A “True” leap — from Mexico City to the Arctic

Crafting a new edition of HBO’s “True Detective,” Issa Lopez had opposite impulses.
One was to go with sorta-familiar characters.. “I’d heard that people just write themselves over and over again,” she said, in a press forum. “That might be true.”
And the other was to go with a wildly unfamiliar setting. She did that, too.
“True Detective: Night Country” (shown here) — starting at 9 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 14, on HBO and Max — gives us Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as police detectives. Tough and relentless, they may have the qualities Lopez hopes to see in herself. “They are also the women that I fear I am,” she said. “They have flaws that I see in myself.”
But the location? This is set in the Alaskan Arctic and filmed in Iceland, a zillion or so miles from her turf. “I’m Mexican, so I was not prepared,” she said.
With the temperature dipping to 9-below-zero fahrenheit, she was shooting a bleak crime scene. There were “huge challenges, … to light a nighttime in the snow, with all the elements,” Foster said.
But in a way, that setting fit into the “True Detective” form.
This is only the fourth edition, spread over a decade. The first– Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson iu Louisiana – was distinctly American-gothic, Lopez said. She grew up amid 9 million people in Mexico City and 22 million in its metro area; she was intrigued by seeing Louisiana’s “endless landscape, where anything can happen.”
And she decided to go for even more expanse. Her story has eight researchers disappear from an Arctic station. Two detectives arrive – a tough veteran, filled with personal flaws – and a younger one who shares the indigenous roots of most Arctic people.
The former role went to Foster, who’s been at this almost forever. “I’ve worked for 58 years in the film business …. And I’m really surprised that at 60, I think I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” she said.
And the latter went to Kali Reis, a relatively new actor whose roots are both Cape Verdean (a West African island) and Native American.
Both are award-winners, in different fields. Foster won Academy Awards in “The Accused” and “Silence of the Lambs”; Reis was an international champion via four boxing organizations.
Now they were in fresh territory. Lopez had gone to Alaska to study the region and cast actors; she then took them to Iceland for the filming. “If the population in the Arctic is 80 percent Inuit, so is our story,” Foster said. “About 80 percent of the actors are indigenous people and coming from all sorts of places.”
It was a distinctive place and mood, Reis said. “The people are built different there. They swim outside, in pools, in minus-degree weather.”
It was, in short, a big jump from the Lopez’s familiar, Mexico City world.