Since Netflix announced, in 2019, that it had acquired the rights to One hundred years of loneliness, the expectation has been maximum. The most famous novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez had had options of being adapted to the cinema, but Gabo he always doubted that the work would fit in an audiovisual format.
The popular platform streaming accepted the challenge and signed Gonzalo Y Rodrigo Garcia Barcha, the sons of the Colombian writer, as executive producers. Little by little details of the project are being known. This Tuesday, during one of the sessions of the eighth Gabo Festival, which this year is celebrated in digital format because of the covid-19, it has been revealed that the series on this masterpiece of world literature will last “around 20 hours.”
Transfers
Gabo’s children, Gonzalo and Rodrigo, serve as executive producers of the series
“It has not yet been fully decided, but I think it will be (three seasons) of eight, six and eight hours, or something like that,” Rodrigo revealed in a talk with the Chilean director Andrés Wood and the Colombian film critic Samuel Castro. The screenwriter Puerto Rican Jose Rivera is the one who has adapted the book and has written the first chapters.
The production will probably not leave anyone indifferent because it will introduce changes from the first bars. Modifications that can misplace readers. “(Rivera) has made a couple of changes that are not reinventing anything, it looks a lot like the novel. But if you’ve done a couple of clever structural things that aren’t going to be alarming. He is very faithful to the book ”, said García Márquez’s son, trying to reduce the controversy.
Rodrigo García Barcha (i), Samuel Castro (top right) and Andrés Wood during their talk
“Every book is difficult to adapt. In the case of works by Gabo there is a history of bad adaptations. They share too much respect for the text. Gabo, in his novels, he has very little dialogue. And when his characters speak, they do so in a very forceful, lapidary and poetic way. And the cinema can’t stand that. They cannot all be talking as if they were gods ”, justified Rodrigo, who understands that it is“ necessary for the scriptwriters and directors to take over the book ”. “They only work if the director has a universal vision of what he is doing in the adaptation. You have to take certain freedoms, otherwise it doesn’t work ”, he added.
The debate was open and Andrés Wood, who directs the adaptation of News of a kidnapping for Amazon ColombiaHe recalled “a saying that is ‘You have to choose a bad book to make a good movie’. There is like a curse of good books. I understand that Hitchcock was a specialist in choosing not-so-good books. “
Respect for the work
In the case of Gabo’s works, there is a history of bad adaptations
Wood admitted that the “great challenge with García Márquez is precisely the greatness of the verbal universe, which is a very important part of the novel. And that, transferred to the image, if one makes it literal, it is very complex. It has a lot of sub-texts, a lot of layers, a lot of complexity. The challenge is precisely how to reinterpret that greatness ”.
Rodrigo García Barcha, who has directed series such as The Sopranos O Two meters underground, admitted that every story “is an adaptation.” “What Gabo, for example, decided to exclude in News of a kidnapping it was a narrative decision. The way it is structured to create more or less suspense. The formats are different and you have to create suspense, which is the most important part of any story. You have to respect the essence, what the people lived, although you always have to adapt something, of course, “he concluded.
The Festival continues this Wednesday with a reading club from Story of a castaway directed by the journalist of The vanguard Xavier Ayén and on Thursday there will be a master class by journalist Leila Guerriero on ‘Editing non-fiction’.
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