As Fremantle lands at the LA Screenings with The Season, a buzzy new co-production from PCCW Media and SK Global premiering on Viu and Hulu this summer, the show’s lead director and EP, Marialy Rivas, talks visual storytelling, global collaboration, and the joys of the Hong Kong backdrop in the new drama from the makers of Crazy Rich Asians.
Fremantle leads international sales, with support from De Maio Entertainment, and Viu manages rights for its territories. The glossy drama was created by Yalun Tu, who also serves as showrunner, with Rivas as lead director and EP. The six-part series will air in the U.S. on Hulu, while Viu will carry it across markets in Asia, the Middle East, and South Africa. It will also air on PCCW’s Now TV platform in Hong Kong. It launches June 17.
Rivas has worked across film and television in Latin America, the U.S., and the U.K. She was excited to board The Season after meeting with Tu, sensing that their visions were aligned for the look and feel of the series, which Chloe Dan, head of television at SK Global, has billed “soapy delicious,” Rivas says in a new episode of ScreenMDM Talks, which you can watch on YouTube below or on Spotify here. “The show is fun and addictive. Landing the tone was important in terms of performances and visually with the DP, Sergio Delgado. He wanted to make it look expensive, because that’s the world we are visiting. So you have to be elegant, but also have danger underneath.”
Hong Kong is more than just a backdrop, Rivas said, “What happens sometimes in TV shows is they start cutting to close-ups of the characters, and then you lose the context. But we were very aware that Hong Kong was also a character, so we kept doing wide shots, and even the close-ups were with wide-angle lenses.”
Rivas highlighted the international nature of the cast and crew and likened her role as director to that of an orchestral conductor. “Everything needs to sound in tune. When you have actors with different styles, one of my worries was tonally making them sound in tune.”
The final result is “extremely fun,” Rivas says, and she expects audiences to be quickly “hooked” by the six-parter. “And then it has the uniqueness of happening in Hong Kong, but spoken in English, with a little bit of Cantonese. That’s attractive in itself. You invite the audience to a world that is fascinating and beautiful. And we all love the story of rich people and the underdog that comes to tear them down. I think audiences will love it.”
As for the state of the global drama business in an era post-peak-TV, Rivas notes, “When you’re in difficulty, creativity explodes because there is no other way. You need to thrive. These collaborations today make content better because they bring different points of view. All of those visions end up making something more unique.”
Rivas also offered up some tips on how to make these cross-border collaborations as frictionless as possible. “On the director’s side, you need to be very mindful of the work culture of each place because everywhere is different, and you need to learn it. You need to respect it, honor it, and work with it. Sometimes that is very challenging. You need everyone working towards the same goal: making great television, movies, whatever it is. You need to research the culture and the place, and also understand that it is such a huge honor that they are granting you the permit to work in those places.”
Indeed, Rivas, who started her career in Chile, is always grateful when she’s at work. “I grew up during a dictatorship, where they killed and exiled all the filmmakers. So every time I step onto a set, I think magic has happened, because it was almost impossible for me to imagine when I was dreaming of being a filmmaker as a child.”
I asked Rivas for her take on the vertical content trend sweeping across the globe. She’s not unfamiliar with making impactful content at shorter lengths, having worked in commercials and music videos over the course of her career. “Thirty seconds, a minute, I’ve done it. Each way of telling a story is different, and you need to master it. A director needs to master everything. I’ve done music videos, commercials, short films, films, and TV shows. So even though I love film and that’s what I would prefer, I think I’m always open to exploration. You cannot close a door and say, ‘This is awful.’ I do think the short attention span we’re forced into by technology isn’t good. But I also understand things change, and you need to surf the waves of change because that is how it goes. There are amazing TV shows, there are horrible TV shows. There are amazing movies, there are horrible movies. So maybe vertical is going to bring something good.”
Read a translation of this fantastic interview in Spanish, which includes commentary from Sheila Aguirre about the LatAm rollout plans, here.
