TV Drama Pioneer Award: Walter Iuzzolino

Walter Iuzzolino discussed how he and his team are positioning Walter Presents as a premier home for top-notch foreign-language scripted series at the TV Drama Festival today before being honored with the inaugural TV Drama Pioneer Award.

Iuzzolino, co-founder and curator of Walter Presents, participated in a keynote conversation with TV Drama’s Anna Carugati as the virtual summit opened its second day. You can watch the session here.

“Everything needs a super tight structure,” said Iuzzolino on what makes for compelling storytelling. “It’s fair to say that when it comes to different cultures in different countries, there are nuances to the argument. English and American storytelling is particularly tight when it comes to structure. It’s perfected the idea of a structure that almost works despite where the story’s going to go. Every cause has an effect and vice versa. There’s something quite beautiful and elegant about admiring the precision of a structure for the structure’s sake. Having said that, it is true that European storytelling, in particular, takes a greater degree of liberty when it comes to painting the emotion. One absolutely needs a good structure, and without that, you’re going nowhere or you’re left in the middle of a scene. However, it is sometimes exciting to break with form, and mostly European storytellers break with form and decide to open up the structure and to allow for more emotion to breathe in a scene that you think should be tighter. I think the grammar is essential and structure is essential. However, when you’ve learned and internalized that grammar, it’s also quite nice to break with form and to take that grammar where it suits you. Every great author, wherever they are in the world, learned to use structure and take it apart and throw it away when it doesn’t serve the purpose they want served.”

On what he looks for that will resonate in multiple territories, Iuzzolino noted: “The universality of the theme does help. But in a way, every story is about human beings and their experience of life, death, tragedy, sadness. But I’ve learned with the experience of Walter Presents that sometimes it’s the specificity of a story that makes it universal. By virtue of being very true to itself, a Sicilian story can become a great global story. In the end, themes have to echo for a viewer. Chances are that a story would resonate when it’s specific to its culture. You know when you are watching and consuming something of excellence, and you will respond to that excellence if you know it’s not being prepackaged and that it comes from a good place, narratively, aesthetically and thematically. It is true that hyperlocal nowadays can be very good. Viewers have enormous amounts of choice. And going very specific with the cultural DNA of what you’re watching tends to help with a global audience.”

Growing up in Italy, where he regularly consumed dubbed content, helped to inspire the idea behind Walter Presents, Iuzzolino said. “I was used to a lot of international drama as a viewer. Language was never a barrier to the appreciation of content because everything spoke Italian and therefore you were able to watch, admire and appreciate textures and paces and tonal bits of storytelling that were very different from one another on a daily basis. When I moved to London 25 years ago, I was quite struck by the absence of that variety. Everything at the time was very Anglo-American. Anglo-American drama is great. It’s fantastic. But I was missing the Italian bit and the French bit and the German bit. It was trying to go back to my heritage and what I used to enjoy and feast on.”

The BBC had been experimenting with foreign drama like Canal+’s Spiral, Iuzzolino noted. “I remember thinking, wow, if half a million people in the U.K. regularly tune into a French show that is quite baroque and dark and fairly convoluted, slightly extreme in its own way, week in, week out, then there is an audience that could embrace international drama.”

With the success that then followed with Scandi dramas such as The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen, “I thought, the audience is there. We just need to corral them to a place that is as rich and diverse and exciting as it could be. And at the time in the U.K., international drama was largely Scandi drama—[it was the] one parameter by which you would judge international subtitled drama. I knew there was a lot more. I wanted to explore that.”

The service is present in the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Scandinavia. “The feedback has been universally positive. The streamers have helped to accelerate a change to the point where viewers are now used to international drama. They’re not scared about subtitles anymore. The shows stream really well. And we are growing and growing. We used to launch one, sometimes two shows a month. Now, in the States we launch a show every week. It’s a very hungry machine. Our viewers are very loyal and passionate.”

Iuzzolino then discussed the launch of Eagle Eye Drama, a sister outfit to develop content in English. “There was a sense of scouting great formatted storytelling that I thought could lend itself very well to international adaptation. But there’s another reason, which is maybe the more powerful motivation: Through Walter Presents, I had learned to fall in love with wonderful creatives that were operating all over Europe and all over the world. They were outside the Anglo-American system. With this plethora of choice came a lack of talent, and I remember thinking, that’s not true. It’s that we’re just looking in the same small pool. If we could look beyond the U.K. and the U.S., there are so many extraordinary program makers that never got the opportunity to project their talent onto our world. And Eagle Eye Drama really was born as a combination of knowing that there were great stories that definitely did merit adaptation and bringing great new talent into the system. With the same pool of people sometimes comes a sameness of tone. I wanted to bring in a slightly different, European tone.”