Rodrigo García
April 22–23, 2013
- Reading: Streaming video, MP3 audio
- Discussion: Streaming video,MP3 audio
Bio
Rodrigo García was born in 1959 in
Bogotá, Colombia, and was raised in Mexico.
García, whom the Washington Post referred to affectionately as "the man
who loves women" in a 2010 profile, is a director and writer for both TV and film, celebrated for
his intimate, emotional and invested portrayals of his characters. He directed several independent
movies which attracted critical acclaim, such as Things You Can Tell Just By
Looking At Her (2000), Nine Lives (2005), and Albert Nobbs (2011). His greatest work to date has been the HBO series In Treatment, which ran from 2008 through the end of 2010, and which he
created, wrote, and directed. García made fascinating use of the genre of the television series,
where each season featured week-long stretches with one episode per night for five nights in a row,
and then four in the third season, simulating the psychotherapist's work week, each episode
focusing on a session with a different patient.
While García's father, writer Gabriel García Márquez, is best known for his works of magical realism, García has spent the better half of his career emphasizing the un-magical, and his style is an everyday realism. But such a style does not mean that touches of the mystical and the uncertain are absent from his work. There is a beautiful spirituality within both his directing and writing work. Contemporaneous with a TV era of American viewers who were obsessively watching, in real time, to find out whether or not 24's Jack Bauer was going to explode into millions of pieces, García has used the concept of "real time" in TV to gain emotional depth and to connect with his audience, convincing them to care as much for the people he created as he genuinely did. As he quotes to the Washington Post, "Anybody can blow up cars. A director who can really get into the mysteries and complexity of women is very special."