Created by two-time Academy Award winner Mark Boal, Echo 3 is described by Apple+ as a big-canvas cinematic thriller set in South America, with English and Spanish dialogue. It follows Amber Chesborough (Jessica Ann Collins), a brilliant young scientist who is the emotional heart of a small American family.
When Amber goes missing along the Colombia-Venezuela border, her brother, Bambi (Luke Evans), and her husband, Prince (Michiel Huisman) — two men with deep military experience and complicated pasts — struggle to find her in a layered personal drama, set against the explosive backdrop of a secret war.
Explains Boal, "I always evaluate stories first as a journalist. It's how I was trained; I couldn't get away from it if I tried. That doesn't mean the story has to be non-fiction. It means it has to have depth. It has to say something I can sink my teeth into. It has to contain mysteries and ambiguities that fire my reportorial curiosity, that makes me want to ask questions and get to the bottom of it.
"In the case of Echo 3, that element, that depth, is primarily the relationship between the United States and Latin America," he continues. "You could spend a lifetime trying to understand all the complications of it, and people do. The country of Colombia, where most of the story is set, particularly fascinates me. For years I knew it from afar as an avid consumer of news, culture and history. Getting a chance to put my feet on the ground there and discover firsthand the beauty, struggles and contradictions of the place was an opportunity I could not pass up. I traveled there with an empy notebook and sought to fill it up. As far as the creative process, I had a simple goal: Make the kind of show I want to watch myself; a big impactful thriller with substance, psychology and a feeling for politics — something both emotionally intense and intellectually challenging. Hearts and minds, as they say."
When he first started writing, the story felt like it had to be a movie, with Colombia more or less begging for the large screen, but the more thought he gave to all the different narrative threads he wanted to weave in, the more he was drawn to the advantages of a 10-hour television series.
"All that additional time allows for many more moving parts than you can get away with in a typical Hollywood film. It gave me the space and freedom to blow up the rescue genre and put it back together again. My story, let's be honest, draws from the old 'damsel in distress' model, though it departs quickly and forcefully from those suffocating and outmoded conventions. This damsel is neither innocent nor powerless, and though she is, yes, distressed at various points, she is never paralyzed by it. She never sits around waiting for someone to solve her problems. Her cunning and imagination power the plot. What came with the wider scope of 10 hours was room for telling a heroic story in which every character has their own agency and humanity, and you can never quite tell where the line is between the heroes and the bad guys. What if there are no heroes?"