Spirit guides: The House of the Spirits showrunners discuss Prime Video series
Showrunners Francisca Alegría, Fernanda Urrejola and Andrés Wood take DQ inside the making of La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits), Prime Video’s adaptation of Isabel Allende’s iconic multi-generational novel that blends family secrets with magical realism.
When director Andrés Wood first read Isabel Allende novel La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits), it was a forbidden book, banned by Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet’s regime following its publication in 1982.
Allende, a writer and journalist, is the niece of Salvador Allende, who was elected Chile president in 1970 before his government fell to a military coup three years later. Fears for her family’s safety led her to leave Chile for Venezuela in 1975, with a letter she wrote to her grandfather later marking the start of her work on The House of the Spirits.
Though the book was subsequently banned in Chile, copies of Allende’s debut novel spread quickly and the title went on to become an iconic work of Latin American literature. It was later adapted into a 1993 Hollywood feature starring Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Winona Ryder, Glenn Close and Antonio Banderas.
Now, Wood has partnered with Francisca Alegría and Fernanda Urrejola to bring a new Spanish-language series adaptation of The House of the Spirits to the screen. Following its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival last month, it will debut on Prime Video worldwide on April 29.
“We realised we all read it at the same age, but I read it 20 years before them,” Wood laughs, speaking to DQ with Alegría and Urrejola in Berlin. “It was a forbidden book in Chile. I read it in the dictatorship. You couldn’t buy Isabel Allende in the dictatorship. But it struck me in many ways, in class and politics and how politics affects the family. Then I encountered a new vision from them [Alegría and Urrejola] that was something that made me view the book in a different way.”
Blending a multi-generational tale of a family living through the 20th century with elements of magical realism, The House of the Spirits centres on Clara, Blanca and Alba as they navigate family, secret loves and bloody revolution in a conservative South American country shaped by class struggle, political upheaval and magic.
The Trueba family’s passions, struggles and secrets span a century of violent social change, culminating in a crisis that hurls proud, tyrannical patriarch Esteban and his beloved granddaughter Alba towards opposite sides of the fence.
Produced by FilmNation Entertainment (Anora, Conclave) and Fabula (A Fantastic Woman), the series stars Alfonso Herrera as Esteban, with Nicole Wallace and Dolores Fonzi playing Clara del Valle at different stages of her life. Fernanda Castillo is Férula Trueba, while Juan Pablo Raba portrays Uncle Marcos.
Wood joined the series after his fellow showrunners Alegría and Urrejola had already begun work on the adaptation. In fact, they were approached to take on the project by producer FilmNation Entertainment, which had snapped up the rights.
“It was our dream, because it’s one of my favourite novels,” Alegría says. “We grew up hearing about this novel, and we read it. It’s such primary material for our own collective imagination of our culture.
“FilmNation had the rights and they approached us. When I go back to that moment, I didn’t realise the huge responsibility it was. We lived it as a dream, and then we just started saying, ‘OK, how do we approach it?’ But we approached it without fear. It was a very free approach, thanks to Isabel Allende, who gave us the freedom.”
Allende is attached to the show as an executive producer alongside actor-producer Eva Longoria (Desperate Housewives). The author was involved in “the best way,” Alegría says. “It’s her first novel. She’s written dozens since. She’s in her 80s. So for her, it’s not a precious thing anymore in the best sense. She told us, ‘I know literature, you guys know film. You know better how to do this.’ So she was very open and, I would say, healthily distant. She came to the writers room and we asked her questions, but she maintained her distance in a very generous way.”
“We talked about the book with her in a more personal way, like how this book also portrays her own story and her family’s story, so it was really nurturing and magical to have her,” says Urrejola.
Set across many years and three generations of the Trueba family, with narration and flashbacks, The House of the Spirits is realised through a complex storytelling structure. But it’s one that the writers – Alegría and Urrejola in the main – struck upon early on.
“One of the main things in the book is, in the epilogue, you learn that the narrator is the granddaughter, Alba, and for us, that was germane to the story,” Urrejola says. “This is a transgenerational trauma and the granddaughter is the one who is able to articulate what the others really could not in previous times.
“Because the novel is circular – it begins and ends in the same way – we wanted to bring that end to the beginning, so the audience will understand from the beginning that this is the granddaughter who is able to tell the story.”
An early incident of violence in episode one leads a young Clara to become a mute for nine years, knowing she could not articulate what she had seen or experienced. “And it’s the granddaughter, Alba, who is able and has the courage to look at the past and bring the memory forward in order to heal and change and cut the chains of violence,” Urrejola says. “That was super important.”
With the book running to around 500 pages across 14 chapters and an epilogue, Alegría says there was “a lot of back and forth” as the writers attempted to find a way to plot episodes that variably unfold across a fortnight, a year or several years.
“We had to kill a couple of darlings,” admits Javiera Balmaceda, head of local originals for Latin America, Canada and Australia at Amazon MGM Studios. “Isabel actually publicly endorsed the series and said it’s the truest adaptation of her work. That’s a testament not only to the fantastic work our showrunners have done but also the freedom Isabel gave them.”
How to dramatise the book’s magical realism was the subject of numerous discussions among the creative team. In the end, the inspiration came from close to home, in the shape of writer-director Alegría’s previous work – feature La caca que canto una canción hacia el futuro (The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future) and short film And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow’s Eye. Alegría directs The House of the Spirits with Wood.
“It’s not literally translatable. Magical realism is a literary genre; it’s not a film genre,” Alegría says. “When you try to copy and paste it, it’s not going to work. But it is going to work when we go to our DNA as Latin Americans.
“Magical things have to occur in a natural or day-to-day space, because for people [in Latin America], it’s normal. It’s normal that a dead relative comes and visits you, and so you need to make it normal. You cannot have a ghost floating around. You cannot have magical things that feel fantastic, so we were always measuring that. We had a concept of, like, this is not Harry Potter.”
Urrejola remembers: “Inside the team, when we were going too fantastical, it was like, ‘No, remember, not Harry Potter.’ Although we love Harry Potter.”
“But that’s why it’s so complex and nurturing and fun to talk about what is magic in Latin America,” Alegría adds. “It’s not like rabbits coming out of a hat, right? It’s emotions becoming real. So, for example, there are a few moments when the women are feeling something inexplicable and we translate that into a magical event, but it’s always rooted from either a feeling or something that comes from the environment.”
The showrunners also wanted to highlight the female characters’ battle against the patriarchy, with each woman in the family “passing the baton” to the next generation. But with several female protagonists through the different stages of the story, “we wanted to keep the differences between them, because they all leave different things and the trauma and the tragedy of each story is very particular,” Urrejola says. “At the end, you will see how Alba is able to understand her mother. She leads her whole life not understanding her mother at all. When she understands everything she went through, she can relate and she can have empathy for her, and that’s beautiful.”
Urrejola, who is best known as an actor from series such as Narcos: Mexico, also appears on screen as Blanca. But she wasn’t always planning to play a starring role. “It came up later,” she says. “At the beginning, I was more focusing on just adapting the show and thinking what was going to be best for the show. Of course, I always kept inside the want [to act] so it ended up great. But in the beginning, I was more focused on the creative.”
Notably, Urrejola had previously written with Alegría on The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future, which Wood also produced. It means the trio in charge of The House of the Spirits had a solid foundation on which to work together on this new project. Additional creatives on the show include production designer Rodrigo Bazaes Nieto and cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro, who collaborated with the showrunners to realise their vision.
“It’s definitely a collective work, with wardrobe, hair and makeup,” Alegría says. “They all do very precise, detailed investigations of the different cultural aspects of the clothing of each character, the look we wanted, the photography.”
Yet therein lied one of the main challenges making the series – shooting eight episodes across a large expanse of time, each with common themes yet strikingly different. “We wanted to feel how the personal intertwined with the political, and how it shifts even in the feeling in the production design and the cinematography,” Urrejola says.
“But something beautiful that happened is that because of how iconic this book is, each member of the crew had their own personal story with it. For example, Manuel Claro, he’s an exile child, and his way to connect to Chile in his teenage years was with this book. So for him, it was magical that we approached him, and for us, it was magical to have him, because he’s such a big talent.”
That the show was filmed on location in Chile, unlike the earlier film adaptation, was hugely important to the showrunners, allowing them to tap into the spirit of the country’s culture, even though the book is set in an unnamed South American country.
“That’s why we decided to have an Ibero-American cast,” Urrejola says. “Isabel Allende told us she made the decision consciously not to say it was Chile, because sadly, we all share the same story. Dictatorships were happening not only in one country. Many different countries are connected to the same sad story. It’s part of the universal language. But it was really important to be super close to Chile, even if we didn’t mention it.”
Based in the capital, Santiago, the production utilised many aspects of Chile’s unique environment, taking in desert, jungles, forests and volcanoes. “We always told Javiera how important it was to do it in Chile, because of the different landscapes,” Urrejola says. “Chile has amazing and really different landscapes around the country. But we also felt, internationally, the world has a vision of Latin America more like Central America and Mexico. You think of Latin America, you think of colours, happiness, lively ways of living. Actually in the south, we’re kind of different, and we wanted to show that Latin America as well.”
At Prime Video, Balmaceda is excited to have The House of the Spirits on her slate. She was first approached for a meeting with FilmNation in 2021, before Alegría, Urrejola and Longoria pitched their idea to adapt Allende’s “seminal” book. “I am Chilean, I am a daughter of exiles, so it also spoke to me in a very personal way,” she says. “What’s really amazing about what this team has done is they’re also bringing a freshness to the story in the language they’ve used narratively. Cinematically, it is going to go out to a wider and younger audience, which I think will really connect.
“It feels like the DNA of Chile is really there, but with Alba telling the story that the women of her past couldn’t tell. It’s also a story of generational healing, which is such a very important theme today. It’s a global story.”
Ahead of the show’s launch, Wood is full of pride and joy at being involved in the project, and “very grateful to do this in Spanish, in Chile, with a wide range of actors. It’s something new.”
“In a way, we hope the show connects us with this deep intuition that maybe 40 years ago was not so understood, but Isabel Allende did understand it,” Alegría adds. “We hope that through the cinematic language, we could maybe show some of that, and that that will connect with younger audiences as well.”
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