The Watch - 'True Detective: Night Country' Episode 1, With Creator Issa Lopez

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Chris and Andy talk about the first episode of 'True Detective: Night Country.' They discuss how it differs from the past 'True Detective' iterations (1:00) and how the setting's constant nighttime affects the story (24:56). Then Chris is joined by creator Issa Lopez to talk about how she came up with the idea for the show and working with Jodie Foster (35:37). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Issa Lopez Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Don Draper really buy the world of Coke? Did Tony Soprano really die? Or just order more onion rings? The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy. From Spotify and the Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time. Find Stick the Landing on Wednesdays on the prestige TV feed, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know about one in three people?

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Trimphaya. Tap this ad to learn more about Trimphia, including important safety information. This episode is brought to you by Brooks. Running connects us to a rush of energy that flows through our world. The cheers of friends that unlock a new gear within us, the intersection of interest that inspires a run crew, the support that gets you over the finish line. Connection is why we move forward and what inspires us to keep going. Let's run there. Learn more at brooksrunning.com. I need supports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio.

he's awake. It's Andy Greenwald! That would be a cool thing to say to someone. Right? Yeah, if they were making a TikTok about some food that they were cooking and then all of a sudden, homie behind you, it was just like, he's big. Yeah.

We are here to talk to you about the first episode of True Detective Night Country, which you hopefully just watched because we are going to be talking spoilers for said first episode. Andy, this was obviously something that I've been anticipating for a really long time is I am a huge fan of the True Detective franchise

I'm afraid. I am a detective. I go to Detective Kans. I've been known to drive around Ohio looking for Nick Pizzolato, who is not involved in this iteration of this era. EP credit, of course, is the creator of the original franchise. This comes to us from Issa Lopez, who is a director of a wonderful 2017 film called Tigers Are Not Afraid, and she created this version of True Detective and directed the episodes. And this also comes to us through Barry Jenkins production companies. He's actually produced it. His relationship with HBO.

And Issa Lopez is on the watch tonight today. So stick around for my interview with Issa Lopez in the second half of this episode. We talked extensively about the first episode of the show and just about her approach to Night Country. What did you think of the show, just in like the broadest strokes? I'm in. I thought it was an excellent hour of television. I thought that, I mean, we can get more into the specifics. I actually want to turn it back to you in a moment to talk about why you think that.

why you think this is a true detective show. To my mind, what was really compelling about it was it understood, I think, the template of the previous seasons. Even aspects of the template that I have bucked against and complained about in writing it on the podcast, in that true detective, not a lot of lulls, generally a serious show about people in serious anguish detecting serious crimes.

Yeah. But what I absolutely loved about especially this first hour, and I should say, I don't know if you're the same. I've not watched ahead. Because I'm going to be trying to. Right. Like I am trying to be good. It's hard for you. Yeah.

But I also think it's useless to jump ahead because then you wind up being like, you're watching the second episode and you're, yeah, so I'm being good. So what I really loved about it was it's complete commitment to the specificity of place, of taking us to a place that I promise you, I will never go, which in this case is Ennis Alaska, basically in a time of permanent night during the winter. Yeah, near the Arctic Circle. And doing something really remarkable, I thought, in terms of this is not a place that I've been, this is not a place I'd like to go. But Issa Lopez is showing us the aspects of what life would be like there with just I thought a really remarkable attention to detail in terms of like the line outside the liquor dispensary, basically, like the piled up canned goods in people's homes, the way the homes would feel if they were your only shop.

for months of night at a time. Yeah. And also making us feel connected to the psychological mindset of people who have chosen to live in a place like this or living there by, whether it's by choice or circumstance, but that there's a kind of universality to their emotional anguish that I felt, this is a weird thing to say about a show that is otherworldly and violent and dark, but I felt welcomed by this show in a way that I found really compelling and I was ready to go on this journey.

Yeah. I mean, I think that, so what you were just saying made me think about one of the things I talked to Issela Lippa's about, which was the mystery of what happened to these men at the Salal station, this research facility. And also what's going on with these people? Because everyone seems to have preexisting relationship with some scar tissue attached with each other. And I like the fact that we are as an audience trusted enough to kind of go along with that without it being. exposition dumps every single time somebody new walks in. And one of the crucial things that I love about this is that there isn't a audience avatar,

new guy in town, detective flown in to investigate this thing and has to go up to every single bartender and every single teacher and every single person, the medical examiner, and say, so why doesn't this person like this person? And in the character of Danvers, who's played by Jody Foster,

and we'll get into Jody Foster, because I think I underrated the importance of her being in true detective. This is right. We get a very special kind of police officer that I don't feel like I've seen in a very long time. It in some ways harkens back to some 70s cops. And in some ways is just a person with a job doing that job to the best of their ability on a daily basis. And it's just a fantastic thing to watch a great actor kind of tell a story through action. And Jody Foster is always doing something in this show.

and she is phenomenal in it so far. I also think that one of the reasons that you and I love genre shows and specifically the genre of a detective show is because in the right hands, it's an opportunity to color vibrantly outside the lines because the lines are given to you, which isn't to say that there's anything boilerplate about the construction of this particular mystery.

It's spooky, it's surprising, and I'm not going to sit here and offer theories because I just want to see where it's going. But under the general assumption of the skeleton of a murder mystery, you see the touch of the author in what's all around it. And the little details like the Ferris Bueller Twist and Shout scene being on repeat. Yeah. Like Danvers, Jody Foster's characters, partners being a father and son with their own baggage and their own relationship to each other. The really compelling potentially supernatural weirdness at the market.

which is mostly told through Fiona Shaw's character and her visions of some of Travis, who is not alive, but is pointing things out to us. And doing some incredible choreography. I thought that was beautiful. Also, I want to harp on the moment in Callie Rees' characters. Oh, Navarro. Navarro's flashback to her time in the military. And there's a really haunting visual of her embracing someone who...

who is nominally alive or standing, who shout out Gus Fring, but has lost half of her head. And this is the sort of thing that's like, these are the curly cues in the margins that separate a regular detective show from, I'm not going to say, from a true detective show,

but from one that might potentially be exceptional. And I was happy to see those, and I was in. Yeah, so let me, why don't I just actually just do a quick recap of what we just saw, just so that we can work off of that, and then we can kind of go into any different direction you want. So as Andy and I mentioned, it's set in N.S. Alaska, fictional

town that's close to the Arctic Circle, I believe, and is going through its month of darkness. It's just a day or two, or day three of the dark period there. And I wanted to say, like, you and I have seen a lot of Arctic

programming over the last few years. There was the show The Head. I watched that. That was not similar, but had some of the broad strokes. There was the Northwater, which we both really loved and talked about. Little things mattered, such as I thought this was more like the head, that it would be an investigation into an isolated research station. The fact that this is near, I mean, I don't know what distance means in this place, but a town made so much difference to me. That we're actually, okay, we're in a place.

It's not just helicoptering in to investigate, you know, specific, site-specific madness. I think in terms of like the relationship between a crime and a place, it's almost more like Broadchurch than, it is the thing, although it definitely has elements of the thing, especially at the end of the episode. So anyway, we're in Ennis. Ennis is patrolled by some cops. Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro, they seem to have a complicated pass with one another. They also seem to be working for different departments or different, you know, sections of

the municipal government or of the state government. Someone is essentially murder police. Yes. And the other and Navarro had... Seems more like a highway patrolman or a regular beat cop kind of thing. She's been knocked down to... Yes. Trooper.

And we're also introduced to a scientific research base called Salal Station where weird shit just seems to happen in these kinds of places. But we see a pretty domestic scene of people exercising and doing laundry. Doing laundry. And a guy is making a cooking TikTok or Instagram live. And behind him, one of his colleagues seems to be going through some sort of seizure while standing up. He notices he turns around the guy stops his seizure.

turns to his friend who's making the video and says she's awake. The next time we see the station is when a food delivery man, like a guy bringing a bunch of chips and dry goods for their winter, shows up, you need somebody to sign for the delivery, and he finds a tongue on the ground, and everybody is missing and gone. So thus bringing Danvers and her partner at the department, played by John Hawks and his son, who is sort of Danvers' protege, as a detective.

They come and they're starting to investigate this disappearance of what should we treat this is. This is missing persons. What do we have a crime? What's going on? And the evidence of this tongue connects possibly what's happened at this station to an older murder case of a woman

that Navarro had been investigating and had obviously kind of gone down with the ship with this investigation. She had been, there's allusions to her harassing people from a mine that is in Ennis, all sorts of stuff. But essentially what we're getting is the thinnest of connections between what's happened to the men and the research station and what might have happened to this murder victim, Annie, from a few years ago. In any case, we also are to clued in, as you said, that Danvers does not like the song Twist and Shout as recorded by the Beatles and seen in the film Ferris Beeler that's playing on a loop.

And she has a very bad reaction to that. We get pictures, a picture of Danvers' relationship to the town, to her daughter, to her colleagues, her friends, and with Navarro. they seem to have something of a kind of complicated past, the nature of which is not really made clear yet. As the episode goes on, we're introduced to a character named Rose, who seems to be kind of a loner living on the outskirts of town, and she's visited by a man named Travis,

who leads her out into basically the frozen tundra outside of her house, and she eventually happens upon something that by the end of the episode we learn is a heronimus, Bosch-like sculpture of, of bodies of the men from the Salal station who have been frozen, but also frozen in a state of terror and have suffered an incredible amount of trauma and are all dead. By the way, shout out to Fiona Sons.

Yeah. If you're going to be reaching back to cast someone in these things, whether it's Andor or Killing Eve, and now this, Fiona Shaw can do everything and makes everything interesting. So I think the question I was going into for this series, and I talked to Issa a little bit about this,

is what makes Night Country Trudeau? That's what I want to ask you, yeah. I think that the opening scene, which I neglected to mention, is of a group of reindeer, I think. Are they reindeer? To me they are. I mean, this is a show, and I'm guilty of this myself, a lot of emotional lifting being done by animals.

But I believe they are reindeer, and I do believe that they commit mass suicide in the beginning of this episode. They go running off of the side of a cliff. That's because she's awake, right? Yeah, and it's a pretty disturbing image to begin the series with, but is true detective. This idea that there is an almost mystical or supernatural evil force in the world

that is compelling, that is desecrating the natural world and is like kind of upsetting the balance of the world is very true detective. And I think even to bookend the image of all these animals killing themselves in the beginning, of the episode and the last shot which is essentially these bodies molded together

in the ice in a state of abject horror is a similar kind of image of a horror that goes beyond explanation

and that is what Carcosa was that is what the pink house in True Detective Season 3 was there's always this idea

that there's this like basically like kind of a window into hell. You know, this, like a, like an underworld that is just outside of the sort of everyday eye in your waking life. And there's a dreamlike quality to this, to the series as a whole, but especially to this season because of its setting. I think that, again, this is off of one episode.

So I want to be measured because we have a longer way to go with this. but through one episode Issa Lopez's integration of the hard-boiled and the supernatural feels very compelling to me and feels very thoughtful. I almost don't even want to say supernatural as much as inexplicable.

Yeah, well, but I think it's more so than... Okay, so one of my... I mean, I'm not going to revisit it, but like... No, I think this is... But one of the things that I struggled with with True Detective Season 1 was I felt, like when I was referring to this idea of painting outside the lines, I felt that a lot of the

richness of season one felt like directorial choices as opposed to a consistently expressed ethos of the show's creative hive mind on mass. Which is to say, we always talk about like the, was it like the Bon Mie shop or the like the cloud, the swirling clouds and horizons that Kerry Fukunaga's camera picked up. Those were adding depth to something that I found frustratingly thin at times. Similarly, I remember when we were covering the show week to week, a lot of the kind of the very aggressive, and I don't fault this, I can be a fan like this too, but kind of the aggressive redditing fan brain took over and being like, ah, flowers and Carcosa.

I'm right here. Okay, I'll speak to you. But like, oh, this show is actually about Sathulu and there's like a lovecraftian element. And in fact, it was a cop show. It was a cop show, which is there's no crime in that. But a lot of that stuff felt to me in my viewing of it. it week to week. I never rewatch it. I didn't consider it as a whole. Maybe I should have. That did not feel comprehensive to me. It did not feel earned as a word that I get in trouble for, so I don't want

to say it. But it did not feel consistent with the show. It felt like distracting. And it felt like it was showy. Like, look, maybe this is a show with depth, but maybe it's not. So far through one, it feels of a piece to me. The world of Danvers in her life feels to me to be a world where polar Bears could show up out of nowhere, or it feels to me a world where a woman on the edge of town could speak to ghosts. That's a tough, tightrope to walk, but I feel I am buying what is being sold to me right now because it does feel like there's a consistency to it. And I wonder, maybe there's no mystery to this. I don't want to be like subjectively she's gifted at X, Y, or Z or Nick puts a lot of struggles with it. I'm not saying that. It might solely be because,

through one episode, we are seeing the vision of a filmmaker. In that, the woman who wrote it is also directing it. So she's showing us her vision in a way that the tension of the first season of True Detective and some of the best things about it came from a tension between the writer and director, pulling us in different directions. Yeah, I think that there are some similarities in so much as like the towns that were of Louisiana that they went into were, I think even the McConaughey character describes them as just like basically ghost towns or towns that have been forgotten by time

or towns that like are full of you know dead dreams or whatever he poetic way he put it and andes feels something some of a piece to that with me it's the kind of place that something like this could happen there's a couple of really wise filmmaking choices that is made first of all because it's so cold they have to do some they're they're inside a lot right so that indoorsness of it actually conversely makes it feel like it's daytime sometimes. But at points in the show, she's able to disorient the viewer the same way that the people who live in the town are disoriented where, let's say somebody goes and gets a drink, you're like, are they getting a drink too early in the day?

Right, right. Or is it nighttime because it's always nighttime? Is it dinner time? Is it breakfast? Is it time to work? Is it time to stop working? Does the fact that it's never daylight mean you're always burning the midnight oil? Like there is like a kind of energy that is imbued in this show without it being monochromatic.

And it's like they're always standing outside in the night and I can't tell what's going on. I think it's a great observation. And it's text. It's not just subtext. Like there's the scene when Peter, who's the younger cop, goes home and we see his child and we see his wife and they are getting intimate and romantic. And then he gets a text from his boss. And the idea of like, you shouldn't answer that. You're off duty. Yeah. But like, is it?

Yeah. Who knows? There's only like four cops. And I don't know what time it is. Right. And her work assignment is to go to his dad's house. Right. And say he wants chips, but really he's stealing files.

Like, everything is way too on top of each other. Yeah. And I think that by that same token, the interpersonal relationships seem on top of each other as well. So you've got Danvers' daughter is in a relationship with another younger girl. Her teenage daughter. Her teenage daughter is in a new relationship with. someone and seems to be getting in trouble for that. And are we right, am I right to assume that I think it's implied that her daughter, Leah,

is her stepdaughter and who she continues to mother, and there's a suggestion that maybe there's a car accident. We've lost. We haven't really gotten the Danvers family tree stuff. But there's something there. Yeah. But there are, the relationships I think are multiple and complicated. And then you have Navarro who's got her sister living in town and her sister,

seems to be struggling with her mental health and Navarro is sort of in charge of her well-being. But I never found that those kind of interpersonal things distracting, nor did I find them confusing. And I was refreshed by the fact that these two people don't necessarily like each other, but they're not saying why they don't. You know, Danvers doesn't seem to like really anyone. Why? I don't know.

Does she feel like she's been demoted by being in Ennis? Is there some place she'd rather be? I note with interest that she's wearing a Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt. She's super into fantasy football. Yes. But is she from Minnesota? Is there a reason why she's out here? All these questions that you might have

are going to come to us in the right time. There's a confidence in the storytelling that I really appreciate. And I think it's a lost art, which is when you start something and you start a story with a pilot, yes, you're juggling the mysteries to come in terms of what you want to reveal,

how you want, in this case, the crime to be solved, or you want the puzzle pieces to reveal themselves. But you also are juggling what came before you started your story and why you started your story there. And we're recording this after having conversation about the Marvel show Echo, which I don't want to kick for any particular reason, other than to say a hallmark of a lot of contemporary,

particularly IP storytelling, is a complete, what projects as a complete lack of confidence in what the audience can handle and what they need to know and what they don't. And so we get way too much information and we don't start the story at the right place because you're just backfilling. This story, again, crime shows are great at this

because you can start with a crime and that everything else can fill its way in. But that's some of the hard-boiled tradition that Pizzolato was building on when he started his show, right? Like, you earn a lot of leeway because we understand that this is an investigation and that the detectives will be investigating the crime

and we, the audience, will be investigating the investigators. We understand that. But there is a lot of confidence in how the show begins with a lot of backstory that is leveraged correctly with a really, really wonderful lack of heavy-handed flashback. Let's talk a little bit about Jody Foster. Yeah.

So I don't believe she's been on television since she was a child actor. Not in a major way, yeah. She's directed for television a lot. She's done a ton of directing for TV. And she's also really only been in, she's in Nyad this year, which I haven't seen. She's done like three or four movies in the last decade or so. She's mostly been directing. And mostly been directing.

So you forget that when you and me were growing up basically, this is one of like the most significant actors of our lifetime, you know, and that between Silence of the Lambs, which Issa talks about directly being inspired by Clarice and wanting to sort of imagine an older version of this, this young sort of genius detective, not that necessarily Danvers is Clarice, but she's like, how could you not think of Clarice when you're looking at Jody Foster?

But the accused and like so many other like, you know, incredible performances throughout the age. and 90s, that to see her back on screen is great, just full stop. To see her back with something so rich to work with, like material that's so, like, clearly like engaging her on all five senses. You know, she's like listening, she's moving, she's talking. You can feel her feel this environment. And at the same time, is unlike any true detective cop we've seen before,

both the, I mean, she's probably closer to the Woody Harrelson character. Like a sort of put upon professionalism. Yeah, a little bit, but like clearly has a little bit of Rust's, like, ability to see the entire thing and see in three dimensions. And as she's spreading out all those pictures on her floor, like, clearly has that kind of brain that can operate on a higher level of an investigation. But I just found this character to be absolutely compelling to watch. is just like you want to know what they're going to do in the next scene and the next scene and the next scene. It's a star turn.

There's a lot of the last 10 years has been a large portion of it, certainly what we cover on the podcast, has been about movie stars and actors going to television. But this is a star performance. That's different than a movie star

taking a role on a TV show. And part of that is because we understand cops and detectives like that as a classic movie role. But the gravity of the show is built around her charisma and her strength and all of the things that her charisma and strength and even honestly celebrity in our history with her, everything that that papers over in terms of we just trust it. We understand it. Like some of the things you're saying, I agree with. I mean, I agree with everything you're saying. But a lot of it, I feel like about

her ability and her depth of field and vision. You're intuiting that because it's Jody Foster. Yeah. And the way she plays it, which is what you should do when you have great actors. But I also think I'm responding to the fact that this is a change of pace for, for a lot of the times when you see somebody who's really gifted at this kind of work on screen, like a detective like this, there is a degree of which they're like almost supernaturally gifted at it, and it comes at a cost. So I'm thinking specifically of like Carrie from Homeland or something like that,

where it's just like, oh, but they're tortured by their own genius. And Danvers seems like a hard worker. And I'm sure she's really good at what she's doing, but she seems a lot more like the Gene Hackman French Connection character than she does like Sherlock Holmes or, or carry from Homeland. She's pretty angry about drunk drivers. Yes.

She's not a big fan. You would be because it's always dark there, so people are probably cramped at all hours. I also just like her, I don't want to say like she's unique in this because a lot of great actors do this, but she's a star who's also a sneaky good team player. Yeah.

And I really enjoy, it's not always, chemistry is tough, especially with a franchise that is based on it being a two-hander or having some, you know, and so the dynamic between Callie Reese, who is, I've not seen in anything before.

Yeah, and it was a professional boxer before she became an actor. And she was in a film called Catch the Fair One that's really cool. But for the most part, hasn't done a lot of acting. It is fair to say that her style and her tempo in what she brings is different than Jody Foster's. But I'm into it. And it's working. And I think a lot of that, I don't want to assume, but I imagine that a lot of that comes from Jody Foster's own intuition as a director and as a veteran performer and how to give and take with someone. These people also just feel real.

Yes. and with history and dynamics between them. But as much as I like her with Callie Reese, I also am totally floored by her and John Hawks, who I believe I sent you the Brian Dawkins tackling someone with his entire body image to suggest what it was like when John Hawks showed up on set because that guy just always brings it.

And you put him in a part and the part's more interesting. It's just one of those guys. I think Finn Bennett's doing a really good job as Peter so far. Like really no bad... And like we mentioned Fiona Shaw earlier, like if you're going to have somebody be the log lady of the show, it's like you could do a lot worse than Fiona Shaw. And it's funny.

Like I don't want to overrate it. It's one episode. It could go off the rails. We're not sure where we're headed. But I still am going to flag it when I see what HBO does best. And HBO can really fill out a call sheet. HBO can really fill out the margins of something. This show, no disrespect to any other streamer or network,

but take the word true detective off of it and say it's just a show called Night Country. that Issa Lopez is pitching around. It should get made. I don't know yet what True Detective is. That was what the, she said she had an idea for this setting and generally speaking a cop investigating a crime that happens at a research center.

And then there was the bakeoff for True Detective. And that it was like basically the marriage of the two. Yeah, it was not intended to be this. And it's interesting that hopefully it's both sides of that equation are going to profit from this creatively, if not, in terms of a longer run for the true detective franchise. Just to say, Night Country on FX, Night Country on AMC isn't going to look like this. It's not going to be, I'm not saying it's worse, but the caliber of actor who show up in Iceland to film this,

the budget necessary to make it look as rich as it does, this is what HBO has always done, and I love seeing them do it. You alluded to Issa's sort of level of talent. I feel like even in the first episode, I kind of am starting to have a sense of how the town is laid out. and okay, that's the bar, that's the cafe, that's the police station, Sala stations out there. Like, you're starting to get an idea of like,

oh, here are the tensions between maybe miners who are transplants, but feel like they're, you know, they're the ones keeping the lights on out here. What are the problems with that mine? Who owns the mine? Et cetera, et cetera. I wanted to kind of get... Just, I want to jump on that, too.

Like, again, I have not seen her movie. I want to see it. I'm looking forward to listening to your interview. with her. But there is a generosity to this episode in that the filmmaking is lovely and considered and world building. And when a filmmaker is given carte blanche to make a TV show, it's not always like that. It doesn't always, they don't always, and sometimes it works. Like whether, you know, when Park Chen Wook made the look hard. Yeah, I'm like, he wasn't worried about making a TV show in any traditional way. It was just a beautiful thing that I ended up loving. This feels welcoming. And I, you

know, I'd be curious as the thing goes on, whether you credit, like, Matt Chessay, who's the editor of this, who has done great work in the past, like, it's just put together really nice. Yeah, and then, like, even little details, like, the different places people live, and the differences between those places, like, the fact that Peter's place is a little shabbier, but is, like, a starter home kind of, like, warm vibe. Then his dad's place is, like, recent bachelor vibes, you know? Pretty blue. He's waiting on his mail order bride or whatever. That's funny.

And Jody Foster's place has a little bit more of a suburban mom kind of look to the kitchen and everything. So just like telling story through these like little gestures within the production are really cool. I wanted to ask you though about a bunch of dudes frozen to each other in the in the snow. You're not like the biggest horror guy in the world. But did you find that horrifying? Were you like turned off by like the level of grotesque violence that obviously went into that? No, I thought this goes back to the point I keep making about feeling, maybe perhaps prematurely, but feeling very confident about the generosity of the filmmaker.

I don't feel in, thank you for asking about my feelings. I do not feel personally triggered or in peril. Yeah. I think that the horror and the grotesquery is of a piece with everything that we're seeing. And I found it disturbing, but I found it exciting. Yeah. You know, in a way, I was really, I cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed watching this. And it's such a funny low bar to state, but there has been a lot of, even of things that I've liked and talked about liking on the mic, whether it's my attention span or whether it's a comment on the quality of what I've been watching, I have been distracted or not fully, fully invested in.

And I was enraptured by this. Yeah. So I'm really glad you're into it. We can stop there unless there were some other stuff that you wanted to hit. Like, there's not really much speculation to go on yet. Like, we get to the end of this episode. We've learned a couple of things. These guys from the station, at least some of them are dead based on, like, what we can see in the snow.

This is a place where the dead still can be among us, that Rose sees Travis, that people seem to obviously feel things out there. This is a place where everybody's on edge already. And this is a place where everybody's got their secrets and everybody's got their past relationships. And I think that those things are all going to come to ahead. Any other stuff you wanted to mention? It's a really good pilot. It's a really good first episode because I am in a place that I found myself before with other good shows where when you ask me like what I want to note or I'm actually just, I'm in. I actually don't have any arm's length. Well, I wonder or she'll need to establish this for me too. I don't have any. I'm not doing any barter. with the straw Issa Lopez in my mind

about what's going to happen next. I can't wait to watch the next episode. We're going to get to my interview with Ys in just a second. I do have a question for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Would you rather, like, okay, what would be harder for you? Arctic Month of Darkness,

or Month of Darkness in Los Angeles? Like, month of darkness in Los Angeles because, like, FYC season is over and there aren't any cool panels to hit, so culturally dark? Is that what you mean? The sun does not come up in L.A. for a month. Do you think it would be easier for you to accept that if you were like in the wilderness than if you were like I'm in East Los Angeles?

First of all, I am very bad at accepting anything outside of my control. So I would be very mad and stand my foot a lot and just be cool to be around. I can't imagine being stuck with you in Ennis Alaska if you were having a bad time. I don't want to be cold. I moved to California for a reason. And the reason was, I mean, broadly did I want there to be daylight? Yes. But the warmth was the most important thing.

But the number one was, no more winter, please. Yes. No more winter. Yeah. 50 degrees in windy, that's okay. Is it? Yeah. I don't like that either.

Yeah, you're spoiled. So you wouldn't have been able to head out there. I would like to see how long I could go out there. Well, you like to test yourself. I have done because of travel kind of situations. Like when I went to England last time, I went to 10 p.m. flight at L.A., so you arrive in England at 4.30, which is essentially a dark. there.

Yes. And that was weird because it was essentially... Looks you like missed a day. Yeah, but like the sun did not come up for like 24 hours for me. And that was pretty disorienting, but I was pretty into it. So you're basically saying that you are a scientist on the edge of night. But I also know that like my guy Andrew Huberman is like, you got to go outside and stare at the sky in the morning and get the circadian rhythms rejump.

So I think I'd be on a variety of pills just to kind of like keep everything regulated. Yeah. I think the excitement of international travel would allow me to be like, guess it's time to have a nice pint at the pub and enjoy sunlight tomorrow. I would choose that over a season long bid at a research station with six weirdo dudes. I feel like your version of this is not quite as challenging as you're suggesting. So yeah, I'm just actually like throwing it out there. Like, what if you had to work a couple of shifts at that cafe?

But yeah, if we were at the Salaw Station, and it was you and me and five homies, and one was like, she's awake, I think you would be pretty disappointed in how life worked out. I'm also just, I'm not a big, I'm not into extremity. Like, I don't want nonstop daylight either. Like, I just want, is that, am I, am I the asshole? Like, I just want, like, day and night. Like, I just feel like it's pretty straightforward. That said, I would much, much rather be in its real hot station than it's real,

a cold station. Oh, I would much rather be in real cold. This is one of the key distinctions. Much rather be in real cold station. I mean, it would be intimidating. I would just, it would always be like, did you remember your gloves? Because you let your hands will fall off if you didn't. Would you be that guy? No, I always lose my gloves. So I would be in a lot of trouble. But I would, I would hate to be in constant heat. I'd love it. That's why you haven't been to Thailand. That's true. You know, this is sorry, this is a callback to last Thursday's show.

To our White Lotus season for discussion. Anyway, let's get a, into my conversation with Issa Lopez, the writer and director of this episode and the creator of this season, True Detective Night Country, I had a great time talking with her. She was just a wonderful conversation to have. And hopefully she will come back for the finale

and talk to us some more. Thank you to Kai McMullen. And we'll be back on Thursday with some cool stuff with Monsieur Spade, which aired tonight on AMC. Please check that out because we'll be talking about it later in the week. The playoffs are here and you can predict the action.

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This episode is brought to by Whole Foods Market. Spring is here, so celebrate it with fresh, juicy, seasonal produce and some very tasty, limited time flavors. New Whole Foods, Market Peach, Apricot, Rose, Italian soda. Perfect for a picnic or brunch, as is their trending mango, Yuzu, chantilly cake. But if you're on the go, new 365 strawberry pretzels make a great sweet snack. That sounds delicious. Get savings with yellow sale sign storewide and everyday low prices on 365 brand items. Enjoy the fresh flavors of spring. Save at Whole Foods Market. Isa Lopez, thank you so much for joining me on the watch. I'm a huge fan of your work anyway with Tigers. It's so exciting to see you working in this

long form format and with a show that I have a tremendous amount of affection for a true detective. So I was wondering if we could start with you telling me a little bit about basically the genesis of this project because I was curious whether there was there a night country without a true detective at first? Like how did this how did this project get developed? There was a night country before but it was a very horace creature you know it was a very floaty and amorphous thing. You know I love the sexiest period of writing I think is when things are not completely anything and And if you don't push the creature, if you let it shape itself and tell you what it is going to be, it's, I think, the best is, you know, you plant a seed and you step back and you go for a whiskey and go for a walk.

And, or in my case, Mascals rather than whiskey. And then you come back and you see what is shaping up. And then at a certain point, you go, oh, it's going to be a pumpkin. And then you start planning for pumpkins. And instead of sitting down and going like, I want to make a tomato. Yeah. Let it come to you. So this was still in the what is this beast?

But I knew that it was going to be a murder mystery. I knew it was going to be in the Arctic. And I knew the very beginning and the ending. And at that point, I got a call from HBO saying, what would you do with true detective? And I was like, well, do you like pumpkins? Funny you should ask. Pumpkins are on sale this week. Yeah.

Without giving too much away, I was curious whether or not, you know, from that pumpkin face to when HBO calls, what carried over? It was Danvers in your head? Like, you said the Arctic, but... It was Arctic, obviously. It was a night in the Arctic. It was the abandoned mothership, you know, the Salalah Station, which... The comparison with a ship was always...

in my mind and my production designer landed it beautifully with this this little nostromo-looking thing. So it is an abandon. It is a ghost ship, you know, where all the crew vanished into thin air. And that concept was there. And the moment that I knew that there was a vanishing of with several men in the Arctic, the next thing that came to me is the Diatlov Pass incident, which has not been solved to my satisfaction, which is the only satisfaction that matters, let's be honest. And there's so many questions still, you know,

with that. This is the case of some rather experienced mountaineers and that in the 50s in Russia had a very mysterious demise in the ice. So I took elements of that. And I knew that there was going to be, funnily enough to detectives, you know. And I think that comes from my passion for seven, you know, the, the, even even the massive, I think one of the best detectives scenes ever written and executed in media is that fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

I hope that word is fine because otherwise it's not going to make any sense in the wire. Yes. You know, when those two cops. Bunk and McNaltier, yeah. to a place and they don't need to say anything else for us to understand how their minds are working. And so that back and forth between two brilliant minds have always been a source of fascination, which fits so well with the spirit of true detective. So you're obviously well-versed in detective fiction and detective films and detective shows.

What are the hallmarks of some detectives that you were like, I can't wait to have a detective who has the, because Danvers, as the show goes on, has almost like a kind of Sherlock Holmes-like brain and the way that she's able to ask questions. But what were some of the tropes you wanted to avoid? Because I think, you know, when you're dealing with an iconic, like a cop trying to solve a murder that just doesn't seem to be solvable, you can easily slide into like, well, this person's a savant and they can see things that, you know, nobody else can see.

Yeah, no, no. Savant is a word that is great that you're using because that was the one thing. You know, it's, I think that we've done a lot. with OCD on the spectrum. And it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, been overdone at this point, especially with detectives. And I can see why it can be attractive, you know, the one track mind that is picking up in the details that the rest of us don't see. But I think that that that has been historically done by the, from, since the birth of, um, fictional

detectives. And when I was very young, I was obviously a massive, massive, massive fan of Sherlock Holmes. I was not a fan of Agatha Christie. Sorry to all the fans. I've always felt that the Agatha Christie formula, that's just me. I mean, the Agatha Christie formula of let's get everyone together in a room and tell them how it went. It's not for me. And Sherlock and the deductive powers has always been an attraction.

it will never not work. You know, that's the miracle of contemplating genius. And it comes from, as we all know, a medical teacher for Conan Doyle. And it's about looking at the right symptoms. And in the case of Danvers, asking the right questions. So that was definitely an influence. But because I veer towards that type of detective, if you're going to have two, the other one has to come from a completely different place.

And the truth is there's many ways to untangle a mystery. Another one of them is to understand people and be able to understand the human spirit. And that's not something that the extremely rational mind necessarily has. So that combination is what for me was really tempting and fun. Do you feel like Danvers changed drastically or at all once you knew Jody Foster would be saying the words? So once you have, yeah, yeah, tell me a little bit about that because she's extraordinary in this. She's extraordinary. I mean, I mean, the woman is extraordinary, right?

And we all know that. We all have always known this. And however, I was not ready for what she brought. I was not ready. I was constantly in awe to what she brought to the set. And as you continue watching the series, you will see it's just insane, the places she will go. And I think that we haven't seen her going to certain places in a really long time. And certainly not in a single story, you know.

That's partially because I think she hadn't done TV. I mean, she did TV when she was a little kid. But it was a different TV. We had them. This new incarnation of prestige TV. And when TV has finally gotten to the place where it has claimed this rightful. plays amongst the arts, because it is an art form. Jody hadn't done this.

So with 90 minutes, hopefully, because now movies are three hours, right? But I'm not to choose in 90 minutes. And so in 90 minutes, you don't have, it's very complicated to have the full range of a character while six episodes give you that canvas. And she took the opportunity. That said, I did write with Jody in mind. because of Clarice, honestly,

and because she's incredible and she's a legend and who wouldn't want to work with her. But I didn't think she was going to take the part. She's very picky and has not been working in acting all that much lately. Yeah, I was just looking at her filmography and I was like, I feel like she's ever present because you see her or you see her older films

and then it's just like, this is a major event. Jody Foster is doing a, just in true detective. This is great. Yeah, and it really feels like, the audiences are reacting like that to the idea of sitting for an entire series with her. There is a hunger for her. However, we sent episodes one and two the scripts and she really liked them and very quickly read and wanted to have lunch with me.

And I was convinced that she was going to say no. So I did it because I, who would say no to their diary? I had lunch with Joy Foster, right? So I went. And she had watched Tigers Are Not Afraid, read the scripts. She was, she's, she has such an incredibly sharp mind and endless film references. And it's an, it's a passionate viewer of international cinema. So she loved the movie.

We talked about the, she's a director to the job of directing children in my previous work. And then we talked about the scripts, which she loved. But she didn't feel. that Danvers was a character that she could bring much to because the character I had written originally was a woman on the verge of a breakdown constantly, like barely holding it together.

And I wrote it for Jolie because I have never seen her like that. Yeah. And she said, well, I love the idea of a woman that is on the verge of a breakdown, but what if she's holding heightened bitterly and angry? and we started to play in that very first launch with that idea. And what if she says things that just come out of her mouth

and are the absolute wrong thing? And what if some of the ideas in her head are, honestly, even racist? And she doesn't think or realize they're racist. So we started to play with this character. And at the end of that meeting, I said, okay, so if I'm getting this right, what you want from the Amber. is for her to be an asshole. And she laughed and said, yeah, I would love that.

So then she jumped on a plane and went to make Nyad. And I sat down with Danvers. And I loved the idea of writing a terrible, terrible human being. Because, and this is about, you know, prestige TV that we had had some incredible, incredible male anti-heroes in TV, starting with Tony Soprano. I'm going to Mr. White and Don Draper along the way. But whereas the big, huge female character that is a terrible human being. And this was an opportunity to have that and to have Joey Foster doing it.

So she read this new incarnation, loved it, and came on board. One of my favorite parts about the first episode, aside from obviously the tremendous, you know, last 10 minutes that are just like, ramps up the intensity over and over again is the way that you ask the viewers to go take a little bit of a leap of faith where you're asked to understand and map all the relationships between the people in Ennis. So you notice that Danvers seems to have like a terse relationship with the John Hawks character, but a maternal maybe a teacher-student relationship with the younger boy and then she's got this past with Navarro, but it's not exactly clear.

For you, when you're bringing an audience into a mystery, how hard is it to also, you know, introduce us to this world, to all these relationships, to all these histories that these people have with each other, give us just enough information so that we kind of understand what's going on or we feel like we're on the right path,

but not confuse us as audience members? Well, you know, instead of making it into something painful, the fact that you cannot and should not overload the episode with information. You need to, episode one forever in every series is going to be a challenge because you have to lay the basis of who the characters are

and what are their lives before they change into what is going to make the series the series, right? So it's always a lot that needs to happen in that first episode. But the beauty about writing a murder mystery is, and I embraced it completely,

is that things are not clear from the beginning, you know. You know a little bit about the characters, but there's a lot that you understand that there's history, but you will not know everything that happened. You will know, oh, this is a thing that happened between these two, but what is it? We don't know. We will learn in time, as happens in life. You know, you walk into a room and you realize that there's a lot you don't know

about the people that are being introduced to you, but you can see how the past affects their actions in the present. So a lot of what makes this character stick is going to be revealed throughout the series. And I think it's part of the spirit of come walk with me to discover what lights under the eyes, you know? Who, what happened to these men? What happened between these two women?

what happened in the past of this character that is so scarred now and we will discover it episode two episode. I was so like I think energized by the fact that there's not really a fish out of water POV character that everybody is coming up to to say, you just got here to Ennis, but boy, you should know that Navarro is this is her history. It's like you get these things like sort of piece by piece in the course of their everyday life. Another really cool thing that I feel like I noticed in the first episode is the way in which you approached the different settings within the town of Ennis and gave them kind of like their own visual language. You were talking a little bit about some of the alien overtones of the base and there's those great pans that you do.

There's these great shots of Callie Reese and Fiona that sort of right as you're discovering the mass of bodies where I think you do two points. to kind of be like, oh, shit, like this is something's about to happen. We just maybe ghost are real in this world. How did you approach the different sort of micro settings of Ennis visually as a filmmaker? Well, I do hate personally, and I've been briefly a victim of this, of deciding an overall language, visual language, for movies or for series. Because I feel that when you do that, you end up chaining yourself. and not doing what the scene asks for the scene to happen,

to have its full effect, because you're chaining to yourself to a language that has been imposed throughout the story. So I don't do that. And it was a decision that I reached very quickly with my DP, Florian Hofmeister, and we said each scene is its own movie, and each scene will tell us how it needs to be told.

So when we're in Salaf, for example, because it has a little bit of the nostromo and it has a little bit of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick. The camera and there's something sinister. There's a power that goes beyond the men that inhabit

the station and it's watching them. So the way that the camera moves in that first sequence there is a little bit the eye of the forces of the universe contemplating of Salal itself, looking at

them and it's a little reminiscent of of those traveling shots in the shining. And then we go back to that type of shooting when we come back to Salal and we start telling the story of Annie and when we go out into the eyes to discover the bodies. Because every time that this darkest, darker, larger than life power involves the story, we go back to that narration. And the stories where the characters are, you know, chatting and aspiring amongst themselves, I let the camera serve the exchanges with my actors. Because if you're going to get a Jolly Foster and a John Hawks to have an exchange in a scene, you follow them.

Yeah. You know, you let them do their thing. And you just let the camera capture it, basically. Without getting too deep into the series itself, which people are going to be watching on a week-by-week basis, I was curious about how you interpolated some of the mythology from true detective seasons past into this season, and whether that was sort of something that you basically, you had the evidence of what you saw on screen from previous seasons and you were like,

I'm going to pick and choose here, or was there like a document that you kind of put together extrapolating things from the screen? How did you sort of work off of that? Well, one of the things that I love the most about that for season, of True Detective was the cosmic horror angle of it, and it had a Carcosa, and it had a yellow king, which are references to the Kutulhu mythos with Lovecraft, and the idea of ancient gods that live beyond the human perception

and that are waiting since before the stars were born. And that sense, of something sinister playing the behind the scenes and watching from the shadows is something that I very much loved. And I completely love the idea of this ultra real Louisiana Bayou, you know, Lost America combined with cosmic horror. And I was very excited about seeing it again. So when I got the call from from HBO, I was like, what would you do with True Detective? Number one, I would bring that back, number one.

So I took the opportunity. And without the spoilering what's coming in the series, because same as with True Detective, you can decide to, at the end of the series, to understand and interpret the events as completely rational and belonging in the real world, or you can go the route of Carcosa. Yes.

So in this season, I never say Carcosa, but the symbol of Carcosa is in this series. And what I believe is that that symbol marks the places where our world and that world beyond where Carcosa is and the ancient ones walk, that's where the spiral connects them. So yes, there is some way to read the series where you can decide that there's things,

there's theme places where we can look into the world beyond. Yeah, I mean, it's really cool because as somebody who's a fan of the show to begin with, like, I've made some connections, but at the same time, it's got a mythology all its own already. It's a really tremendous piece of work. Issa, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you come back at the finale so that we can talk more openly about some of the things that are to come.

But you should be so proud of what you done. It's so awesome. Thank you so, so much. Thank you. I will come back. Thank you very much.