After a five-year absence, “True Detective” returned for a fourth season, a season that turned out to be one of its most critically acclaimed and most viewed ever. With Emmy Award voting right around the corner, “True Detective: Night Country” stars Jodie Foster, Kali Reis, John Hawkes, Isabella Star LaBlanc, executive producer Mari Jo Winkler-Ioffreda, and series creator Issa Lopez reunited for a screening and Q&A at the Television Academy to revisit the latest installment of the HBO anthology series. Foster, who earned an Oscar for her portrayal as Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs” over 30 years ago, hasn’t played a detective of any type since. And, as she told the crowd that was purposeful.
“Yeah. Well, I never wanted to do it again after ‘Silence of the Lambs,’” Foster says as the audience laughs. “I just don’t want to go into that arena again. But this was just such a lovely writing and I’m a different person. And there’s something really interesting about coming back at this era and looking at the idea of inquiry and how those detectives are very faithful to the first season of ‘faithful Detective.’ How the investigators’ psyches are a reflection of the kind of rock that they’re looking at, their wounded individuals. So yeah, it’s exciting coming back into the thriller horror area, and I’m drawn to it, obviously. So yeah, made me happy.”
Lopez, who was inspired by the “madness” of the pandemic, says it took her a long while in her work to be open to “the space of creation.” As she comments, “What’s the point otherwise of surrounding yourself with people that hopefully are much more talented than you, which is I think, the smart way to do it.”
In fact, the Mexican filmmaker and screenwriter initially regarded Foster’s character, Alaska Police Force Chief Liz Danvers, as a lady on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She thought it was rather entertaining. And then she met Foster who was like, “It’s not fun.” Lopez remembers, “She was like, ‘Read the script, loved it,’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s going to say yes!’ [She was like,] ‘I adore the script. I love the world. I don’t know if I can portray this character.’ And I was like, ‘F**k.’”
Foster said to Lopez that she was a lot more interested in the character that was left after coming out the other side of such sorrow and trauma.
“What I realized at the end of our conversation of her initial lunch is what she was saying is that she wanted her to be an asshole,” Lopez says. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, I love that.’ So we delved into that, and then I wrote Navarro initially as a Latina. It happens with a lot of Latin women. They join the Marines and later joined the police force. But the more I studied Alaska, this is a location where the more you travel on the West, literally to the entire state, the percentage of the native population is greater and higher and higher, and [the village in the series] was as north as you can go.”
That inspired Lopez to adapt Reis’ persona to a local who was half of Dominican Republic and Iñupiaq descent, “But the most important aspect of her culturally is that she was taken away from her native culture and she’s disconnected from it. And all of that came from comprehending the place. And then the question was, who’s going to play that? And this woman, [Kali Reis], the instant I saw her portrait, just her photograph, I was like…!”
A former professional boxer who has spent the last few years refining her acting abilities, Reis realized that Navarro is a stubborn, multifaceted, attractive, vulnerable” and interesting character.
“It’s one of those characters that even when you watch it again, there’s something else that you find out about her,” Reis adds. “And I love what Issa had constructed with her. She was very cautious in making sure I knew everything that she could make and then gave me over to, okay, she’s yours now. And it wasn’t me truly constructing the role. It was meeting her where she was and Alright, we’re going to work together with this problem. And it was when she allowed me to actually delve into that. And it wasn’t like a delicate process. It was getting distorted into another world.”
While Reis is both native and Indigenous, she believes that does not imply she’s a representative for the Indigenous experience. She felt it was vital to sit down and have conversations with the Alaskan Iñupiat community and learn their tales. It helped that the series had recruited Iñupiat producers to consult on the episode.
“I really got close to them,” Reis adds. “Tell me stories. Tell me stories about your family. How do you wish to be viewed on screen? And what is the story that I can express via your experience with this character? So that was actually part of my, just delving into Navarro. And then of course I have the Marine half of it. I’m not an ex-Marine, I’m not any military, but I do have buddies. I want to know what those types of recollections are. What are the triggers, what are the pleasant times, what the music you listen to. I built playlists or I had listening to certain music. Yes, the Spice Girls was on it.”
Many have wondered Lopez why she would chose Alaska as the location for a new “True Detective” series. She adds that much like Louisiana in the first season, the 49th state “is one of the corners of the United States that we overlook and we don’t understand deeply enough.”
“In the Bayou, there is a different language that is spoken and in Alaska, [it’s] the language of survival because the weather will take you and the long nights will suck your soul,” Lopez explains. “And you have to be careful. We were told extensively about the exposure to the long dark, and I thought that the crazy that may emerge under such extreme conditions is fascinating. On top of that, Alaska per capita is the state of the United States with the most number of disappearances and also is the state of the United States with the largest murder index per capita, which is also very, really broke ground for what I wanted to do.”
A professional producer and unit production manager of productions such as “Y The Last Man” and “Stillwater,” Winkler-Ioffreda can speak the long, dark days and nights the crew faced filming Icelandf or Alaska.
“We shot 58 nights, 43 of them were consecutive. So for two months, for actually two months in January, February, our work hours were four o’clock in the afternoon to two o’clock in the morning,” Winkler-Ioffreda reveals. “So, we were on a completely different cycle. But there was something fantastic about it that you could sort of get up, go to the pool, visit the gym, make some phone calls home, have a little lunch, and then head to set. And then it was just game on. And the thing about the cold is it was a lot less cold than Alaska would’ve been in the Arctic at minus 22. But the thing that was really unusual about it was the wind. The wind was beyond. And there were nights when the Icelanders were really in tune with the weather. They know every minute of every day of what’s going to happen.”
Winkler-Ioffreda recalls, “And our supervising location manager Thor, yes, his name was Thor, would come to us and go, ‘We’re going to have to wrap at 11 o’clock today because the wind is coming.’ And we’d be standing about at 10 45, 11. We’d be like, ‘What is he talking about? There’s no wind.’ And literally to the minute, it would be like everybody’s yelling at each other, get out, ‘Get in the van! Get in, drop in!’ I mean, it was insanity.”
The gathering talent didn’t want to say too much about the show’s finale because there were members of the audience who hadn’t watched all six episodes (very few people), but Foster plainly enjoys how some of the show’s plots were explained and some were not. There was reasoning for why things occurred and then something otherworldly may or may not have been involved. That was “magical” to her.
“Some of it is our job to figure out and maybe not even tell the audience and allow the audience to have their feelings about it,” Foster adds. “I mean, our characters always have their perspective and where they come from. I think it’s quite evident that Danvers believes in the rational universe and believes that there’s a scientific explanation for everything. And Navarro is instinctual and more in tune with the spiritual side of things. But they’re mirrors to each other. And when you go to episode six, hopefully someday you’ll get to episode six, there’s a big question mark there. Which one is it? And I think our response is it can be both. It doesn’t have to be either one. There’s so much mystery about this world.”
“True Detective: Night Country” is available to stream on MAX
