Content Trendsetters Talk Creativity at MIPCOM

Lorenzo Mieli, Álex Pina and Eric Newman discussed the creative process in the Talent Behind the Camera session moderated by World Screen’s Anna Carugati today before each receiving a Trendsetter Award.

The trio of producers were each honored with a World Screen Trendsetter Award in association with Reed MIDEM for their contributions to the global content business. Mieli, the CEO Fremantle Italia, is behind The Young Pope and My Brilliant Friend. Pina is the creator and executive producer of Money Heist. Newman is the showrunner of Narcos.

Mieli likes to surround himself with people who aren’t in the TV business—notably, he teamed up with Paolo Sorrentino on The Young Pope. “I have always been in love with Paolo’s work in movies, and I thought that he was the furthest artist I could think about in television. I went and asked him, Do you want to do TV? He said, I’ve never watched a TV show! Maybe one. I said, That’s why you should do it. That’s how it happened.”

Mieli had originally thought about doing a drama about a well-known Italian saint. “He’s been a mainstream character for mainstream television for both Rai and Mediaset. I thought, what if Paolo Sorrentino approached a character like that and made a totally different show? He said, That’s interesting, and he thought about it. He came back and said, A saint is too little for me—I want to do the Pope!”

Narcos was sparked by a story Newman heard in 1996 about the efforts to take down Pablo Escobar and the Cali cartel. “As I dug deeper into it and was confronted by the complexities of the failing endeavor [to win the war on drugs], I was very drawn to it and I began developing it as a film.”

At the time, Newman was unsuccessful in getting a studio to take the film on. “When Netflix announced they were launching in Latin America and they asked if I had something that might work, I said, Yes I do, but it has to be in Spanish—at least partially—and we have to shoot in Colombia. I knew very little about television at the time and that seemed to be OK with them. They said, Go do it! It took me about 19 years between the idea and actually shooting.”

Pina, speaking through a translator, told MIPCOM delegates about how he came up with the idea for Money Heist. “We planned to do the series with two different time [frames—the heist, and the lead-up to it]. This offered us rhythm, freedom and versatility. We could change the ambiance, almost the genre, and step away from immediate events and enjoy different kinds of scenes.”

Mieli talked about the consultants used on The Young Pope and the upcoming The New Pope. “It was anonymous consultants. We had a lot. What Paolo does is he studies a lot but then he creates everything from scratch.”

DEA agents advised the team on Narcos, Newman said. “Part of this job has been spending time with very different points of view on all sides. I have journalists, politicians, cops, occasionally traffickers, and they’re all full of shit when you get their version of what’s wrong, why it happened, who’s at fault. The DEA is invaluable as a source for us, certainly, but their version of events is always, We got this guy and this guy. They tend to not focus on the fact that the moment that guy goes down, another guy takes his place. We couldn’t reach the level of authenticity that is so important to our audience without them, but they definitely have a very clear, black-and-white view of the issue. The show works for people who have a clear, black-and-white take on it. It also works for people, like myself, who approach it with a bit more complexity.”

Mieli discussed the importance of HBO airing My Brilliant Friend in its original Neopolitan language. He noted the impact Narcos had with its use of Spanish and English, and pointed to the global success of the Spanish-language Money Heist on Netflix.

He added, “In the first season of My Brilliant Friend, there are two twists, one is a pair of shoes and one is a doll. It’s a totally different way of looking at long-form storytelling. There is no jumping from your chair at every scene. It’s all about the point of view and the complexity of the point of view of these female characters. It’s a risk, but at the same time, it could open up a new way of considering long storytelling.”

Pina said that none of his characters are based on real people, but noted that we all know “narcissists like Berlin or a compassionate man like Moscow. We all know those types of people.”

Asked about his new show The Pier, Pina described it as a more emotional series than Money Heist, focused on a man who is living a double life.

Laurine Garaude, the head of the television division at Reed MIDEM, then joined Carugati on stage to present each of the panelists with their World Screen Trendsetter Awards.

You can read extensive interviews with Newman, Mieli and Pina here.