A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
The new Netflix series
set in the 1980s, tells the story of how the cocaine trade emerged from Chile, migrated to Colombia and arrived on the shores of the U.S. to be greeted by the likes of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No" campaign.
The character of an American DEA agent based in Colombia serves as a narrator leading us through the story, but the anti-hero at the heart of the film is drug lord Pablo Escobar with his Medellin Cartel. While the DEA agent and other Americans speak English in the show, Escobar and his fellow Colombians speak Spanish. This makes "Narcos" the first bilingual show on Netflix. Ironically, Wagner Moura, the actor playing Escobar, is Brazilian, so he had to learn Spanish to play the part.
The director of the first two episodes of “Narcos” and one of the show’s producers is the Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha. He and Moura had worked together on Padilha's films “Elite Squad” and “Elite Squad 2.”
Before those movies became massive hits in Brazil, Padilha made his name as a documentarian. Most recently he directed the reboot of “Robocop.” "Narcos” Aug. 28.
Below are some of the highlights from the Frame's John Horn's conversation with Padilha, who insisted the show be shot on location in Colombia and that it be in both Spanish and English.
Escobar to me — I mean, apart from being a mythical drug dealer and a mythical figure — he was a small-time criminal who was, at the same time, a sociopath, psychopath guy, for sure, and a megalomaniac.
And what's ironic is that by chance he ran into cocaine, that he made so much money, so fast that he's been one of the megalomaniacs in the world that really became what he thought he should become. It's like a megalomaniac that managed to accomplish what he wanted. And that fed him. You know, he wanted to be the president of Colombia. There was no limit for Pablo Escobar. That's what makes him such an incredible character for a series.
First of all, I'm a documentary filmmaker. I like shooting in locations. And my movies that I did, "Elite Squad" and "Elite Squad 2," were shot on locations. I wanted to go there and capture the real feel of Colombia. You just cannot simulate Colombia. It's such a peculiar country with the Andes, with jungles, with cities like Cartagena. You just can't do that.
And so we went to Netflix and we said, one, shoot in Colombia. And two, we don't want to go to stages. We want to do a location-based TV series, which is crazy. Most TV series are studio-based, just because you have to do that so quickly. And so Netflix to my surprise said, "That's great, let's do that."
And then the other thing I really wanted was for the Latino characters to speak to each other in Spanish. So we would actually have a bilingual show that emulated what actually happened down there, with American police officers and embassy people talking to each other in English and drug dealers and policemen talking to each other in Spanish. And again Netflix says, "Great, let's do that!" So we got two of the key things we wanted from the get-go. It really helped me, because I was able to cast great American actors, but also great Latino actors.
We have actors in the show, like Wagner Moura is Brazilian. We have Mexican actors. We have Colombian actors, Chile. We got people from all over Latin America. We've a great cast; as director of episodes 1 and 2, it was a dream come true.
The first mythology we need to dispel is that people like Pablo Escobar in Colombia and in Latin America in general, and they don't. Actually, they hate Pablo Escobar with a passion more than anyone hates him anywhere else. Pablo Escobar put a bomb a day in Colombia — terrorized the people who lived there. He brought a plane down with a bomb to kill one person that he thought was going to be on the plane, and the person wasn't even there. Pablo Escobar is just, to make it very clear, a terrorist — not only a drug dealer.
So people hate him down there. But, having said in Medellin — the city where he's originally from — he built barrios. He built neighborhoods with his own money and gave people houses. In those neighborhoods, people like him.
And once we were there for scouting purposes and we were looking at the locations in the neighborhoods and all that, and somebody came down from the slum and told us, "Get out of here. Get your crew and leave fast. Otherwise you guys are going to have a problem." Because they were still loyal to Pablo Escobar, and they knew we were going make a series that was going to be real, and reality doesn't portray Pablo Escobar so well. So they basically kicked us out of there. So there is people who like him.
And also, he is Pablo Escobar. He is maybe the biggest drug dealer of all time. He has this aura. People like famous, powerful individuals, just like the same way America likes Al Capone — "like's" under quotes. I mean "likes" to talk about him and likes to make movies about him — the same thing happens with Pablo Escobar down there in Latin America, you know?