Entertainment

The team of Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude took creative risks


When Colombian director Laura Mora was first asked to join the team tasked with adapting Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude into a TV series, she was very skeptical.

“I first heard about the project in 2018, and I remember thinking, ‘What is this madness?’” Mora said in Spanish in a Zoom interview. “How could they want to do that? I was horrified. I really thought it was stupid. Even irresponsible.”

José Rivera, who wrote the script that ultimately changed Moura’s mind, was initially cautious.

“I’m not going to go watch that,” he remembers thinking when he heard what Netflix was trying to do. “It’s going to suck. They’re going to blow it. It’s not going to be good.”

But as was the case with everyone who eventually signed up for an ambitious and contented adaptation (the first, eight episodes, is now available for streaming), Rivera, Moura, fellow series director Alex García Lopez, and the entire creative team knew that the best way to ensure the series was What would make García Márquez proud is to make the decision and make it theirs. To honor her but to abandon the idea of ​​complete devotion to her.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1967, and the Colombian novelist known as Gabo won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. More than 50 years after its publication, the story of the Buendía family and the tragic events that destroyed their family unfolds. The Small Town of Macondo remains one of the most beloved novels of the twentieth century.

In García Márquez’s prose, Macondo is Colombia and Colombia is Macondo. A full sense of history is embedded in her melodramatic stories. The city, founded by José Arcadio Buendia (played by Marco González as a young man and Diego Vásquez as his older version in the series) with his wife Ursula Iguaran (played by Susana Morales and later Marlida Soto), slowly traces the arrival of mysticism, then science, and later politics and the church. . Macondo soon finds himself at the center of a political civil war as Buendía’s eldest son, Colonel Aureliano Buendía (Claudio Cattaneo), becomes a revolutionary leader destined for glory and infamy.

The novel covers so much ground that adaptation seemed impossible for a long time. The book has been followed since its publication by rumblings about a Hollywood stab at it, with people as diverse as Anthony Quinn and William Friedkin expressing interest at some point over the past few decades. But García Márquez, who died in 2014, had always resisted such offers.

With the arrival of streaming giants like Netflix and their commitment to supporting local talent and production, the García Márquez family — which includes his son, director Rodrigo García — saw an opportunity to give “One Hundred Years of Solitude” the adaptation it deserved, a film that would be shot in both Spanish and Colombia with mostly Colombian talent in front of The camera and behind it. (The series uses English subtitles.)

Garcia serves as an executive producer on the show but said he tried not to be too involved. He knew that his mere presence might distract the creative team.

“I’ve said that I think a lot of the edits that have been made to my father’s work have suffered from too much respect for the book,” he said over Zoom. “And a lot of awe for the writer. I told them they should feel free to really adapt to it.

It was always difficult to translate García Márquez’s poetic language and distinctive images into the language of the TV series, especially since the book did not follow a neat timeline.

Rivera, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004), knew that to tell the story of the Buendías family, he had to contend with the novel’s circular sense of time. In drafts of the show’s 16 episodes — which were fleshed out and co-written by a coterie of Colombian writers, including Natalia Santa, Camila Bruges, Albatros González, and María Camila Arias — Rivera arranged a chronology of the series’ titular century, beginning roughly in 1850 and ending in Mid-twentieth century.

This alone opened up a way to divide a 400-page novel into 16 hours, which contains little dialogue and covers six generations of the Buendía family—not to mention the civil wars, bloody massacres, illicit love affairs, familial betrayals, and ill-treatment. Fateful marriages, cold-blooded executions, and everything in between.

Another big hurdle was how to import García Márquez’s signature sensibility to the small screen. Moura and García Lopez worked to ground the world of the series in a tangible and believable reality. Filmed on location in Colombia with sets that allow the characters to move freely in long, rambling shots, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” has a hand-crafted theatrical feel.

“One of the big stakes in the language of the series specifically was the opportunity to distance ourselves from that magical realism that is often interpreted as a fantastic place, and embrace it instead as a poetic place,” Moura said. “A place where our reality, sometimes because of its beauty and its cruelty, surpasses any imagination. To do this not in an artificial way but in a very literal way, instead.

“The book is known to be a book with magical motifs,” Garcia adds. “But it’s also a very realistic, psychological story of relationships. Of desires and frustrations. I think that’s what keeps the book alive. It’s about life.”

The popularity of One Hundred Years of Solitude has not diminished precisely because Gabo’s stories have long served as both a historical record and a warning. Such as history and template.

“One of the things that distinguishes a great work is precisely that it never loses its relevance,” Moura said. “It always gives us insight into the world we live in. It doesn’t matter when it was written. The author becomes the prophet of his time.

For the cast, the show’s themes — about political violence and a divided people, the cost of peace and the price of corruption, torn families apart and trauma passed down from generation to generation — remain as topical as ever. And it is not nearly as local as it might seem at first glance.

Although the show’s roots are clearly in Colombia, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a text that transcends borders.

“The contradictions at the heart of the human experience will resonate forever through time,” said Cattaneo, who plays the iconic Aureliano Buendia. “It is a theme that all races on Earth can identify with. All the dualities and ambiguities of humanity are the dualities and ambiguities found in these characters. It is impossible not to identify with them.”

“I think its significance and importance comes from the fact that we have gradually lost our memory,” Vasquez adds. “The cycle keeps repeating itself.”

It’s a bleak message. But this is his nature, and as the Buendías themselves have learned, it will never get old. This idea will continue to resonate not only in Colombia, but elsewhere. Especially in countries facing challenges related to the issues of power-hungry figures depicted by Gabo nearly half a century ago.

“The book touches on many global issues, one of which is the ever-present problem of tyranny,” Rivera says. “The idea of ​​revolution and revolutionary fervor is universal. Today it is appropriate to understand that Trump is a tyrant, or a potential tyrant. Then we have to ask ourselves, where is our revolutionary spirit? Who is our Aureliano?”

That’s why Mora is so excited, if apprehensive, about exporting these Colombian stories to a global audience once again.

“I wonder how this would resonate in a place like the United States, in a country that is so divided right now,” Mora says. “But then I think the whole world is so polarized. One Hundred Years of Solitude gives us an insight into how difficult and dangerous this divided world is, and how poetry and beauty are also what can save us.”

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