from García Márquez to… Borges?

For Alex García López, agreeing to direct the series adaptation of One hundred years of loneliness It was one of those decisions that you don’t think twice about. “When Netflix called me, I said yes instantly,” he tells Viva. The doubts came later: “It was when I hung up that I asked myself: how are we going to achieve this?”

García López is Argentine, although his accent does not give it away. From the age of 13, when he moved to the United States with his family, his life was spent mostly outside the country. He is also one of the Latin directors with the greatest projection in the world of series, having shouldered episodes of global productions such as Star Wars: The Acolyte, Daredevil o The Witcher.

But while his resume reveals that he is no stranger to big projects, One hundred years of loneliness It was a different challenge. Gabriel García Márquez’s novel is one of the most translated books in Spanish in the world and an unavoidable landmark of the work that earned the Colombian author the Nobel Prize. She was sometimes described as “unadaptable” for the screen. Few dialogues in the text, a multitude of characters and an intimidating length make the task only for the brave: Gabo himself had shared in life his reservations that such a task would work.

With the first episodes already released (there will be two seasons of eight chapters), García López feels that he emerged successfully from the great challenge of his career.

The series, Netflix’s most expensive production for Latin America (it cost about 50 million dollars)took three years to film, involved a team of more than 600 people and even the construction of an entire town recreating Macondo, the mythical place where the story of the Buendía family takes place.

Actually, four Macondo were built (from the initial village seen in the first two chapters to the city that will be seen in the second season). They were built in a place near Ibagué, capital of the department of Tolima, next to the Central Mountain Range, a place that, due to its landscape, color and light, represents the Colombian Caribbean very well.

The series is also a success with audiences and critics, to the relief of the Argentine director, responsible for five of the first episodes, including the pilot and the closing of the first half.

–One hundred years of loneliness It is one of the great classics of Latin American literature. How did you become the main director of its series adaptation?

-With Francisco “Paco” Ramos, director of Netflix Latin America, we had been talking about making a Latin series. I loved the idea because I had never done one. I always led outside. But I warned him that I wasn’t looking for stories about drug traffickers or illegal immigrants.. Some of this genre are well made, but they are the same old stuff and they don’t interest me. I was living in New Zealand, working on another Netflix project, when one day Paco called me and said: “I think you’re going to like this project.” He had obtained the rights to One hundred years of loneliness and he wanted to know if I was interested in directing. I didn’t hesitate and said yes, obviously. Then came fear!

-Did you have a previous relationship with the novel?

-I read the book for the first time as a typical Latin American teenager when I was 13 or 14 years old and, I think like many of them, I put it down. It was very complex, very long… I think I didn’t have the mental capacity and patience to follow it. Later, when I was 25 or 26, I reread it. I was going through a stage where I wanted to get into the classics of the “Latin boom.” That’s when it really hit me. It captures not only Colombian history but that of our entire continent with unique prose. It is a very demanding book, but it has a special energy that drags you from the first page.

-That demanding aspect made him practically unadaptable. Did you have doubts?

-Bringing that special and unique voice of Gabriel García Márquez to the screen was an enormous challenge. The big question was how José Rivera, the screenwriter, was going to work from a book that has so little dialogue. We had to give the characters a voice that almost does not exist in the text without the work losing its essence. After about two or three months, the first versions of the script began to arrive to me. I was very afraid because I had already said yes to the project. I had jumped into the pool! I told myself inside: “Please, let it turn out well for us!”

-As you can imagine, over time, almost four years of production, the script changed a lot. But the beginning of the story is the same one with which we started. I remember reading the equivalent of the first five minutes of the series and feeling brutally calm. José had the great idea of ​​taking a character from the end and putting him at the beginning. This character opens a book and begins to read the history of his family. I realized that we had gold in our hands: through this narrator we had Gabo’s voice, with his poetry and prose, with his humor and his passion. It was our common thread. That was the moment when I understood, and so did the entire team, that we could do this.

Alex’s career could be described as atypical. Although he is Argentine, he has never directed in the country. And although today he is one of the most sought-after directors of the show, His foray into the audiovisual format was his second optionsince he came to the field after years of working in another branch of art: music.

That is why it describes One hundred years of loneliness like a before and after: it involved the chance to rediscover his Latin roots and explore another type of history to which he is not accustomed.

-Your career progressed in reverse: you always worked abroad and you are only now making your first Latin American fiction. How did it happen like this?

-It was pure coincidence. I am from Buenos Aires, born in Buenos Aires, but when I was 13 I went to the United States for my father’s job. I went to high school there and then, at university, I studied music, my first great passion. At 20 I moved to London and lived there from music until I was 30. It was only at that age that I started directing. I loved cinema, but the truth is, I had no idea how to get into it… Until digital cameras appeared. There was the NETWORK, which at that time was the first, and it was what allowed me to start making short films.

-How did you hit her?

-I think I was lucky: I was in the right place at the right time. English television was going through an incredible moment. They were looking for young people. They wanted new directors because they were making strange and very unique series visually. I had made a few short films when they invited me to work at Misfitsan incredible, cult show that even won three BAFTA awards (given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts). Then it came Utopiawhich won an international Emmy… It was all very fast. I started dividing my time between Europe and the United States, kind of the reason I’d never had the opportunity to tell a story in Latin America until now.

-Many of the series you directed are geeky: one about Star Wars, game adaptations, superheroes… What was new for you when working with such different material?

-There are things that were similar and others that were not. Whether in One hundred years of loneliness o Star WarsI knew I was messing with something that is very loved by thousands of people. There is an occupational and personal risk that many of those people probably won’t like it: “How dare you touch something that is ours?” There is something half possessive.

-Does that weigh on your work as a director?

-I’m already a little used to pressure. Rodrigo, one of García Márquez’s sons, warned me at the beginning of the project: “Do not feel the weight of my father’s book. You do what you know and follow your heart.” He was right. I let go and was able to enjoy.

-Directing the episodes was a very special process. Making the series felt like a big awakening. It made me return to Latin America, rediscover our culture, and learn a lot from a sister country like Colombia. It was an experience that changed me and whetted my appetite for telling new stories.

-Would you be interested in filming a movie?

-I have been trying to launch a few for about five years. But independent cinema is difficult: you have to raise money, get investors… The infrastructure is complex. But I am working and I will continue at that next year with my first film. It’s terrifying. It takes place during the war between the United States and Mexico, in 1848. I like that time. I was always interested in making films and it never happened, but now I see the opportunity.

-You already directed your first series in Latin America, but it was your turn in Colombia. When will it be Argentina’s turn?

-You sound like my agent (laughs). I would love to tell a period Argentine story. A genre that always fascinated me, and which I have not yet ventured into, is police. And, as we know, Jorge Luis Borges was a great lover of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer who was a pioneer of the detective genre… I want to do something like that in Buenos Aires. It is another reason why I also wanted One Hundred Years of Solitude to be a successful series: to demonstrate to the big studios, who are expectant because there was a strong financial bet, that there is a global demand for this type of fiction.