Jodie Foster on How Night Country’s “Mystical” Setting “Served the True Detective Model”
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post Jodie Foster on How Night Country’s “Mystical” Setting “Served the True Detective Model” appeared first on Consequence.
Writer/director Issa López laughs when Consequence asks why setting True Detective: North Country during the darkest months of Alaska’s winter excited her. “Well, if you set out to make an noir, it’s just like, why haven’t we done this? The moment that the night starts and doesn’t go away, it’s an invitation to the things that hide in the shadows to come out and play.”
It’s an answer that speaks to the pervading eeriness of the newest True Detective installment, as Night Country begins on December 17th — “the last sunset of the year” for those who live 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, as ominous text informs us. And that sets the stage for an eerie murder mystery unlike any other, as detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) investigate some unexpected deaths that speak to a much bigger secret within the community. All during an endless night, shot in Iceland over the long winter months of 2022 and 2023.
“There’s something very beautiful and kind of mystical and eerie about this idea of a place where we don’t see the sun for three months, where it’s dark all the time and cold,” Jodie Foster says during a roundtable interview with press. “And I think that it really served the True Detective model of, you know, let’s locate the place first, and then the weirdness of that place, in some ways, will inform the psychological space of that character.”
Continues Foster, “That’s really the power of the first True Detective — it’s in the bayou in Louisiana. It’s hot, steamy, and there’s something eerie and kind of grimy about that. Well, we’ve kind of done the opposite by bringing in a different lens, a feminine lens, on this place at the end of the earth, that is so isolated and so misunderstood. That in some ways is older than anything on Earth.”
An acclaimed filmmaker whose past projects include 2017’s Tigers Are Not Afraid, López says she’d already been developing the idea that would become Night Country before getting “the call from HBO asking what would I do with True Detective. And I don’t think that happened by chance. I think that there was a reason that I was thinking already in these terms, because when I heard that, I chuckled, because it was just perfect.”
López says that as soon as she decided to set the story in the northern reaches of Alaska, Native and Indigenous representation would be important, because that’s 70 percent of the area’s ethnic make-up. “You cannot in good conscience set up a story in this universe if you don’t understand that 70% of what you’re saying has to deal with this and has to be about it. It’s not about background. It’s not about decoration. If you are going to set up a story here, you have to embrace it, to understand it, and respect it.”
Along those lines, she established that one of her two detectives would be Indigenous, so “it was not people that come from a different culture, or white people figuring out the situation. It had to come from the people in the region.” In addition, Native writers like Princess Daazhraii Johnson went through the scripts and collaborated on making sure the material accurately represented their culture, while still creating good drama. “After they read the pilot, they said to me, emotionally moved, ‘Where was Navarro? We have been waiting for her all over our lives,'” López says. “Which felt like such a powerful thing. It moved me to tears.”
Central to the story is the issue of murdered and missing Indigenous women, which Kali Reis hopes will bring more awareness of “the epidemic that’s been plaguing our people from the dawn of time. Something like a big production like this, you have eyes on it that wouldn’t normally talk about it and do research. The more attention we put on things like this, the more we make it a big deal, it becomes a big deal. Because It is. And you know, that can motivate or change conversations. It just needs to be talked about more. I wish we didn’t have to talk about it as something that’s still currently happening.”
Filming the series in Iceland meant that the production team brought many Inuit and Native actors in from Alaska, as well as Canada and Greenland. And with everything else the production team brought to set, though, from props to wardrobe to food, “all of that together made it so that when the Alaskans got to set, they felt at home. They recognized it as their own. And that let me rest, that I had done it right.”
Adds Reis, “Unfortunately we couldn’t shoot there, but we brought Alaska where we shot. Actually, it felt like we were there the entire time.”
That much unending darkness is one López identifies as “such a foreign concept for the people that don’t live beyond the Arctic Circle.” This includes her, as a native Mexican: “It was the most alluring, strange phenomenon. And getting into it was so fascinating, because the interesting thing is both Alaskans and Icelanders, when we would talk about it, they would say, ‘I don’t think you’re understanding the dark, when it comes, because it’s not scary. It’s a space where you go inside and you become creative. It’s cozy.'”
And López says she did actually experience that while making the show. “We became like this family that would get together in coziness to drink our hot tea and make the show that we loved. It was really a beautiful, creative experience.”
True Detective: Night Country (Max)
Though, she continues, “When the dark season started to approach, the Icelanders started to say, ‘Hey, just be careful. Are you sure you’re going to be fine? We play music and we have lamps that keep you happy.’ And I was like, ‘It’s not as easy as you said.’ So I think that part of it is you talk yourself into keeping a little sunshine in your heart through it.”
When it came to capturing this bleakness on camera, López sings the praises of Oscar-nominated cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, who according to her “made this show possible. He’s a true artist. I talked to a lot of DPs for this one, because it’s a challenge, you know, working on the ice, and working on the ice in the dark is a very unique talent. Florian, before this, had done many, many things in his career, but one of the things he made is The Terror [Season 1], which also happens in the North Pole, in the Arctic, and that’s how the conversation started.”
Continues López, “We both had this vision that instead of fighting the dark, letting the dark come in. So we have these rich, profound blacks and dark areas in the shots, even the ones that happen inside, because the whole ethos of the show is you can only see part of the reality. There is more that you’re not seeing. He was integral to the identity of the show.”
Foster, after decades in the business, is used to the idea of night shoots: “You usually get a system down for that — you wear eye shades and earplugs.” However, she continues, “I don’t think anyone could be ready for that cold. It doesn’t matter how many pairs of boots you have on and warmers and all of that. It really influences how you speak, how you act, your irritability. And I think we really used that on screen. I think it was important actually, to really feel that real depth of the cold in that place and it really comes out. It’s very different than it would’ve been had we been shooting on a soundstage somewhere comfy.”
Adds Reis, “Yeah, nobody can prepare you for that cold. But I think being a night shoot, it added to the depth and the darkness of the actual story we were telling. It’s a character within itself. And it makes you really, really feel the cold, the night, the vast unending abyss of darkness.”
True Detective: Night Country premieres Sunday, January 14th on HBO.
Jodie Foster on How Night Country’s “Mystical” Setting “Served the True Detective Model”
Liz Shannon Miller
Popular Posts
Brad Wilk: Rage Against the Machine "Will Not Be Touring or Playing Live Again"
Thomas Dolby, Thompson Twins' Tom Bailey, and Modern English Top Totally Tubular Festival Lineup
Billy Joel Announces 2024 Tour Dates, Including Shows with Stevie Nicks and Sting
Houston Rapper Viper Arrested After Allegedly Holding Woman in Captivity for Years
Natalie Portman: Method Acting Is a “Luxury Women Can’t Afford”
