True Detective‘s new showrunner on shaking things up and why Jodie Foster is a “beast of an actor”

Jodie Foster in her first major TV role is already Appointment Television. But Jodie Foster, with a badge, starring in the much-anticipated fourth installment of True Detective, as directed by one of horror’s freshest, freakiest minds? Well, that’s arguably the television event of the year.

So saying all eyes are on Issa López, the Mexican filmmaker (Tigers Are Not Afraid) tasked with taking up the True Detective mantle for season four, is an understatement. López wrote and directed all six episodes of True Detective: Night Country, which serves as a franchise shake-up not only onscreen—in a series first, our dynamic detective duo are both women, investigating the disappearances of six men at an Alaskan research station—but off. Night Country will be the first TD season without series creator Nic Pizzolatto as showrunner or writer. (He still serves as an executive producer, though, alongside López and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins.)

That set López the daunting challenge of making the acclaimed crime anthology her own while still remaining, well, true to the True Detective universe. Ahead of Night Country’s premiere January 14 on HBO, The A.V. Club spoke to the multi-hyphenate about why she considers the new season “a love letter” to the original series, how she sought out Inuit input to authentically portray Alaska’s indigenous communities, and how she fully leaned into those Clarice Starling similarities for her famous leading lady.

Issa López: I’ve always been such a fan of whodunits, but I never had written one. It felt like such a gymnastic feat to hide from your audience but also show them enough so that when it comes time for the reveal, they go, “Oh my god, it was right there, and I didn’t see it!” When it’s well done, it’s incredible. So I started toying with this idea of setting one in the arctic with the elements, a little bit like a Western, but a modern one. I was playing with that story when HBO came to me and said, “What would you do with True Detective?” And I was immediately like, “You know, funny you should ask!” But I never thought this was going to come my way, had no idea. I thought True Detective was done. And honestly, I missed the feeling [of it], especially of that first season: the world containing this story and these two complex, truly profound characters. So I kept all that and I put it into the environment that I imagined. Weirdly, it was like a negative of True Detective: One is sweaty and hot and male, while this one is cold and female and happens in the dark.

AVC: Night Country deviates from the format and pace we’ve come to know from True Detective. How did you balance the freedom of doing your own thing with faithfulness to the franchise?

IL: I think the main thing is, if you pick one thing to latch onto that’s very central, that made a story what it was, you’re free to go. For me, it was the feeling of [True Detective]: the eeriness of the space, the two characters, the sinister circumstances of the events and the philosophical position. You know, the characters have deep positions about how the universe works, and they talk about it and they explore it and change their positions throughout the [season], so that is all there. That said, I don’t jump between the past and the present. We do have some flashbacks, but it’s not the structure of the first season. I toyed with the idea of moving between [the past and the present], but I thought it was not going to give me anything except a lot of headaches with makeup. It gave me the luxury of not knowing everything that happened in the past and discovering it slowly, and it still feels, I think, like True Detective. There’s so many love letters to the original series [in Night Country], Easter eggs, including a bunch that are spoilers that I’m not going to go into! But I did love those long, chatty scenes in the car with the two of them. I’m happy to have that in the show.

AVC: Speaking of, this is, notably, the first True Detective with a female detective duo. How did you land on casting Jodie Foster as Liz Danvers and Kali Reis as Evangeline Navarro?

IL: Well, Jodie was a no-brainer. From the beginning, she was in my mind because, number one, we all want to see her more, we miss her, and having her in a TV series was going to give us all the chance to enjoy her for a longer time. And knowing the beast of an actor she is, because she is a beast, giving her the canvas to work at that level would be incredible. And after rewatching True Detective, I was like, ‘This reminds me enormously of Seven.” So then I rewatched Seven, which is masterful, and was like, “Oh, this reminds me of The Silence Of The Lambs.” And that’s the genealogy: The Silence Of The Lambs begets Seven begets True Detective begets Night Country. So why not go to the origin of it all?

AVC: So you’re not worried about the inevitable Clarice Starling comparisons?

IL: We haven’t seen Jodie as a detective since [Silence], and it’s a very different character. But it is Jodie Foster and she is really, really finding the meat and the nerves and the soul of this new character. And we’ve never seen her, I think, the way we’re going to see her in Night Country. So that was a no-brainer.

And with Kali, it was more interesting because at the very beginning, Navarro was a Latina, because I’m a Latina, you know? But then, the more I learned and understood about Alaska and these northwest towns that I was referencing, 70 percent of the population is Inuit and if not Inuit, Native American. So I felt like I needed to represent that. I could not do another story where cops that do not belong to the community come to solve the issues of that community, so at least one of the detectives had to come from there. Then the question came up of who in that community could play this, and Francine Maisler, genius casting director, was like “There’s this woman, you need to see her.” She sent me a photograph [of Kali] and immediately I went, “That’s her.” Just with a photograph.

AVC: True Detective tradition usually sees two big-name stars anchoring the cast: Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in season one; Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams in the second season; and Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff in season three. Kali Reis only had one acting gig prior to Night Country, in the 2021 film Catch The Fair One, as she’s better known for her professional boxing career. What did HBO say when you wanted her cast as the show’s co-lead?

IL: Navarro has a spark and a soulfulness and a depth of tenderness, but that character is tough. I wanted someone who could give me both. Talking to Kali and reading with her, I was like, “She’s the one; she can do it.” I went to HBO and was like, “I believe in this.” Usually True Detective is a two-starrer, two big stars, but they saw what I saw in Kali and they trusted me.

AVC: As you mentioned, you changed Navarro from being a Latina to an Inuit woman. Did you work with the indigenous communities in building the character and the overall setting?

IL: I wrote a first draft of the script and immediately went to find Inuit voices. We worked with two producers—one of them Inupiat and one Inuit—and both of them went through the script and immediately came back and said, “Where has Evangeline Navarro been all these years?” That was very moving. The story is not an Inuit story but it lives in this world and it’s informed by this. So they went through and were like, “That’s not how we cook that, that’s not how we say that, she would never stay quiet after hearing something like that, that’s not what we wear.” We went deeply into work with them for a couple of drafts and they made sure the places and the looks and the clothing [were right] because both our production designer and costume designer, Daniel Taylor and Alex Bovaird, went to Alaska to really absorb the space, absorb the people, and get the stuff that we used. It’s the real deal.

AVC: The story is set in Alaska but you actually shot in Iceland. How was it braving that tundra?

IL: It doesn’t matter how tough you think it’s going to be. You’re not prepared. I’m Mexican, so I’m really not fond of the cold. We shot for 49 nights back-to-back, 120 days total. And those 49 nights, most of them out in the ice, they do something to you in a beautiful way. Some of the nights we were at minus 23 degrees Celsius, in conditions that I would never think of being in, but it just informs the story and feeds the feelings and the way you experience the series. A lot of people who have watched it are like, “I felt cold when I was watching it,” and that happened because we were there, because the actors were cold, because the filmmakers were cold. And it needs to happen to really transmit that physical sensation through the screen.

AVC: And there is something very unsettling, almost creepy, about the cold. You’ve had great success for your work in the horror genre—was there anything specific from the horror tradition that you wanted to include in this season?

IL: Absolutely. First of all, one of the biggest references for it is Carpenter’s The Thing, no doubt. Tsalal [the research station in Night Country] has undertones, the way we shot it, to Kubrik’s the Overlook and a feel of Nostromo, even, from Alien. But beyond that, one of the things I loved the most about the first True Detective is that it had that supernatural flavor—it had that Carcosa; it had a Yellow King. So when HBO approached me, I said, “Guys, me being who I am, I’m going to tap into that and go for it.” So you can watch the whole show and come out of it very much like True Detective the original, thinking that everything has a rational explanation. Perhaps Cohle fried his brain with drugs or perhaps birds really were drawing spirals in the sky? Perhaps he really saw Carcosa at the end? So this is the same—there is a path here where you can go, “Every single event has a natural explanation,” or there’s more than what we can see at stake. And I love that liminal space.

AVC: Now that you have one under your belt, would you take on another season of True Detective?

IL: That’s a question for HBO!