Photo taken on April 30, 2017, of attendees at the XXX Bogotá International Book Fair while looking at the book “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” by Gabriel García Márquez, in Bogotá, Colombia. Photo: EFE
EFE/New York
Screenwriter María Camila Arias said this Friday in New York that before agreeing to be a script advisor for the adaptation of the novel One hundred years of loneliness by Gabriel García Márquez, for a television series she said “no” several times out of “fear” of the responsibility of looking good, of not disappointing, and as a Colombian, because it is the most important work of her country.
Arias pointed out that the adaptation of the work of the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1982, which was a team effort between scriptwriters and directors whom he advised, took about a year and a half before filming began in Colombia to tell the story. history of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo, which represents Colombia.
“We talked, we listened to ideas, we fought, we fought with Gabriel about why he had written things in that way that made adaptation more difficult,” he commented in a forum as part of the International Book Fair, where he answered questions from Daniel Marquínez, director of Special Projects of the Gabo Foundation, and the cultural journalist Eugenia Zicavo about the adaptation of the work.
The Neflix series, which will be broadcast in Spanish and will premiere on December 11, is made up of 16 episodes. There are scenes that are not in the book “to give coherence” to the chapters but they do not change the context.
Arias assured that it was “a privilege” to have worked on this project and added that the great challenge was being able to manage the large number of characters in the novel by García Márquez (1927-2014) and bring them to those 16 chapters almost 60 years after the publication. Release of the novel to the market (1967), which talks about violence in Colombia.
“It is the history of Colombia from the beginning. I think García Márquez wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude seeing the history of Colombia, too present. It narrates many very important events such as the War of a Thousand Days (which occurred between 1899 and 1902), the liberals . and conservatives, that is our history, events in history that still resonate today in what happens in the country,” he commented.
In this adaptation for television, co-directed by Laura Mora and Alex García, women have a prominent role, specifically Úrsula Iguarán, the cousin and wife of José Arcadio Buendía. “Úrsula is our main character from the beginning, others emerge, but for us she, more than José Arcadio, is the one who leads the characters by the hand,” he indicated.
“She experiences the suffering of all the characters and has to help her family move forward. She is a very tough character that is difficult for me because of how tough she is,” he said.
As an aside, Arias, who has made other adaptations of novels and written scripts, assured EFE that this has been his most important challenge.
He also assured that the most difficult part of the project for the work team was deciding “what stays and what would not be (in the series). Putting the novel into a series is a process that is not only the script, but also continues with the editing” and that the viewer is trapped (with the final product) without needing to have all the details. the
series motivates people to read or reread the work with another perspective.
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