“True Detective: Night Country”
Frosty filming in icy places
Kali Reis and Jodie Foster (r.) in “True Detective: Night Country”.
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Ice and snow, eternal night: The fourth season of “True Detective” takes place in Alaska, but was largely not filmed on US soil.
“A pale sun wavers and dies over the endless expanse of ice, the last sliver shrinking rapidly. It is the last of the sun this part of the world will see for a month. Title: 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Ennis, Alaska. 17. December. The last sunset of the year.” Just these few lines from the script for the first episode of “True Detective: Night Country” make it clear that the journey through the “Night Country” will be more than just uncomfortable for the actors and viewers.
In the current season of the HBO crime drama, which has been shown in Germany on Sky and Wow since mid-January, Hollywood legend Jodie Foster (61) is investigating the obscure case of eight missing men with professional boxer and actress Kali Reis (37). a research station. In six episodes, the two also have to contend with darkness and high temperatures below zero.
A fictional town is the setting for “True Detective: Night Country”
In the first season of the anthology series, Woody Harrelson (62) and Matthew McConaughey (54) went to the bayous of Louisiana. Colin Farrell (47), Vince Vaughn (53) and Rachel McAdams (45) ended up in California in season two. In the third, Mahershala Ali (49) and Stephen Dorff (50) found themselves in the Ozarks. Foster and Reis investigate in Ennis, Alaska. The town is fictional, but according to media reports it is based on the northernmost town in the USA and its surroundings in the North Slope Borough – Utqiaġvik, formerly Barrow. According to a 2020 census, fewer than 5,000 people live in the town.
Viewers who are not averse to the horror genre could not wrongly be reminded of “30 Days of Night” or John Carpenter’s (76) “The Thing from Another World” when watching “True Detective: Night Country”. from 1982 feel reminded. Showrunner, director and writer Issa López explained in early January in an interview with the “AV Club”, that the sci-fi horror cult film is undoubtedly one of the most important references for the season. The 2007 vampire film, meanwhile, takes place in Utqiaġvik.
The limits of human endurance
The series didn’t film in Alaska for long. And there were several good reasons for this. “As much as we wanted to stay true to the elements of the story, the part of Alaska where we had to shoot – above the Arctic Circle, where the night stretches into months – doesn’t have that [notwendige] infrastructure”, explained López “Total Film”. “It’s a big production. And in Alaska during the months we wanted to shoot there, temperatures could reach minus 36 degrees Celsius,” she continued. Not only does this exceed the limits of human endurance, it also reaches the point where the cameras no longer work.
What does López mean by insufficient infrastructure? Utqiaġvik is cut off from the rest of the country, with no roads leading from outside to the town, which is accessible via a local airport. According to the Alaska Travel Industry Association, which is responsible for tourism, some of the local people still rely on whaling today. The meat is used as food and oil is made from the blubber.
Therefore, the showrunner’s team headed to Iceland, thousands of kilometers away – in and around the capital Reykjavik, where a large part of the work took place. We also went to the northern towns of Dalvik and Akureyri, where the filmmakers brought Ennis to life.
But here too, the conditions during filming were more challenging than one could imagine, the showrunner told the “AV Club”. It doesn’t matter how hard you think the shoot will be beforehand: “You’re not prepared for it.” In addition, as a Mexican, she doesn’t like the cold. “We shot 49 nights in a row, 120 days in total. And those 49 nights, most of them out in the ice, do something to you in a wonderful way,” she explained.
In some cases, the crew filmed at minus 23 degrees Celsius, but this affects how viewers experience the series. “I was cold when I [die Serie] According to López, many of the people who are watching the current season said – and that was because “we were there, because the actors were cold, because the filmmakers were cold”. It had to be like this, “about this physical thing “to really convey the feeling across the screen.”