The Secret in Their Eyes: Eduardo Sacheri on scripting his novel into a film

Through his involvement in both the book and the film Sacheri realised he could delve deeper into the thoughts of his characters

The Secret in Their Eyes (2005) is Eduardo Sacheri’s debut novel. Despite having published several books of short stories before this, the Argentine writer found himself struggling to write a novel. So Sacheri devised a plan for a creative breakthrough: he depicted his protagonist Benjamin Esposito, a retired judicial investigator, as someone grappling with writer's block, much like himself. “Now my problems became the problems of the character,” says the 50-year-old writer. The book became a novel within a novel.

In 2009, the thriller was adapted into a film noir by Argentine director Juan José Campanella, and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film that year.

Old loves

Shifting between the mid-70s and the late 90s, the film takes you through Buenos Aires, where Esposito, after retirement, sets out to write a novel on the rape and murder of a young girl that he had investigated. In the pretext of recalling details of the case, he reaches out to his former boss, an upper-class senior prosecutor, Irene Menéndez Hastings, who he was hopelessly in love with. As the two revisit the case, the film explores themes of unrequited love, memory and the politics of an era preceding the military dictatorship in Argentina in 1976.

To retain the story’s authenticity, Sacheri was brought on board to work on the screenplay. The writer made peace with the fact that a film can never be entirely faithful to its source material: for him, a successful adaptation is one where the essence of the characters is retained. The focus of the film was, therefore, the behaviour patterns of its characters.

Through his involvement, in both the book and the film, Sacheri realised that he could delve deeper into the thoughts of his characters in the novel. But in the film — which is dependent on sight and sound — emotions and complexities had to be contained in subtle gestures and nuances of body language. “In our daily lives, our way of expressing is plain, but our feelings are not,” he says.

Memory of the past

At first glance, The Secret in Their Eyes can be seen as a pacy film noir with stylistic telling. But the emphasis for Sacheri is on commenting on that less-explored political period of Argentine history, as the characters begin to discover that the forces of dictatorship have already started to manifest in the workings of the judiciary.

“History is not the past but the memory we have of the past,” says Sacheri. Both the film and the book use flashbacks to establish this interplay of history and memory.

Interestingly, after the success of the film, Hollywood made a spin-off in 2015 starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts, and placed the story against the backdrop of the 9/11 attacks.

“They provided a setting where the judiciary system that is otherwise supposed to be reliable stops being reliable,” says Sacheri. But the film was widely criticised as having fallen short of the political urgency of Sacheri’s book and Campanella’s film. “I feel the Hollywood version is less emotional than the Argentine one,” observes the Buenos Aires-based writer.

By working on the screenplay, Sacheri ensured that the political essence of the story was retained in the script. Unlike writing a book, making a film is a collaborative process. “Accepting to work in an adaptation implies a collective work where you have to discuss, stand your ground, convince the other person and sometimes you get defeated,” he says.

For Sacheri, the book he set out to write was the book he ended up with. “But the movie in which you are participating is an equilibrium between your desires and those that are not yours.”