Welcome to Deadline’s International Disruptors, a feature where we shine a spotlight on key executives and companies outside of the U.S. shaking up the offshore marketplace. This week we’re talking to Alex García López, a director on Netflix’s epic adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The first eight episodes land today (December 11) on the streamer and the Argentine director lifts the lid on the pressures that come with steering Netflix’s most ambitious Latin American project to date, why the project had to be set in Columbia and his next steps, which includes a move into the feature film space.
Alex Garcia Lopez is no stranger to directing big-budget and ambitious TV series, with shows such as fantasy drama The Witcher, neo-noir anime series Cowboy Bebop and Star Wars series The Acolyte among his list of credits. But when he was approached by Netflix to board One Hundred Years of Solitude, a 16-part adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s epic novel and the streamer’s most ambitious Latin American production to date, García López admits he was a little daunted.
“I had just done an adaptation of another significantly beloved cult project Cowboy Bebop and that didn’t go down very well with the fans,” the Argentine director tells Deadline via Zoom from Barcelona. “So, the thought of doing another beloved adaptation of something everyone loves, I didn’t know at first if I had the strength to do it. But that hesitation lasted for about five seconds because I knew this was an opportunity that I could not miss.”
Today the first eight episodes have dropped on Netflix and, looking back, García López admits the experience has been a career high for him.
“Without a doubt, this was, for me, both on a personal and on a career level, the most gratifying job I’ve ever done,” he says. “It was the most satisfying job. It was the hardest job I’ve ever done because of feeling the pressure of what the book means to so many people, but also wanting to have the opportunity to show the world that Columbia and Latin America is so much more than illegal immigrants, Narcos, drug dealers, favelas and dictatorships.”
Like most Latin Americans of the director’s generation, One Hundred Years of Solitude was mandatory reading in high school. The 1967 novel, which was written by esteemed Columbian author García Márquez (or Gabo as he is affectionately known throughout Latin America), is a multi-generational tale that follows the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the mythical town of Macondo.
It’s one of the most seminal books to come out of Latin America and, in addition to being cited as a major achievement in world literature, it’s the most translated Spanish work in the world, having sold more than 50 million copies worldwide in more than 40 languages.
“I read the book when I was a young teenager but to be honest with you, it’s such a colossal and complex book to be reading at that age that I think it was too much for me to comprehend,” García López admits.
It was only while he was doing his masters in the Netherlands during his twenties, that he decided to return to the magical realist masterpiece. “Then I understood why everyone was so in love with it – it’s so profound. On first read, you realize it’s such an entertaining book. It’s so unique. The execution, the language, the pace – everything about it is just intoxicating. And then you walk away from it, and you go, ‘What did I just read?’”
He continues: “Being Latin American, you realize that Gabo managed to summarize not only the Colombian identity and their history in this tiny, fictious town of Macondo, but also all of Latin America’s identity. That is, in many ways, what the book ended up being.”
Gabo, who passed away in 2014, had been reluctant to sell the film rights in his lifetime but when Netflix convinced the García Márquez family to entrust them with the adaptation, it came with one major condition: It could not be whitewashed by Hollywood and had to be set in Columbia and told in the Spanish language.
García López, whose additional credits have included Marvel shows like The Punisher, Daredevil and Cloak & Dagger, had been searching for a show that would take him back to his Latin American roots. “Nothing came up that interested me,” he recalls. “I always felt I was being offered the same few stories that Latin America tends to export to the world, which were stories about Narcos, the drug dealing, illegal immigrants and dictatorships and all of the stuff that we’re known for and people around the world like to see because they deem it authentic.”
He adds: “I understand that’s the demand and that’s what we produce but I just didn’t want to do this.”
But when Francisco ‘Paco’ Ramos, Netflix’s VP of Content for Latin America, approached García López with the prospect of directing Gabo’s mythical masterpiece for the small screen, it felt like a perfect fit (after his initial “five second” hesitation).
The director read the book in Spanish and then again in English to see if it was even translatable or adaptable. “I thought, how are we ever going to adapt a book that has almost no dialogue? That’s really tricky.”
Thankfully a meticulously crafted story from writers Camila Brugés, Albatros González, Jose Rivera, Natalia Santa and Maria Camila Arias, which adapted Gabo’s thick book into a more chronological story, made sense of how it could be realized for screen, says García López. “It’s a fantastic script that has a voice of a narrator that allows us deal with the passage of time and tell the story in a classical way,” he says.
“The book is incredibly biblical and absurd at times, and hilarious and violent and vulgar and passionate,” he says. “It’s intertwined with themes of order and to me it kind of boils down to this question that God will present to every generation, which is can humankind defeat its own destiny? Are we ever going to improve society as a human species or are we going to be constantly recreating the same errors over and over again? I think everyone can empathize with that.”
He continues: “What’s special about our narrator is that he is discovering the story of his family at the same time the audience is. He’s reading it. Sometimes he’s reading faster because he wants to know what happens, and sometimes he laughs because things get ridiculous. Other times he’s sad and melancholic because of what he has just read.”
Columbian indie Dynamo, producer of Narcos and Falco, made the series while García López shares directing duties with Laura Mora, the feature director behind Columbia’s 2023 Oscar entry The Kings of the World. Of the first eight-episodes, García Lopez directs five, with Mora helming three.
The cast includes Claudio Cataño (Colonel Aureliano Buendía), Jerónimo Barón (young Aureliano Buendía, Marco González (Jose Arcadio Buendía), Susana Morales (Úrsula Iguarán), Ella Becerra (Petronila), Carlos Suaréz (Aureliano Iguarán) and Moreno Borja (Melquiades). The team saw more than 10,000 candidates for the 25 main characters across seven generations of the Buendía family.
Production designers Eugenio Callabero, Oscar winner for Pan’s Labyrinth, and Bárbara Enríquez, who was Oscar nominated for her work on Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, oversaw the building of four versions of Macondo to reflect the passage of time.
García Lopez, who was well versed in making big shows in Hollywood, says the fact he is one of the few Latin American directors used to dealing with these big television budgets meant he was an appealing creative to addition to the team.
“Because of our history and our budget issues across the last few decades, Latin American directors tend to tell smaller, independent stories and I think that was one of the reasons I was brought in from the get-go with Netflix,” he says.
“We knew our goal was to make something incredibly authentic and to make this a story of the Columbian-Caribbean Buendía family but at a level that was equal to America and Europe.”
He continues: “Because I was working with the writers so frequently and in such a detailed manner, I was always pushing for bigger things and for bigger scope because the writers came from the indie scene in Columbia and Mexico and, sometimes, they would write things small simply because they were used to a smaller scale.”
It’s touted to be the most expensive show that Netflix has done in Columbia. “Kudos to Netflix to back up their ambition with a check because sometimes that isn’t always the case. We knew that if we were going to do this, we needed to do it right and every department needed that financial support.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude was shot in a field outside of the city of Ibagué, Columbia, where Macondo was built. The nearly 600 strong production crew was almost entirely from Columbia. “Everyone was working 16-hour days for nine or 10 months, so it really was a huge, huge undertaking,” says García Lopez.
When pressed about whether the enormity of the project was daunting, the director says: “The vision and style I think about in pre-production, but once you’re in it, you just have to go with your gut and your heart. You look to the horizon and see 250 extras dressed in 1850s attire in this town and half of it’s on fire, it just feels like a dream.”
“Columbia is a complex, beautiful, passionate, violent and incredibly unique culture because it has so many influences of indigenous, African, Middle East and Spanish culture that has created this unique way of life surrounded by this extraordinary tropical jungle, rainforest and mountains with amazing food and music.”
Crucially for García López, the experience has left him with a “reawakening as a Latino, as a Hispanic person.”
“I’m feeling proud about it and I’m hoping to share this story with the rest of the world, hoping they see us, and they are entertained by us and by our story and way of telling stories.”
Next year, García López will tell another Hispanic story but in a very different light. He is currently prepping to shoot feature film entitled They Wait for Us, which he wrote and will direct. The story takes place after the Mexican American war of 1846-1848 and is described as a horror-thriller.
“I found it interesting of how after that war, when Mexicans living in part of New Mexico and California, all of a sudden became Mexican Americans in someone else’s land and were treated like second class citizens.”
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