Issa López

Issa López is a Mexican director, writer and producer. Twelve Spanish language features have been produced from her scripts, four of them directed by herself. She has won several literary awards, including the National Novel Award granted by Mexico's Institute of Fine Arts and Literature in 2007.

In 2017, Tigers Are Not Afraid (Vuelven in Spanish) premiered at Fantastic Fest, in Austin, Texas. Written and directed by López, the film received the Best Horror Director Award, and went on to collect fifty-one awards in film festivals around the world, three Diosas de Plata, including Best Picture and Best Director, and received ten Ariel Awards nominations, of which it won two. The film earned multiple positive reviews by major trades and critics, and a rating of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. Currently, López is developing projects with Guillermo del Toro, Noah Hawley and Jason Blum. She directed and co-wrote all episodes of the fourth installment of HBO's TV series True Detective, which aired in January and February of 2024, as True Detective: Night Country.

Issa López was born in Mexico City, where she was raised by her father after her mother died when she was eight years old. Her father was a semiotics academic and a college professor. During her childhood her family faced economic hardships, since academia is not a high-paying job in Latin America. This was a defining aspect of her life, inspiring much of her later work, since her dad would try to keep her and her sister entertained in spite of their economic situation. Lopez explained in one of her interviews that she, her sister and her dad would "go every weekend on some road trip through Mexico, from small town to small town, sitting to watch kung fu and horror movies in traveling cinemas, eating street food, visiting archeological sites, jungles, deserts and the most haunted little towns in the country". Those memories were the inspiration for many of her stories.

Issa López studied Archeology for about two years, until "the pull of cinema was too strong to resist". She abandoned Archeology and enrolled in Mexico's National University Filmschool, where she obtained a BA in Film Directing and Screenwriting. After her BA, she completed a two-year graduate program for dramatic writing. López began co-writing telenovelas and TV shows at Televisa. In 2003, she wrote the film Ladies' Night which was a box-office success, becoming the 5th biggest grossing Mexican film of 2003 and 2004.

López has won several literary awards, including the National Novel Award granted by Mexico's Institute of Fine Arts and Literature. In addition to her literary work, she penned multiple TV shows, some of them reaching the highest audience ratings in Mexican prime-time TV, and wrote the scripts for several film features, three of them produced in Mexico by the Major Hollywood Studios, and two of those directed by herself; Efectos Secundarios (Warner Bros., 2006) and Casi Divas (Sony Pictures, 2008). In 2015, López shot her third feature as a director, and tenth as a writer, Tigers Are Not Afraid. In March 2018, Todo Mal, her fourth feature film as a director, 11th as a writer, opened in Mexico.

In 2005, López was selected as one of the 50 Latino Impact Players in Entertainment, by Variety.

In Mexico, López' movies have ranked among the highest grossing local productions: Ladies' Night (Disney, 2003) ranked fifth, Niñas Mal (Sony Pictures, 2007) seventh, and Efectos Secundarios fifteenth. Casi Divas opened in first place in the box office and went on to a limited theatrical run in the U.S.

Casi Divas received enthusiastic reviews from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. The film is the only Mexican movie to be scored by acclaimed Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer, who only charged $1 for his extensive work on the film.

In 2015, 600 Millas, a film with a script co-written by López, was nominated for the Mexican Film Academy Ariel Award for Best Script.

In September 2017, Tigers Are Not Afraid (Vuelven in Spanish) Premiered at Fantastic Fest, in Austin Texas, and received the Best Horror Director Award. Issa López directed, wrote, and was Executive Producer of the film, a dark fable about the children surviving the Mexican drug war, and the ghosts that haunt them.

Tigers Are Not Afraid collected a total of fifty-one awards in Film Festivals around the world, three Diosas de Plata (the Mexican equivalent of the Golden Globes), including Best Picture and Best Director, and has received 10 nominations for the Ariel, (the Mexican Film Academy Award), of which it won two, has earned a large amount of positive reviews by major trades and critics, and a rating of 97% from Rotten Tomatoes. It also got a Best Latin American Director Award in 2019 from NALIP (National Association of Latino Producers) and Fangoria Magazine, specialised in Horror Cinema, awarded it Best Foreign Language Movie in 2020. Stephen King, Neil Gaiman and Guillermo Del Toro expressed their enthusiasm for the movie via social media and interviews.

Currently, López is working with Guillermo del Toro, who announced that he'd produce Lopez' next film, a haunted western about the werewolf mythology.[10] Searchlight Pictures signed her to write and direct The Book of Souls,[11] to be produced by Noah Hawley, and Blumhouse is developing Our Lady of Tears,[12] written and directed by López. She also wrote, produced and directed the fourth season of cult HBO series True Detective.[13] She is set to develop a fifth season after the fourth received critical acclaim and the series’ best ratings for HBO.[14]

Fiction Writer awards

Movie awards

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