Leonardo Padrón, José Ignacio Valenzuela on Creativity in Today’s Era

Creators, writers and showrunners Leonardo Padrón and José Ignacio Valenzuela took part in a MIP CANCUN panel, moderated by Elizabeth Bowen-Tombari, editor of TV Latina, to speak about their current work and how their roles have evolved within the television and streaming space.

The conversation began with Bowen-Tombari asking about their beginnings in content creation and storytelling. “I ended up in journalism, but my true origin—my ‘amniotic fluid’—is literature and poetry,” Padrón noted. “That was actually the first of many crossovers I’ve experienced in life because, as you can imagine, poetry and television sit on opposite ends of the content food chain.”

He added, “At some point, while I was pursuing cinema, because I’m a film lover and wanted to work in film, I found myself walking down a hallway that led to television. I thought, ‘This could be the way to get into film.’ That hallway has lasted almost 40 years and ended up becoming home. I went to film, came back, went again, but television eventually seduced me for good. There’s something deeply fascinating about writing a story between the four walls of your home and watching it travel to unimaginable places. For a storyteller, that feeling is indescribable. And going from publishing a poetry book, where selling 10,000 copies was a huge success in my country, to having an audience measured in millions was also wonderful. It was truly a drastic crossover.”

Valenzuela shared a similar experience, saying he also began in literature. “I studied literature at university, and it was in my first year that I wrote my first telenovela,” he said. “I must admit, I didn’t write it intending to become a screenwriter; I was simply looking for a job. There was no internet back then, so I physically went to several TV channels to drop off my résumé, in case they needed someone to correct faxes, which was the most modern thing at the time, or help with anything else. While job hunting, I invented something on the spot, wrote it out by hand and submitted it. To my surprise, it ended up becoming a telenovela. Over the years, I slowly and innocently discovered that it could actually be a career.”

“Over time, I realized I was already living a career as a television writer,” he continued. “This year marks 30 years in that profession. That path took me to live in Mexico, where I also wrote films and a great deal of theater, which I continue writing to this day. And in the last seven, eight, maybe nine years, I’ve transitioned into series. Who knows where I’ll end up in the next five, six or ten years?”

Bowen-Tombari then asked them about their work with global streamers and the transition from writing 120-episode telenovelas to creating one, two or three seasons of 10 episodes of 45 minutes each, without commercial breaks.

“In my particular case, I made the transition with great enthusiasm,” Valenzuela said. “I’ve written, I think, around 26 telenovelas, and of those, I wrote about 20 completely on my own, without a team. I didn’t know people worked with writers’ rooms, and the channels didn’t tell me either, they obviously found it cheaper to have me write everything alone. So when you’re used to producing six episodes a week and suddenly arrive at a streamer where they say, ‘You have a month to write a pilot’, I couldn’t believe it.”

He described the experience as learning to write all over again. “I discovered that much of what I’d done in telenovelas simply didn’t work in streaming. In a telenovela, especially in episode one, you build a big introductory episode: you set up the promises that will unfold later, lay the groundwork, and close with the major event that breaks the precarious balance. In other words, the real story begins in episode two. But when you write for Netflix, Amazon, HBO or Disney, you must eliminate virtually all of that act one and begin directly with the triggering incident. For me, that meant erasing 25 years of experience from my head, reconfiguring it, and in many ways learning to write again from scratch.”

For Padrón, the transition was also a significant shift in his career. “It was another crossover: going from long-form stories of 120, 150, even 180 episodes, to a different kind of narrative,” he said. “Back then we wrote one episode per day, 40 pages every day. When I look back now, my back thanks me for having left behind that workload I maintained for decades. And then there was the issue of ratings, the great villain of the story. You lived glued to them: at 10 a.m. the next day you waited to know how your episode performed. That call could ruin your day or week, or make you the happiest person in the world.”

“It was a very interesting crossover, of course, because you start letting go of many elements inherent to the genre,” Padrón continued. “In streaming, almost every scene must be purposeful, most scenes have to push the story forward. In broadcast TV, especially in telenovelas, that wasn’t always the case. There were ‘color scenes’, moments where characters had fun, chatted, traded hints, and expanded their personalities simply for the pleasure of hearing them speak. And audiences loved them.”

“But streaming has different demands. All that dramatic ‘fat’ needs to be trimmed down to the bone of the story. Beyond the big end-of-episode cliffhanger, broadcast TV required mini cliffhangers for every commercial break. Each block needed to keep viewers glued to their seats. Streaming brings a different, and in many ways stricter, pressure. Stylistically, it’s a big shift: how do you tell a story on such a short highway? Fortunately, I think streaming has done tremendous good for the industry and for the art of audiovisual storytelling. It’s brought much of cinematic narrative with it: parallel timelines, more intelligent and sophisticated storytelling. Many cinematic tools can now be used with far more creative freedom than on broadcast TV.”

The conversation then turned to the globalization of content, driven largely by streaming platforms. Bowen-Tombari asked whether they create from the local outward to the global, or the other way around.

“I remember my first official panic attack, the one that really marked my entry into the world of series, happened when I got the call from Netflix,” Valenzuela said. “‘We want you to write a series,’ they told me, which would become Who Killed Sara?, the first thing I did for them. And they were very clear: ‘Be aware that this will be watched in 200 countries simultaneously, so write global.’ When they said ‘write global,’ I froze completely. I spent several days like that. What does writing something global even mean? That it has to resonate in Cape Town, La Paz, Budapest, Chile, with my grandmother, and with the man living across from the Eiffel Tower? For me, that word ‘global’ was an avalanche, and a paralyzing one. What helped me survive that vertigo was remembering a saying that literally saved my life: ‘Paint your village and you will be universal.’ So I made a decision, right or wrong, but it allowed me to move forward: I would write about something that personally impressed me, affected me and disturbed me, something that would keep me glued to my computer for 12 hours a day for six months.”

“I think stories travel not because of the characters’ passports but because of the strength of their dilemmas,” Padrón explained. “When you speak of the human condition, you speak of something that doesn’t change with nationality. All human beings share the same miseries, desires, contradictions, lights and shadows, whether Australian, Czech, Brazilian or Mexican.”

Padrón added: “I remember when I got the call from Netflix, a call that definitely marks a before and after, I tried to forget the idea that people in 200 countries would be watching, because working with that in mind seemed insane. And yet it’s the first thing they tell you. But when I was searching for the story that would become Pálpito my Netflix debut, I set out to find a truly powerful moral dilemma. I thought: What if a man is told his wife will die in two months without a heart transplant, but the waiting lists are eight months or a year, and suddenly someone offers to obtain a heart, if he kills someone? That’s a universal dilemma. It could happen to a Venezuelan, an American, a Chinese person, anyone, and they would all face the same moral conflict. In the end, everything rests on the strength of the dilemma and on trusting the language of emotion. And emotions are the same in every corner of the planet.”

When asked where they find new ideas amid the growing volume of original productions from Latin America, Spain and beyond, Padrón responded: “The best creative source is real life. Reality writes better than fiction, it’s a great, sometimes downright delirious, writer. And reality is inhabited by the human condition, which is an avalanche of stories, circumstances, tones, terrors and drama that are truly marvelous. As a writer, I enjoy listening more than talking. A writer is, at heart, a spy of reality. When you listen, stories arrive on their own. Sometimes I go into meetings and tell everyone: ‘I’m not responsible for what comes out of here in a few months,’ because people’s stories are extraordinary. There are stories everywhere. What we do is simply find a way to capture them, shape them, structure them and send them out into the world.”

“I come up with stories in the shower,” Valenzuela said. “The shower is that moment of the day when the phone isn’t ringing, no one is talking to me, and somehow I discover what’s really bothering me. Sometimes I catch myself arguing with the tiles about something, and when I realize I’ve been mentally fighting with the same idea for days, I say: ‘There’s a story here.’ Another practice I have is researching, country by country, the most Googled words. For example, I’m developing a series for France right now, and my prep work was spending weeks looking at the most searched terms, concepts and headlines in the news. It gives me a sort of mirror of society.”

On the evolution of the creator’s role and the deeper involvement with writers’ rooms, Padrón said: “In my case, when I was working in television in Venezuela, the term ‘showrunner’ didn’t even exist, but over time I realized that’s exactly what I was doing. I didn’t let go of the episode: I accompanied it to the network, went into the editing room, met with the art director. I even began bringing in people from other fields: an academic musician for incidental music, a visual artist to create sets and environments. I was deeply involved in every stage of the process. Since the telenovelas were successful, the network allowed it. I edited with the editor until episode 20 and then let the team continue. I know I had that privilege because it isn’t the norm. So when I finally had the opportunity to formally take on that role here, it felt like returning to my natural waters.”

“In my case, the arrival was far more abrupt because I was the showrunner of Who Killed Sara?, without knowing I was,” Valenzuela said. “When I started working on the series, I did so with Netflix U.S., they didn’t even have Mexico offices at the time. And there the formula is very clear: if you’re the creator and also the executive producer, as I was, then you’re the showrunner. Naively, I started seeing myself copied on emails where they asked about the characters’ cars, the colors of the locations, very specific visual and narrative decisions. And I thought, ‘I hope someone answers this correctly.’ After about three weeks, Roberto Stopello, my boss at Netflix, wrote to me: ‘Aren’t you going to answer the emails?’ I said, ‘But Roberto, they’re asking very serious things.’ And he replied: ‘Of course, they’re your responsibility.’ That’s when I realized it was my role. I had to prepare a lot, because they even asked me about the cameras. So for me, it was an abrupt arrival: one day I wasn’t a showrunner, and the next day I was. Fortunately I had time to study, train and adapt, and I still am. And in a way, I’ve gotten used to working that way and not letting go of that creative control.”

The conversation concluded with the executives highlighting their upcoming projects and deals. Padrón pointed to the three-year agreement he signed with Banijay in June. The goal, he said, is “to generate a slate of premium content for Latin America, Spain and the U.S.. The idea is to contribute to that: create content that travels, content that stands out. And there’s synergy, we’re aligning missions, criteria and styles. They approached me, and that’s how Leo Padrón Productions was born. I’m now supporting the development of several projects, generating some of my own ideas and advising on other scripts currently in progress. There’s a lot coming.”

Valenzuela added: “I’ve had a production company, Malule, for five years now. We coproduced Donde hubo fuego, Las hermanas Guerra and other projects. Right now I’m finishing the final episode of a series for Spain, I’ve already written it and am fine-tuning the final details. I’m also on episode two of a new Netflix series and developing, as I mentioned, episode two of a series for France. They’re very fun projects.”