and how they fight,” says the also protagonist of Taxi Driver.
Officer Liz Danvers, played by Jodie Foster in the final season of True Detective. HBO Max
The role of Navarro was originally intended for a Latina actress, but since there was no connection to the Alaska Territory, she was chosen to portray a native ancestry from the region. Reiss, a 37-year-old former world boxing champion – from Cape Verde and Wampanoag, an Indian tribe – accepted the challenge of playing Danvers' partner, as a woman with Dominican roots and the Iñupiaq people, to whom she appealed to know and that the display on the screen is best suited.
“It was very important for me to follow the same protocols that I was taught when asking questions. How do you want to see yourself represented? What are your cultural traditions? Tell me stories about your food. I didn't want to assume that I could speak or know the experiences of other peoples just because of my indigenous heritage. And since it had mixed origins, it was something very similar. “I was able to bring this experience of having to fight between two worlds and not being satisfied with either of them into the character of Navarro,” says Reis.
The award-winning, highly rated and critically acclaimed first season of True Detective was brought to the screen a decade ago by Cary Fukunaga – an adaptation of the play of the same name by Nic Pizzolatto, who also wrote the screenplay for this installment. and this one took place in southern Louisiana and had detectives Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rustin “Rust” Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) as protagonists. And the following parts featured protagonists such as Colin Farrell, Taylor Kitsch, Vince Vaughn and Rachel McAdams in the second part (2015); and in the third (2019) to Mahershala Ali, Stephen Dorf and Carmen Ejogo. For the most part it was a production with lots of character and male energy.
In Nightland, women are not decorations or part of the landscape in a man's world. They bring with them their past, their background, their trauma and a challenge that brings both changes and new and different dimensions to the series. “The first three seasons are a meditation and observation on the male spirit and male identity in a changing world, and are very well done in that regard. But it was absurd to throw out a fourth who also wanted to do the same and who was also fathered by a woman. The interesting and obvious thing was to say: well, we're going to face the same existential problems. “The same doubt about how I present myself to 'the darkness that will consume everything' – and these are literal words from the first season of True Detective, but from the female perspective,” explains the director and writer of this new episode, which Mexican Issa. Lopez.
Issa López during the recording of a scene for “Tierra Nocturna”, the latest installment of the television saga. Lilja Jons (HBO Max)
In the darkness of the night
One of the big challenges of this new season was moving production to a deserted and extremely cold area. The humid heat, light and green of the first season of the southern United States are replaced by the snow, desolation and darkness of Alaska, called the final frontier because of the vast tracts of land that have never been mapped. However, for logistical reasons, the series could not be filmed in this state, as Foster says, “because it was too strict, the climate was not favorable for us and there were not enough roads.” Production was moved to Iceland, where there is noisy López, there is also no one to prepare you for filming outdoors at night in minus 23 degrees Celsius.
“If you take off your gloves for a minute, you immediately feel a deep pain in your hands. And that affects your actors' performances, it affects the team itself. However, there was a warrior spirit that we all shared and a belief in history that made us fight to move it forward,” says López.
Night and darkness form an edgy part of the new season, both visually and narratively. For this reason, cinematographer Florian Hofmeister and the director decided that we didn't have to fight the darkness, but rather “embrace it”.
“When you talk about a story told through images and you know that you will develop it in the dark, there is a fundamental contradiction. So even in scenes where there would be plenty of incident light, there are always corners of the image that are kept in darkness, as a thematic reminder of the darkness we always carry with us. It doesn’t matter that we are where the light is,” he adds.
López, director and screenwriter of Casi divas (2008) and co-writer of 600 Miles (2015), began attracting international attention with Gabriel Ripstein after her fourth feature Vuelven (2017), a dark fable about a group of children in Mexico survived the war on drug trafficking and the ghosts that haunt it, earning praise from both Guillermo del Toro and Stephen King. The director, who is preparing a western about the mythology of werewolves – also produced by the director of Pan's Labyrinth – knows her monsters and their references to the horror and suspense genre, which are reflected in Night Land.
Fiona Shaw plays Rose Aguineau in the series' fourth season. HBO Max
López winks and acknowledges “The Thing” for John Carpenter's sci-fi horror set in Antarctica, or also takes inspiration from the comic “30 Days of Night,” about a group of vampires trying to satisfy their thirst for blood, by taking advantage of the phenomenon of “The Thing” the polar night The references are there.
“Seven, the David Fincher film, is very loved and I think is a huge inspiration for the first season of True Detective. And Seven herself is very inspired by The Silence of the Lambs. Salal, the Arctic station where scientists disappear [en Tierra nocturna]is in some ways a reference to the Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and a reference to the Nostromo, the ship in the original Alien film. “My whole love for horror films is there,” says the director.
López is aware that comparisons will be inevitable, especially given the pedestal on which the first season stands. However, Foster, who describes himself as a fan of the series, says that “the good thing” about an anthology is that the genre, mood and tone can be maintained, but each narrative can be different. “This is the way of the future for these types of products [True Detective]. I directed an episode of Black Mirror [la antología distópica de Netflix]that needs a concept and there are many ways to approach it,” the actress continues.
“Nightland is a love letter to the fans of the first season because I love that first season too, being a fan myself. So there are undoubtedly a lot of thematic and stylistic connections, but beyond that there are little details that clearly connect the two, and it's very exciting that fans are starting to recognize that,” the director concludes animatedly.
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