True Detective returns Sunday, January 14 on HBO, as True Detective: Night Country debuts. Issa Lopez is the creator, director and executive producer, and Jodie Foster portrays Det. Liz Danvers. Eight men who were operating a research station in Alaska disappear, and Danvers and Det. Evangeline Navarro, played by Kali Reis, investigate.
Lopez is a Mexican filmmaker whose work includes Tigers are Not Afraid and Todo Mal. She told B+C she was “fighting madness” during the pandemic, and was kicking around ideas for a whodunit movie.
Then HBO reached out and asked her what she might do with True Detective.
She’d not done television before.
“I love cinema more than anything in the world, but I do love good TV,” Lopez said. “It’s a dream of anybody — if I ever make TV, I wish it was with HBO.”
Besides watching the earlier seasons of True Detective, Lopez watched the films Seven (“a masterpiece!”) and The Silence of the Lambs to help get her in the mindset. Foster, of course, played investigator Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to bring back Jodie as a detective,” Lopez said she wondered.
Lopez sent Night Country scripts and her Tigers movie to Foster. She was sure Foster would turn the project down. “She has a reputation for being incredibly picky with what she takes,” Lopez said.
The actress and director met for lunch. They went over a script. Lopez had written Danvers as a woman on the verge of a breakdown. Foster said she liked playing powerful women. She had some other ideas. “She could be bitter and she could be tired and she could be a terrible stepmom,” Lopez said Foster suggested.
The director countered, “You want me to make her into an a**hole.”
Foster responded, “Yup.”
Foster was in.
Lopez was also keen to create the rare project where the antihero, a cornerstone of peak TV, is a female. How many female antiheroes can you name?
“After the Walter Whites, after the Tony Sopranos, after the Donald Drapers … having a woman go there would be fascinating,” Lopez said.
A Decade of ‘True Detective’
Season one of True Detective, with Matthew McConaghey and Woody Harrelson, was set in Louisiana and premiered in 2014. Season two, with Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams, was set in California and aired in 2015. Season three, from 2019, had Mahershala Ali and Carmen Ejogo, and was based in the Ozarks.
Season four of the anthology series has six episodes. Reviews from the new season are pretty positive. USA Today called Night Country “an astounding work of art.”
Entertainment Weekly gave it a B. “Strip away the spooky atmospheric embellishments and obligatory Easter eggs, and the series is still a shrewd and engrossing saga about community, generational trauma, industrialization and how perilous it can be to underestimate women,” it said.
NPR said it is “the best True Detective season since the original.”
‘Very Peculiar’ Alaska
Lopez said a sense of place has always been vital to True Detective. She loved the idea of setting the series in Alaska, which she described as “a very peculiar universe.” It’s cold, it’s vast, it’s “its own ecosystem,” Lopez said. She added that the state has almost double the number of people who are reported missing, per capita, compared to the rest of the U.S., and almost double the murder rate.
“I felt like that was an interesting thing to explore,” she said.
HBO felt it would be difficult to pull off such a large production in remote Alaska. So they shot the series in Iceland, with B-roll shot in Alaska.
Lopez called it a “challenge” to make Iceland look like Alaska. “Ice is ice, but the cities, the streets, the cars — nothing looks like Alaska,” she said. “We had to bring stuff from Alaska, from wardrobe to cans for the pantries.”
Alaska often emerges as a minor character in series set there, including the one-season ABC drama Alaska Daily, ‘90s drama Northern Exposure, which recently debuted on Prime Video, and unscripted shows such as Bering Sea Gold and Alaskan Bush People on Discovery.
“It’s a corner of America we don’t often see in the media,” Lopez said. “It feels full of secrets.”
