Ask the Right Questions: Interrogate Your Story with Tips from Showrunner Issa López of ‘True Detective: Night Country’

A veteran detective mulls over a gruesome discovery. A younger police officer has some theories. She’s willing to listen. “Start asking questions,” she says.

HBO’s Emmy-winning mystery series True Detective returns this month after a five-year hiatus, ditching the Southern Gothic for the Arctic—an environment that’s as much a character as the miners, environmentalists, and Indigenous people who clash throughout bitter cold and round-the-clock darkness.

Set in December around the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, True Detective: Night Country features two women as the leads: Oscar-winner Jodie Foster as Liz Danvers, the town’s White police chief, and pro boxer Kali Reis (Catch the Fair One) as Evangeline Navarro, a state trooper with Iñupiaq roots.

It also introduces a mantra writers can apply to their work: Ask the right questions, as Danvers notes when thinking aloud with Navarro or another cop, Peter Prior (Finn Bennett).

“It’s just the most essential tool for reasoning, really,” agreed Issa López, this season’s creator, writer, and director. “It applies to detective work, no doubt, but it applies to interaction with other people. It applies definitely to writing—and it definitely applies to filmmaking. So, yeah, you can use it for anything. Just know that you’re asking the right questions.”

The filmmaker, whose 2017 horror/fantasy film Tigers Are Not Afraid drew raves from director Guillermo del Toro and authors Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, shared how she interrogates any story—and how she cracked the core of True Detective’s icy new chapter.

What Lies Beneath

True Detective: Night Country begins with the disappearance of eight men from the Tsalal Arctic Research Station in Ennis. They leave behind a once-fresh sandwich and fixings on the counter, wet laundry in the washing machine, and the TV blaring the “Twist & Shout” scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in a garbled loop.

When further details connect the men’s disappearance to the slaying of an Indigenous activist who had spoken against a local mining company, Danvers and Navarro probe not just what happened but how and why. As is typical with the True Detective franchise, they also balance tumultuous personal lives. Danvers has a rebellious teenage stepdaughter (Isabella Star LaBlanc) and memories of her son, who died at a tender age. Navarro sees reminders of her late mother while her sister (Aka Niviâna) deals with a mental health condition.

A native of Mexico, López started writing what became Night Country a few years ago, intrigued to tackle a new genre. Tigers Are Not Afraid blends horror with magical realism, focusing on children navigating the drug war in a deserted Mexican town. Her earlier films, “Effectos secundarios” and “Casi divas,” combine comedy and social commentary.

“I think I have a little bit of a masochist to me. I think every writer does. Why else torture yourself into producing stories that are supposed to live up to the fantasies you had about them before putting them to paper?” she said. A whodunit “has very specific, peculiar rules. And the technique to creating it is a mystery in itself; it is for me. So, I started toying with that idea. And I came up with the concept of the feeling of a Western in the dark, in the ice, in the Arctic, and characters that need to break through the ice they’ve built inside themselves to get to the secrets that are happening in the real world.”

As Tigers gained acclaim, HBO came calling and found her idea a natural fit for True Detective. Along with focusing on the female experience instead of being “a profound meditation on maleness and its many different manifestations,” López knew the wintery setting brought a fresh feel.

“I detest the cold,” she said with a laugh. “The one time that I had, like, a relationship with the snow was when I was visiting New York City in 1995, I think. There was this furious storm; it was ridiculous. And my illusion as a Mexico City girl of meeting the snow and how beautiful it is was dead within the first fifteen minutes. Moving through it is hell. Breathing in it is hell. And I’m not built for it. Still, it captures the imagination. What happens in the ice? Especially when darkness comes and stays, you know? It was a perfect environment for a whodunit.”

Enter the first question: What is this story really about?

Sure, True Detective: Night Country starts with the scientists’ disappearance, but below that, “it is about the secrets we keep under ice,” at least at first, López said. “I realized that the answer for this particular story is loneliness and loss. Once I understood that, I could go back and … shine some light on those moments.”

A story always reveals its deeper meaning much later in the writing process, she said. López doesn’t trust this realization early.

“If it comes in the beginning, you will be imposing it instead of letting the story tell you,” she said. "As you as you work, ... you realize what it’s really, really about. And that’s interesting, because when you find that, then you have to go back and reshape the story to serve that.”

How to Relate

When creating her characters, from Danvers and Navarro to the extended community, López first turned to social media because the COVID-19 lockdown initially prevented her from visiting rural northwest Alaska. She listened to area radio stations and watched locals record how they made breakfast, shopped for groceries, and hunted for food because prices were exorbitant.

“To understand that we’re talking of a society that needs to go out and hunt in the ice to survive, that alone will give you a perspective on how distant this is from our own experience,” she said.

Once she could visit the area, “I was able to have dinner at the homes of the characters that I had dreamed.” She also absorbed details that fueled the story, such as how the people she met had a monthly liquor allowance and bought wine for her through an alcohol depot, and how the dead remain in a shed during winter until the ground is soft enough to bury them.

Ironically, the show filmed in Iceland because northwest Alaska’s infrastructure couldn’t sustain the size of the production. “There are no roads to get to them in winter. You can’t get there by sea because the sea freezes,” López said. The show’s look and the story further developed with the help of Indigenous producers, who ensured it portrayed their experience faithfully.

When meeting new people, López wonders how to connect with the person underneath what someone presents to the world. “Everybody’s incredibly fascinating and twisted. And when you find that [in a] person, you can get interested in pretty much anybody.”

Enter the next question: How do I relate to this person? Writers often think of their characters, “Who is this person?” but López prefers to relate to her characters instead. “If you don’t have profound emotions towards a character, I think you’re going to struggle to make them fascinating for anybody else.”

She’s careful not to make characters like herself or ones who would be her friends. “They’re not going to be surprising, and they’re not going to be enhancing the world for us.” With True Detective, “I didn’t make them book readers or philosophers or jazz listeners or none of that. None of that is who these characters are,” she said.

Danvers, for instance, has political beliefs different from her own. “I don’t like Danvers. I really don’t … which made me like her.”

When crafting characters, López suggests distancing them from yourself, then digging beneath the surface to find something to which you can relate. “In that way, in the end, there is still going to be you. We cannot invent something that is outside of our experience or imagination. But everything about them is going to be new and fresh and true. And not a self-portrait.”

Keep It Surprising

López once told The Los Angeles Times she loves horror because it “goes directly into our most intimate, primal emotion, so if you can squeeze your way there, you have the audience’s heart and ear. Then you can go into their other fears, the ones they really don’t want to go into, the real ones.”

Her work often deals with fears—and confronting them. “I think that the biggest fear is loss,” she said. With True Detective: Night Country, “the whole series is a meditation on how you cannot outrun your fears. Because they’re right in you. You’re carrying them as you run. So, if there is a takeaway, and it doesn’t sound super creepy, at some point, you need to stop running, and take a look at what you’re carrying when you run.”

In your work, be aware of your own fears—and don’t let them stop you at obvious answers.

“Every time that I find myself in front of writing,” she said, “the next question is, OK, so, how can we reverse this? How can we make it the opposite and surprising? In every scene? And in every episode? The constant question is: How can this be surprising?” 

True Detective: Night Country premieres on January 14, 2023 on Max.