The Hurt Locker’s Mark Boal enlists in the streaming war with Apple’s Echo 3

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Mark Boal cannot help but still play the journalist. The Oscar-winning screenwriter of director Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker – the beginning of a strong collaboration between the two that has since delivered Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit – Boal started his career as an investigative journalist, covering politics and crime for The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and Playboy. And today, while sitting down for an interview to discuss his new Apple TV+ series Echo 3, Boal is still asking the questions.

“I would take a whack at that answer, but I’m curious what your opinion is? Because I have a feeling you’re more aware of the landscape than I am,” Boal says after being asked how Echo 3′s mix of mercenary action and geopolitical intrigue stands out from the current glut of streaming series fighting for attention.

Answering a question with a question isn’t just a cute journalism trick of evasion, though. Boal is an attuned and engaged interview subject who seems to enjoy giving as much as he gets – the kind of storyteller with one foot in Hollywood, the other in the real world, all the while aware that neither is easy to navigate. And now with Echo 3, which follows two black-ops soldiers (Luke Evans and Michael Huisman) who travel to Colombia to stage a personal rescue mission, Boal gets to ask and answer the kind of heavy-duty questions that he has been exploring his entire career.

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Ahead of Echo 3′s launch on Apple TV+ this week, Boal spoke with The Globe and Mail about a career of reporting on, and then inventing, the world.

How much of Echo 3 can be found in your previous work?

I wanted to make something big and impactful and purposeful, but also have real-world texture, and be cognizant of politics at the same time. It needs to work on an emotional level, but I also want to see guys running around the jungle. But it had to have some room for ambiguity, too, which is something that’s perhaps in short supply right now. Certainly the work on television suggests that audiences are not interested in ambiguity.

Is that willingness to explore ambiguity, then, what attracted you to working with Apple?

Apple, like anywhere else, has notes. But I think that once they trust you … I’ll just put it this way without getting into any inside baseball. I was able, for a number of different reasons, to make this show how I saw it. But it was a learning curve, and it wasn’t a friction-free process.

But I love inside baseball!

I know you do, but I have to be cognizant of the fact that I’m very fortunate to be here. And there is always a bit of feeling a little impolite when filmmakers complain about the people who give them money. It’s not wrong necessarily, but it does seem impolite.

As a journalist yourself, you know the line between inquisitiveness and politeness …

You’re free to ask me anything! I’m just … When I look back on the show, I don’t have a whole lot of regrets.

How did your work preparing the series Intelligence for Showtime [which never made it to production] help prepare you for Echo 3?

Oh wow, well that’s real inside baseball. Intelligence was a much different thing in terms of structure. Echo 3 is very linear, while Intelligence was fractal, it was kaleidoscopic or mosaic storytelling. But it certainly got me acquainted with the idea of a writers room concept and the industrial side of making TV.

What made you feel Echo 3 would work better as a series instead of a film?

I had started thinking about doing something in Latin America as a film, but a couple things happened that moved it over to television. One of which was that the film business is changing every week basically, and I’m not sure it’s getting better. The water is drying up. The other thing is that 10 hours is a tremendously long narrative runaway that gave me the opportunity to develop characters more than in a feature film. It’s not just taking a movie and multiplying it by five. Everyone says, oh, a series is a like a 10-hour movie but that’s completely nonsensical. There’s no such thing! A movie is two hours or three. It’s its own thing.

You’ve said that it was important here to work with Latin-American directors, such as Pablo Trapero and Claudia Llosa. Is that why this wasn’t another partnership with Kathryn?

Kathryn has not ever expressed any great interest in doing TV. But whether she had or hadn’t, the idea here was to make something that would genuinely work for both North American and Latin American audiences. Obviously I couldn’t do that by myself or with an exclusively American team, so hiring Pablo and Claudia were core early decisions to ensure that I wasn’t completely messing up the idea of a story that roots in both places.

Do you see yourself staying in television instead of going back to film?

No, I want to make a movie, and I have one I’m working on right now before that last water gets sucked into the ground. It’s impossible to prognosticate, and so many filmmakers are making good movies now. It’s just the economics have shifted.

Well, I hope you’re able to get a big sip while there’s still something left to drink.

Sorry about the metaphor. It’s the best I could come up with.

No, no, it’s good – journalist to journalist, you gave me a potential lede.

Echo 3 streams on Apple TV+ starting Nov. 23

This interview has been condensed and edited

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