Mark Boal focuses on TV and Latin America with Apple TV+ Thriller 'Echo 3': 'We spent a lot of energy giving it reach'

Mark Boal has focused much of his energy as a screenwriter on interpreting geopolitical dramas of our time in the Middle East and Central Asia. For his new Apple TV+ series "Echo 3", the double Oscar winner who wrote and produced "The Hurt Locker" in 2008 and "Zero Dark Thirty" in 2011 turned his gaze to the southern neighbors of the United States.

The drama series, adapted from the 2018 Israeli series "When Heroes Fly", revolves around a kidnapping of an American researcher (played by Jessica Ann Collins) near the Colombian-Venezuelan border and the ensuing rescue effort, led by her working brother (Luke Evans) and new husband (Michiel Huisman) both for an elite US Army combat unit, aka special forces. “Echo 3” bowed on November 23 with three episodes, followed by weekly installments premiering on Fridays through the Season 1 finale on January 13.

"Echo 3" marks Boal's first mass production - and it was a doozy, with 10 episodes shot entirely on location in Colombia and the United States for over 200 days. Here, the former investigative journalist delves deeper into his inspirations for the scripts, adjusting his rhythms as a television writer and producer and how impressed he was with Latin America's television and film infrastructure and the the caliber of actors, directors and other creatives who worked on the series.

Being a screenwriter is basically the opposite of being a showrunner and executive producer in television. How was the adjustment for you?

The transition wouldn't have been possible without the help of Jason Horwitch, EP with me. He brought a lot of television experience to the table, and then I built on what I learned in feature film production. I think everyone does the showrunner's job a little differently. I approached it as an extension of the experience I had in producing feature films.

How did you find your way through the story that originated in the novel "When Heroes Fly" by Amir Gutfreund?

I started from a premise that I often start with: what would be the most naturalistic way to tell this story? Then, the advantage of 10 hours is that it allowed us to use different narrative styles within the same piece. We kind of thought of it like people use the phrase '10 hour movie' these days in our case we thought of it in a very literal sense that writing is meant to be taken as a whole so that the pilot is really the beginning, in the same way that the first 15 minutes of a movie are really the beginning. The room shifts and ebbs and flows in the way a movie does and pays off at the end like a movie does as opposed to a more traditional episode that has its own set of dopamine hits independent of other episodes.

Was it hard to keep up the pace of a 10 hour thriller? I'm two episodes down - so far it's a white punch.

That was the structural approach - and then we had this big hot-blooded core of a story of abduction that gave us the ability to be more sophisticated in some of the moments of world-building, dialogue, and performance. The stakes are so clear and the central plot is so simple that it allowed us to build a fairly complex series of events around it and bring in a lot more characters than we normally would in a long footage. Including the protagonist-antagonist mix in the character of Violetta, who is a prominent political journalist played by Martina Gusmán. It takes you into a political and moral dimension of history and a Latin American dimension. With a different medium, it would be more difficult to have this type of character.

Gusmán stands out from the moment she hits the screen in Episode 2.

Martina has worked in Latin America and Spain for a long time and is a very prominent Argentinian actor.

The storytelling is nonlinear, as is the tone. Without giving too much away, there is a moment in Episode 1 where a wedding sequence takes a dramatic turn...