The director of One Hundred Years of Solitude talks about creative vision

Netflix has now tackled literary master Gabriel García Márquez’s family saga One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad). The author, who is recognized as a pioneer of the magical realism genre for his incredible work, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

Despite being burdened by such a large cultural legacy, Netflix’s efforts are proving fruitful. The series has already made Netflix’s global top 10 list, and that’s partly due to director Alex García López’s respect for the source material. In a conversation with Forbes, he was happy to share his creative ideas.

García López, who referred to the writer as “Gabo”, directed five episodes of the series. He admired García Márquez’s ability to create an enchanting world and spoke of the need to immerse himself in the cultural richness of Colombia’s Caribbean in order to do justice to the fictional city of Macondo and the Buendía family. “I started to see Gabo’s youth and his stories and his family differently. And so, for me, it was fundamental to bring that energy to life,” he said.

“My biggest concern was how we would adapt a novel that had so little dialogue, but such a deep and unique voice,” he explained. “But when I read the first draft of the script, I was excited. I was hypnotized. I saw that we really had a chance to do this well.”

García López approached the story through a narrator, which helped him better understand the prose. “Unlike other shows or movies where the narrator knows the beginning and the end of the story, our narrator discovers the story along with the audience,” he said. “The camera becomes his point of view. He’s flying around the house, trying to find who’s talking, where the story is coming from. That gave us a slightly surreal, slightly ethereal, slightly magical element to the show.”

He also worked closely with Rodrigo and Gonzalo, sons of the late author, to better emulate the vision of the original story on screen. Their encouragement was the push he needed to bring to life a story he believes will resonate with a global audience, just as the book did.

“The story, the characters, the themes themselves are universal,” he said. “That’s why the book has sold more than 50 or 60 million copies worldwide. And now, thanks to Netflix, audiences are hungry for stories set in places they’ve never seen before.”