🍿 2022-10-22 03:19:00 – Paris/France.
Rodrigo Santos was 17 when he immersed himself in the world of detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, the character in the detective novels by Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II. It was in literature class, when his teacher recommended to him battle days, the first volume of the saga, which, he says, "I really liked", so when the company of diffusion Netflix offered him to get involved in the business of recreating the world and adventures of Belascoarán and bringing it to the small screen, he thought it was "a fairy tale, a charming project".
The three-part series premiered on October 12 and has generated an outpouring of positive comments on social media, many of which are nostalgic not only for the Taibo II saga, but for a Mexico City that has disappeared over time. , but that's the way it is. well portrayed in the Netflix production of which the capital seems to be the main protagonist. "The story is a tribute to Mexico City, a wild city, but with a lot of criteria," says Santos (Mexico City, 46), the series' developer, who is also the script's head writer and producer. Note that the producer, a thin man with a long face, long and wavy hair and carefree, defines himself as “chilango, very chilango”.
In this way, traditional corner food stalls appear in the production, like in a sepia family photo, with their tacos dripping with grease and their drinks so sweet they could cause instant hypertension (Keli Cola at lemon is Belascoarán's favorite drink, a concoction that lights him up to clarify the crimes he insists on sticking his nose into), the gory and overtly controversial tabloid newsstands (wingless butterflytitle one by reporting the murder of a homosexual in the capital, or busted brainreads another which recounts the death of a serial killer who called himself Cerevro), the long cars of the time, a symbol of prestige of a flourishing bourgeoisie, and the avenues of traditional neighborhoods, including the silhouette of mansions and Porfirian buildings gave way to a scenario of multi-storey buildings, as ugly as they were uncomfortable.
“The city has changed a lot physically, the transformation is brutal and sometimes painful. We fight with beautiful things and we replace them with ugly things, ”explains Santos, in an interview given at his home, located in a modern condominium integrated in a neighborhood in the south of the Mexican capital, this area full of beautiful secrets. in this chaotic city and in the luxurious calm of which writers, politicians and artists have taken refuge. In the coolness of his garden, which overlooks an old convent, protected by a wall of volcanic stones and surrounded by ferns, orchids that he takes care of himself and with the playful dog Lemonade As he leaps, Santos recounts what it was like to recreate the world of detective Héctor Belascoarán, played in the Netflix production by actor Luis Gerardo Méndez, who became famous for the film We the nobles.
Rodrigo Santos. Monica Gonzalez Islas
Question. Was it difficult to adapt the books of Paco Ignacio Taibo II?
Reply. I did the writing with a team of writers, but it's a month's work. It's great fun, because the ideas pop up, the good ideas and the bad ideas, and the stories and the tone are shaped. There are tough decisions in an adaptation. Writing a script can be easy because you can write whatever you want, the problem is that later you have to deal with what exists.
P Did Taibo participate in writing the screenplay?
R No, but he read the texts. I had one or two sessions with him, during which he gave me very useful notes and also made me see things that I did not see.
P Like what ?
R He told me that the wisdom of the street of Belascoarán grows and improves thanks to Gilberto Gómez [un plomero amigo del detective que en la serie es interpretado por el actor Silverio Palacios] and that was interesting for me, because I was able to speak to readers and tell them that with this, the popular wisdom that we needed is achieved. There were dialogues that Taibo corrected and then you say: 'well yes, it's funnier like that'. Taibo was very respectful and I hope he is happy. It's that there were a lot of things from the original texts that we wanted to respect and the first was the weather. So we were really excited to write it.
P How was the work of recreating this city of Mexico at the end of the seventies?
R Representing this city is difficult. There were times when we said that we had to correct our script because certain spaces of the city that were in the original texts no longer exist and, in addition, recreating them is very expensive. But there was a very important research work then a recreation of spaces, labels, colors. When I was talking to the editors about the tone of the series, I told them to emulate the crime fiction genre, which is a rigid genre, but we realized that those archetypes, when they collide with a city like this, they have to lose that rigidity. . It's that we're dealing with a character who wants to be a detective and realizes he can't be a detective like those in the gringo novels, because that doesn't work in Mexico, so that clash was important to recreate.
P He says that some of the urban spaces depicted in the text no longer exist. How did they handle this problem?
R The city has changed a lot. At one point we thought we were going to find corners, long stretches of streets, but there are very few of them, everything is interrupted by something modern, full of poles and cables. So there was a digital work to erase a lot of things, to cover up, to replace. Was a shock to see that change, because you see that there are no more things that you remember, even if I think that the personality of the city has not changed that much. And the city's problems, although bigger, are also similar. Like police corruption. It is sad to see that it has not changed, that it has gotten worse. We have not been able to professionalize our security forces, which have continued to rot in corruption.
P Violence against women, still latent in Mexico City, is also reflected in the series.
R This is one of the things about reading the Taibo II novels and discussing in the writers room that was painful to comment on. In a novel written in the 1970s, Taibo tells the story of a femicide that no one considers and that a detective decides to capture, but today's Mexico has this much more serious problem. There is enormous indolence on the part of the authorities, mothers and relatives are looking for their missing themselves and it is not getting any better. And it's hard to realize that Taibo's fiction is so close to reality and that it now overflows. But we didn't want to make a series centered on violence, which is part of the landscape of the city and we wanted to give it its place and its importance, but not only to portray violence.
Belascoaran must live
Rodrigo Santos has a request for the Asturian author Paco Ignacio Taibo II: that his famous detective continue his old habits in order to make a second part of the series which is a hit in Mexico. “Sherlock Holmes is dead, but there was a plea from his fans, who demanded more stories and sent thousands of letters to Conan Doyle [el autor de la saga]. I understand that the same thing happened to Taibo back then, but now we need people to come to his office to demand more stories about Belascoarán, so that they force us to resuscitate him, or put banners outside of Netflix so we can get it back,” he says. The saints laugh.
SOURCE: Reviews News
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