One Hundred Years of Solitude is both one of those classic books a lot of people are already familiar with, and a complicated book a lot of people find it very difficult to get into. That’s why any adaptation had to try to straddle a balance between the hardcore fans and people new to the material. As Netflix brings Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous work and one of the most beloved books in Latin American literature to the screen, Remezcla sat down with screenwriters Natalia Santa and Camila Brugés to discuss the adaptation process and how to make the series exist independently from the book.
“You don’t have to have read [One Hundred Years of Solitude], or be a super fan, or know how it starts or how it ends, to understand it,” Santa promised. “But without a doubt, if you’re a fan of the book, you’re going to find many iconic moments, and we wanted anyone who had a special affection for the novel to be able to see them. But the complexity is how not to disappoint a big fan of the novel, and also how to invite someone who hasn’t read the novel to want to read it after watching.”
In that very same sense, she also shared that the idea was “not to please the reader, but to be faithful to the novel, and to that extent, that reader will find themselves there, and hopefully, all the decisions we make are decisions that don’t jump out at them, that perhaps surprise them, but that don’t jump out at them, that don’t make them feel like, this doesn’t belong in this world, or this doesn’t correspond with that character, but that they feels like, yes, this wasn’t in the novel, but I buy it, it makes sense.”
For the two, it was also leading with the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but also asking the question of, “why it starts the way it starts, of how they get to this place because there is a tragic feeling in that beginning, which is that cold open,” she told us.
“That’s where we start with this story of the founding of a town and two people looking to get out, to escape a curse, full of hope, full of dreams, full of love. So, we did want the two things to coexist, the tragedy inherent in this story, which is also a condemnation that is presented from the first pages, right? You are going to have children with pigtails.” Brugés shared.
For her, it was simple. “It is a tragic story, with a curse that crosses a love, right? But there is a lot of hope in these two characters who founded a town, and above all, a visionary spirit in José Arcadio Buendía, that needs to create, to go beyond, to discover, it’s what motivates him, it’s his engine and his condemnation at the same time, because in the end it leads him to madness.”
“And I think that the novel is always navigating in those two waters, between the beautiful and the poetic, the beautiful and the magical, the sordid, the crude and the violent. But in the end, it is a story where there is hope because two offspring of this family manage to love each other, no matter how it ends. And there, I think that deep down there is the luminous message that runs through the novel.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude is now available to stream on Netflix.
