Lux Vide: Shedding Light on What Unites Us

Luca Bernabei and Stephen Davis talk to World Screen about their creative partnership.

Luca Bernabei and Stephen Davis met 16 years ago when they were both producers on the miniseries Pope John Paul II, co-produced by Bernabei’s company Lux Vide. Their work together developed into a lasting friendship between two professionals—Bernabei, the CEO of Lux Vide, and Davis, a producer and former Hasbro chief content officer—who share a commitment to quality programming for the entire family. They have teamed up again to work on projects, first on their slate The Rising and Sandokan, that highlight the humanity and aspirations that connect viewers from different countries and cultures.

TV DRAMA: Lux Vide has a successful track record producing high-end scripted programming, particularly religious-themed miniseries. Tell us about that tradition.
BERNABEI: Lux started from an idea of my father, who was a CEO in Italian television for 14 years. After retiring, when he was 72 years old, he decided that the world was full of pipelines, meaning TV networks, but these pipelines needed clean crystal water. So he decided to produce content for television. His first idea was to produce The Bible. He partnered with Beta Film, and together they went to Ted Turner and sold the idea of the project—21 episodes (each telling a different Biblical story). He believed that after the invention of the printing press—the first book printed was the Bible by Johannes Gutenberg—no one had done something new on the Bible. My father wanted to put the Bible into content with moving images.

Lux started as a faith-based values company. Then we moved forward as a company for feel-good family programming. We are the largest supplier of fiction for RAI, the public channel in Italy. We have produced for Mediaset the highest-rated TV series of the last three years, Good Morning Mom, and for Sky Italia, the international show Devils. And still not satisfied, we are currently involved in a new international production for OTTs in Italy. We want to keep making television for family audiences. In the beginning, people were saying, Oh, yes, they are doing product for the family, but that’s not interesting because, for a long period, television was not based on heroes, but anti-heroes. Our productions seemed almost banal. Now, it’s completely different. Product for family audiences is needed; it attracts a broad range of subscribers and viewers. What started as my father’s idea of producing television for family audiences has now become the marketing position of this company. This is the link between Stephen and me, making family programming, which is how he started in television. Now we have a joint venture [even though we come from] different backgrounds. He’s from America; I’m from Europe, but we believe in similar values. Television, especially after the difficult worldwide situation we have been living in, can connect people through common values. If you save the family, you save the world.

TV DRAMA: Stephen, you’ve had a long track record in scripted programming.
DAVIS: I’ve had the honor of producing everything from TV movies to series to movies to digital content. Probably my proudest producing moment, though, was meeting Luca 16 years ago and producing with him Pope John Paul II, which got nominated for several Emmys and did very well for CBS. Fast-forward to producing Transformers and My Little Pony and everything in between. Luca’s point about wanting to make content that brings families together to feel good about what they are watching, irrespective of backgrounds or beliefs, provides reinforcement of positivity and values. You feel good about what you are watching and that makes you feel good about yourself. It doesn’t mean that it has to be banal, as Luca pointed out. Content can have tension and drama, but it makes you feel good about the experience that you are having. If anything, Covid-19 has taught us that the family viewing experience is more important than ever before and will be a sustainable activity for families. Luca and I believe that to achieve what we want to achieve as producers and tell the stories we want to tell, television is the best medium. And with the innovation that we are seeing with the streamers, and linear networks, and Luca’s international background, my domestic background, we think we have a tremendous opportunity to partner to bring these wonderful stories to a global audience.

TV DRAMA: How did The Rising come about?
BERNABEI: We are making something mainly for non-believers. We don’t want to shock believers, but we want to [appeal to] non-believers—people who may have heard about Jesus but don’t know much about him. We want to find a young audience. This is one of our main targets. Jesus says love each other, forgive one another; these words are so lost in this era. Help each other, give food to the hungry. Try to find the positive in each other. Love your enemy—how can you love your enemy? That seems impossible. These are important messages, especially in the world as it is today. We need to get back to our roots, which are so important.

This is how The Rising started, and Stephen found a wonderful screenwriter, Daniel Knauf, who brings a different point of view. It will never be a European vision or an American vision; it will be a joint venture between these two worlds, always coming together to make this new kind of television.
DAVIS: Irrespective of where you are geographically or what your religious beliefs are, there is a really interesting story to tell about Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Apostles and those individuals around them, and our series is really focused on the humanistic side of their lives. We don’t look at this as a religious retelling by any means. This is an opportunity to show the personalities, the characters and the humanistic experiences of Jesus and those around him in a way that hasn’t been shown in previous films and television series. What’s been phenomenal is the talent we have been able to bring to bear. In addition to showrunner Daniel Knauf, we have an amazing consultant, don Fabrizio Ficco, who is the foremost expert on Jesus and his life. We have other scholars providing the critical and accurate Jewish perspective. It is equally important that this draw heavily from a non-believer’s perspective while being respectful to believers and telling a story that has never been told before. What I love, and this is Luca’s expression, is that Jesus was the original superhero. If you think about it, he is the model for the archetype of every superhero that has come after. If non-believers and believers alike see Jesus in a different light and feel good about their impressions, then we’ve done our job as storytellers and producers.

TV DRAMA: Tell us about Sandokan.
BERNABEI: After this period of the coronavirus, when we have been closed in our homes, families living together, we need something to take us to a completely different world, on the sea with adventure stories. Stephen and I were thinking of Sandokan, which was written in the 19th century, and was a successful TV series in Europe in the ’70s. This story was produced by RAI and sold all over Europe. We want to make it more modern. Marianna, the female character originally written as a 19th-century heroine, in our story is going to become a pirate. Stephen put us in contact with Scott Rosenbaum, a writer who is an expert on pirates. On our first call with him, he told us that pirates were the first hippies of the 19th century. They were living on the sea with a sense of freedom. There was the captain of the boat and the rest were drinking, smoking opium. They were from different cultures and regions of the world. That is an interesting and modern concept because we have all become multilingual, multicultural societies. We are bringing this concept to Sandokan, which, through enjoyable stories in a faraway world, will help us finally dream again.
DAVIS: With so much content available across so many genres, as producers and storytellers, we are always looking for ways to present what might be a more conventional story in an unconventional way. What I responded to with Sandokan was the opportunity to tell a pirate story from a female perspective. We have a very strong male perspective as well because Sandokan is our lead male, but Luca, who originated this idea and has wanted to do this for many years, felt there was this amazing female heroine in Marianna. In the book, she was never given the credit she was due for transforming Sandokan. So, let’s turn the story on its head. Those are the kinds of unexpected moments in a series that we want to see. We felt it was absolutely the right time and place for a series like this. We are fortunate to have Scott Rosenbaum, who showran The Shield, V, Chuck and so many other successful series, and Scott also loves the pirating world. Even before he joined us, he had done quite a bit of writing on his own about pirates. He was the perfect collaborator to tell this story.

TV DRAMA: Ambitious projects like these are expensive. Are you looking for partners to help with the financing?
BERNABEI: Our target budget for each series is around €50 million. I’m bringing money from Europe. Stephen’s bringing money from America. This is important because this is money you can only raise if you put together these two continents.

TV DRAMA: Many of the global streamers are owned by studios that are keeping their original content for their services. International buyers feel there isn’t quite as much product available. Does this provide opportunities for independent producers, particularly high-quality European producers like Lux?
BERNABEI: Yes, quality is always important. This company was born 32 years ago, and we have kept delivering quality programming that in Italy [has consistently achieved high ratings]. We have a tradition of producing in English. Our Leonardo got a 24 percent share on RAI, which is quite good. He was a genius, a rock star of that age. These are the types of stories we want to tell, those with a grounding in history but [are relevant to today’s world]. Leonardo is doing very well on Amazon in various parts of the world.

TV DRAMA: You have other projects that focus on historical figures.
DAVIS: Lux has made a success story out of telling stories about Renaissance men and women. We like continuing this tradition of focusing on interesting historical characters but telling their stories in a more contemporary way that’s going to catch the attention of a broad audience, and we felt that telling interesting stories in a different way is absolutely right for Caravaggio and Michelangelo.
BERNABEI: Leonardo, Michelangelo and Caravaggio belonged to the Renaissance. In a way, now, we are all searching for a Renaissance. Leonardo was complex. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, inventor. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel in a completely innovative and transgressive way for the time. Caravaggio was a maestro in the use of light. He invented the modern use of light in painting. The three of them have something in common. They were cinematographic in the way they painted. The Last Supper of Leonardo is cinematographic. So is The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. The Call of St Matthew in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome is so cinematographic, so modern. All three were ahead of their time. That was what attracted Stephen and me. We [agree on this new approach to storytelling] by bringing together our cultural roots in Europe and America. Yes, if you have a large number of viewers, you will have more money. Yes, money is important because we need it to produce our product. But it’s also important to respect people. We have to get back to this sense of respecting the audience. Not everybody is careful in showing content. It is important, and we have a responsibility as communicators.