On June 6, the IndieWire Honors Ceremony 2024 celebrates thirteen creators and stars responsible for some of the TV season’s greatest works. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial staff, this event is a new edition of the IndieWire Honors event focused entirely on television. In the days leading up to the event, IndieWire will be showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.
Ahead the star of ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Jodie Foster tells IndieWire about the many qualities that set our Author Award winner, director and writer Issa López, apart from the crowd.
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As told to Kate Erbland. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It starts at the beginning, which means you get a great piece of material. In Issa’s case, she had this great instinct to say, “I’ve always wanted to do a kind of noir, a Arctic black.” As soon as she said that and started researching the place, it revealed itself to her. And then she said, “This is America, but it’s the Arctic.” Suddenly you have all these generations of embedded, deep, beautiful trauma that comes with the extraordinary folktales, myths, and character of that landscape and those people. As soon as she spoke about it, it was as if a whole world of truth, beauty, humor and complexity opened up to her.
You have to be a talented, inspired person who is open to that. It’s all contagious because every person who climbs aboard says, “There’s something going on that I can’t deny.” When everyone came on board, each of them was just starting to do the best work of their lives. It was all a bit magical, to tell you the truth. That happens when you have a piece of material that is rooted in something that really goes to the core of your humanity. I think the only other time I’ve had this experience was with ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.
It starts with Issa’s extraordinary talent, but also with her instincts and how open she is. She is someone who has been given many seemingly contradictory talents. She is incredibly brilliant and intelligent, but also very funny and silly. She is so strong and so clear about her vision, and has no problem saying, “No, I totally disagree with that.” This is the way we’re going to do it.” Yet she is completely flexible and enjoys the process of walking in and saying, ‘Oh, what are these new things We bring to the table?” I’d almost say she’s an actor, but I don’t know if she’s an actor because I think she has a bigger worldview than an actor. But she could have become an actor if she wanted to.
I read the script first because I never want to attend a meeting without reading the script. I don’t want to sit in front of someone and have them tell their story that they love, and then I read the script and I’m like, “Eh.” I read the script and was so intrigued that I felt so moved by that first episode. We had a great conversation and she talked to me about the play, but we also talked about everything under the sun, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s amazing. What a vision. Extraordinary person.”
But I actually put the bomb at the end, which was, ‘Look, I just don’t think I’m right for this role. There’s a lot that I played before when I was younger that I’ve now outgrown. I’ve played a lot of characters who have lost their children, and I don’t know if I want to play that again. It feels like I’ve done it a few times and now I’m older, and why am I playing it again? Not only that, I’m too old to play a character who recently lost his child. Shall we take that part out?”
And then I went away and made another movie and said, “Well, that’s probably the end of it.” But Issa called me and said, ‘Look, that’s not going to happen. That part of your speech to me isn’t going to happen. I understand if you feel completely connected to that and it’s a place you don’t want to go, and then we happily say goodbye, but these are the reasons why I feel like it’s important. Then I said, ‘Okay, but I can’t play her because she recently lost the child. That would be ridiculous, I’m 60 years old.” We were able to reach a compromise on that!
I would follow her to the ends of the earth, because she has that confidence in herself, but is also flexible. It’s a combination of both. As performers and actors, we can learn to give up these embedded ideas we have about something because we are simply stubborn or because we cannot grow. Then we have to learn how to stick with things that are true to the character. For a lot of writers, especially writer/directors, that’s hard because they spend a lot of their lives alone in a hotel room, making something perfect and then handing it out and saying, “Oh, just do it this way.” this.” But movies and TV shows aren’t made in a hotel room, they’re made in collaboration with 170 people, with each person bringing their stuff, their history, their experiences to the table, and it changes and changes every second.
That’s what you have to love about making films, you have to love how organic they are and how you do it together. It’s like an act of love that brings you together. But there has to be a conductor on the train, there has to be a parent who says, “I love you and everything you do and you’re amazing, just go, go, go,” but who also says, “Except me I wants you to get on the train at 8:32 a.m. so we’ll be on time.” You need both, and that’s Issa.
We all really care about each other. Some of that obviously happened while we were shooting because you like the people you’re working with, but I always want to keep some distance while I’m shooting because honestly, when you’re working with a bunch of people for 14 hours , at the end of the day I just want to come home and watch football and read.
My relationship with Issa, while really great while shooting, was also very different [her], because she is the director and she knows she should be higher in the hierarchy. We really bonded after the shoot and I was able to say, ‘Oh, you know that day when this and this happened? Actually, this is what really happened.” Especially knowing that it’s an anthology and I won’t be in the next one, we were able to really become friends in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever become friends with a director before.
She’s someone I would call if I cut my finger off with a paring knife and needed someone to take me to the hospital. I would call her, and she would call me. Make sure you tell her how much I love her.
Read Issa López’s IndieWire Honors profile.
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