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.”
