'True Detective' Season 4 holds 'a lot of darkness,' director Issa López says

The first season of the acclaimed crime drama “True Detective” premiered on HBO 10 years ago. And while the fourth season of the anthology series — kicking off this Sunday — looks very different, Mexican filmmaker Issa López says that the stories for both seasons are connected.

“I thought that what had made ‘True Detective’ so unique was this backdrop of a world where you could feel the secrets brewing under the surface, in a corner of America you don’t often see portrayed in media,” López said in an interview with NBC News.

López is the showrunner, writer and director of the fourth chapter of “True Detective,” which is subtitled “Night Country.”

And, she says, she wanted to tap into those brewing secrets to create a new story about two detectives that also calls back to Season 1.

“Night Country” introduces detectives Liz Danvers (played by Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (played by Kali Reis) as they partner up to solve a case about eight male scientists who disappeared from a research station in northwest Alaska.

As evidence surfaces, viewers will see both detectives get entangled in another unsolved case about a missing Indigenous woman.

Seasons 1 and 4 are in many ways inverted images of each other. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson inaugurated the series in a humid, sunlit Louisiana bayou, while Foster and Reis carry out their investigation in a cold, dry tundra that can see weeks of uninterrupted night in winter.

But in spite of these contrasts, López describes both sets of detectives as “characters who are holding a lot of darkness, and a lot of doubts, and a lot of obsessions.” And she focuses on these tensions to draw out comparisons.

The Mexican filmmaker says she started working on the story for “Night Country” over three years ago, before joining the “True Detective” franchise. And she combined elements from Western and noir genres to create the type of “mysteries that had obsessed” her as a child.

Growing up, López recalled, she was influenced by John Carpenter’s 1982 science-fiction horror movie “The Thing.” She also remembered watching detective shows dubbed in Spanish on Canal 5 in Mexico, which fed her lifelong passion for finding out “who is the killer.”

Unlike the first season of “True Detective” — critics described female characters then as mostly peripheral — López says she wanted to tell a female-forward story where Jodie Foster could pay homage to her 1991 film role as an FBI agent trainee in the psychological-horror thriller “The Silence of the Lambs.”

When picking Foster’s partner on screen, however, López changed her idea of the character as she learned more about the geography and culture of Alaska.

“Originally the character was Latina, because I am a Latina and I wanted to portray the experience,” she said. “But the more I understood about the specificity of the landscape, the more I understood the character should be an agent that comes from the same culture.”

Ultimately, López preserved part of detective Navarro’s Latina heritage: Her father is Dominican and her mother is Iñupiaq — a Native group from Alaska.

Once it became clear that she wanted a detective who was going to be a mix of two cultures, López said that Kali Reis — a boxer-turned-actor with Black and Native American ancestry — was a perfect fit.

Reis is not an Alaska Native; her Indigenous heritage comes from Cherokee, Nipmuc and Seaconke Wampanoag lineage.

“We have characters that don’t come from the outside to figure out and solve the Indigenous problem. It’s the people from the region themselves who figure out the puzzle,” she said. “And they become active characters instead of passive characters seeing it happen in the hands of characters that come from the outside.”

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Fans of the first season will also be excited to know that beyond the familiar story of an intense partnership between two detectives, “Night Country” is also connected in more direct ways.

López says that characters in Season 4 “are related to characters in the first season.” She also points out the reappearance of the spiral symbol, which was associated with Carcosa — a place where gruesome rituals were performed in Season 1.

Additionally, “Night Country” includes smaller nods, like characters drinking the same beer in both seasons. And López also highlights that “final big revelations in Episode 6” will connect the stories of Seasons 1 and 4.