[MUSIC PLAYING]
The circulatory system of drugs and money
has tentacles and reaches all over the world.
The US government was using Honduras
as kind of the launching pad to move south into Nicaragua.
And at a certain point, the Sandinistas
started to figure that out.
We need to find another way, Costa Rica, a private airstrip.
You'll be able to make your flight paths more unpredictable
and use ground transports.
LEONARD CHANG: We needed to have Teddy
solidify certain routes to fortify certain elements
of his business.
ALONSO ALVAREZ: How can we really achieve
the scope of what the-- it's on paper,
like what's the writing is.
And it was written to be in this massive jungle surrounded
by rainforest and Cabécar Indian tribes
in Costa Rica in the '80s.
When this first came up, I didn't really believe
that we would go to Costa Rica.
CREW: Good afternoon.
Welcome to Snowfall, Costa Rica, season three, sound roll one.
Fusion 12-track recorder, track one's a mix of only tracks
are isos.
There is no backup to this, because we're over the shoulder
in the jungle.
[TRUCK ENGINE]
BRIAN O'NEILL: Well, getting gear here
is the first and foremost challenge.
You know, we are about 60 kilometers outside San Jose.
And San Jose is about 3,000 miles south of Los Angeles.
And everything needed to get transported here
or get sourced locally, which we did a lot of.
We met some great filmmakers in Costa Rica that really helped
with this production and have been instrumental in making
this happen.
This is their land.
And without their knowledge, we're
all kind of a little bit lost.
Even though this is the second least
rainiest month of the year, but it doesn't
mean that it can't rain.
We were all a little bit nervous about pulling our big day off
yesterday, but it went well.
We got it.
BRIAN O'NEILL: We built an entire indigenous
Cabécar Indian village here.
We hired all the local artists here to build it for us.
And they basically sourced all the material from this property
to make it look as if it's been sitting in this rainforest
for countless years.
It just seemed like the perfect little valley,
a little clearing in the middle of the rainforest.
And Tomas is the genius behind actually making that happen.
And his art department guys, which they spent
about a month building it.
It's basically a Cabécar Indian village,
kind of like guerrilla style, hidden
in the middle of the jungle.
ELIAS CONEJO: Cabécars like native people of Costa Rica.
They're not very common anymore.
It's just one person left that is a native speaker
of the original language.
We based our designs more on the cultures that we have.
Like, there are the Bribris and the Malekus,
that actually the extras are Malekus.
So I started sketching some of the cages
and the designs for the houses and the huts and everything.
It's everything that we wanted for this episode
and impossible to get this level in LA.
Snakes, in general, are not aggressive.
It's only, only if you disturb the animal
you can receive a bite.
I'm a snake handler.
I try to help here with snakes.
We can find a lot of species of snakes
here, mainly non-venomous But we have some very
important venomous species.
Like the Fer-de-lance is the most common venomous
snake in Costa Rica and Central America.
It's a mainly nocturnal species.
But you can find during the day and hide in the forest floor.
And sometimes you can find big, big specimens.
CREW: Initially, there was a feeling that like, oh,
we can't really do a big night sequence.
I sort of just started thinking about it was like, well,
we can probably manage to like light a large portion of this
just with some fires and some practical fire
and trees that are white in the background, the reflection.
I think I can get enough depth that we
could have a scene that we ultimately
had around the fire up here.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's "The Heart of Darkness" meets "Fitzcarraldo."
And I feel like Klaus Kinski right now.
To get "Snowfall" out of LA and to be
truthful to the writing.
And I'm really grateful that they actually went for it
and that we're all here, and we came down to shoot.
We all had a vision.
And we, with the help of the local folks,
are able to execute it.
LEONARD CHANG: We could've tried to fake it.
But because we really do strive for a sense of reality
in everything that we're doing, to see what it was
like at the time there as someone like Teddy
was trying to establish more routes for his arms, ammo,
guns, for the contras that's being funded by the sale
of cocaine through Franklin.
So really it was a way to connect more the dots
and then do so in a visual and visceral way.
You'll need medical supplies, 25 M16 rifles with ammunition,
a Cessna 441 Conquest 2, and 10,000
American dollars a month.
We're in this for ourselves, Teddy.
We are more than patriotic.
Because we are willing to die, and even worse, to suffer
and destroy for the cause.