While DP Florian Hoffmeister had just scored his first Oscar nomination coming into True Detective: Night Country, for his stunning work on Todd Field’s Tár, showrunner Issa López almost declined to meet with him for the fourth season of HBO’s acclaimed crime anthology, having previously met with 10 other cinematographers.
But when her mentor Guillermo del Toro, who’d worked with Hoffmeister on the 2021 Searchlight horror film Antlers, referred to him as a “genius,” and when she realized the DP had already tackled the Arctic for AMC’s smartly lensed horror series The Arctic, she knew she’d have to reconsider.
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Impressed with how Hoffmeister had “conjured the immensity of the Arctic” on that prior series, she soon found herself equally taken with his pitch for the Alaska-set Night Country, which was about finding ways to emphasize “the isolation and loneliness…of the Arctic, of the night, of the souls of these characters.”
With regard to the scripts for Night Country, Hoffmeister shares, in conversation with López in today’s episode of The Process, “I felt particularly touching just the distance and the fragmentation of people’s relationships, and their attempts to reconnect with each other, and with nature.” And these themes would be his guide over the course of a 10-month shoot in Iceland which he calls “transformative.”
Premiering in January, Night Country watches as the long winter night falls in Ennis, Alaska and the eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station vanish without a trace. To solve the case, Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) will have to confront the darkness they carry in themselves, and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice.
Even with Hoffmeister’s experience on The Terror, the principal challenge of Night Country came down to grappling with “this insane, incredible environment,” says López, which would frequently be highlighted in exteriors, under total darkness. The principal difference between the process of making the two series came down to the fact that The Terror shot mostly on soundstages, using extensive VFX to help with the creation of exterior shots, while Night Country was shot over 112 days — around a third of those, at night — out in the freezing cold.
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Hoffmeister liked to think of shooting out on location as “an advantage,” creatively, and while he now admits that he was “a little bit naïve” going in, as far as his understanding of the challenge in front of him, he essentially stands by his line of thinking in the end.
“I think the theme of isolation is something you can really dwell on if you are by yourself in the dark out in these landscapes. It was just necessary to show the scale of it, and that became a technical challenge at times,” the cinematographer explains. “But the darkness [was] a favor, I think also as a place where mystery can be born out of and where [suspense] is born.”
The genius of the way Hoffmeister shot the series, López says, was how he juxtaposed “absolute blacks” and “areas of very, very striking highlights” in every frame, the combination of which wound up being foundational to the DNA of the show.
López also served as the writer, director and executive producer of True Detective: Night Country, the response to which was so great, HBO signed her to an overall deal and asked her to shepherd another season of the anthology, which remains in development.
Check out the full conversation between López and Hoffmeister above.