Yet this roadblock actually resulted in one of the production’s biggest strengths, according to Newman: “It required a certain fluidity, but we built an amazing locations department.” He reserves special praise for his “absolutely amazing” Colombian head of transportation Jenny Roa Garcia. “In the early days, we would come to a location and it had been demolished or sold to someone else, or the person who said yes changed their mind, or there was construction on the streets and they were torn up.” “One of the hardest things for us initially was locations,” he says. So we had to get a lot of people and equipment into a place that hadn’t really seen that before.”Īlong with the practicalities of moving people and equipment, the production found other aspects of shooting in Colombia challenging. “There were two big movies that had been here before - one was Love In The Time Of Cholera and the other was The Mission many years ago. “ never really been a production base for big shows,” he says. It was a steep learning curve and “a bit of an invasion, logistically”, Newman recalls. Narcos’ showrunner conducted a study to see how local Colombian crews and the largely Mexican and US crew already employed would get along. “It was important to all of us that Colombians see it that way because it’s very much their story. “They felt we did our homework and were respectful,” Newman says. Once the local population watched the show, however, perceptions changed. When Newman began scouting in April 2014, he found the Colombians to be politely dismissive in Medellin, the former hub of the local drug trade that, like much of the country, has transformed itself into a largely safe locale with thriving business and tourism sectors. Such fears, however, proved to be unfounded. Initial concerns were over security and how the locals would respond to another Escobar story. He was probably a sociopath.”Īlthough Narcos did not qualify for Colombia’s tax reliefs, because the government wants to bring in more feature films, head honchos at Netflix and French partner Gaumont still decided it would be best to shoot in the country (the first two episodes of season one were treated as a two-hour film and so qualified for the incentive). “This was an opportunity for us - especially with an actor of Wagner’s calibre - to tell a story of a man who was devoted to his kids, loved his wife despite being a big philanderer, and yet could also put a bomb on an airplane.
“What 20 hours allowed you to do was tell the story of a man, not an animal or a monster,” Newman continues. You’re not going to get into the pathology of this guy and how he was created, so in that story he’s just a bad guy and he needs to be stopped. I was developing one, and what we found is that if you’re going to do a two-hour version of Pablo Escobar, you can really only focus on the bad. “There were all these Escobar movies people tried to make. “People often ask why Killing Pablo didn’t get made,” he reflects.
He has been hard to depict on the big screen, and Newman - a film producer whose extensive credits include Children Of Men, the RoboCop reboot directed by Narcos pilot director Jose Padilha and Netflix’s upcoming sci-fi thriller Bright - realised episodic television was the perfect vehicle for his story. Reviled by law enforcement in Colombia and the US, and feared by everyone in the drug trade, he was revered locally as a Robin Hood figure who helped the common man. And the world is better off without him.”Įscobar was different things to different people.
He was an innovator, a pioneer in the game. “Part of it is my love for Wagner and how much I will miss him,” he says. Newman says he will miss the character of Escobar, the poor boy who used his entrepreneurial gifts to become one of the most powerful and feared men on the continent, and who flooded the US with smuggled cocaine. But Escobar himself is no more, killed off in the season two climax that paves the way for a new focus: the Cali Cartel, which played a part in his downfall. The season keeps the action firmly rooted in Colombia, the South American country that gave rise to the drug lord Pablo Escobar. “This is the end of three years in Colombia and I’m sort of nostalgic,” he sighs down the phone from the country, where he is speaking to Screen International during a break in filming. Crime drama Narcos has been a passionate endeavour for showrunner Eric Newman and so, as the launch of the third season approaches, he can be forgiven for feeling a little wistful.
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