José Ignacio “Chascas” Valenzuela: 2024 looks like an interesting year. It closes the three most creative years of my life, and at the same time, the most important of my career
For the Chilean writer and creator José Ignacio “Chascas” Valenzuela, 2024 will be a year of premieres, closures, and beginnings. Closures because their three years of exclusivity with Netflix concluded. Premieres because several productions he has been working on with his production company Malule Entertainment and his partner Lucas Akoskin will see the light this year. And beginnings because they already have signed contracts for productions aimed at new audiences, such as Europe (England, Spain) and the US.
“With these projects, we are diversifying into interesting places, and also quite new for me,” he commented to PRODU. He explained that this year, he will see for the first time in his life some of the projects that they have been developing with Malule Entertainment and have been working on for three years, some based on his books.
“2024 looks like an interesting year. It closes the three most creative years of my life, and at the same time, those most important of my career,” he said, referring to the end of his exclusivity with Netflix. He explained that the experience with the platform allowed him to open himself to new possibilities, such as working as a showrunner and executive producer. “I have nothing but infinite gratitude to Roberto Stopello, who took me to Netflix, was my boss, as I call him, also my friend, and allowed me to explore new and different topics, which I had not been able to explore on open television. I was able to do Who Killed Sara? and something unrelated, such as Donde Hubo Fuego, like the one I’m doing now, which is different from the previous two. It has been a fascinating year. It was three series in three years, but Sara had three seasons. And Donde Hubo Fuego, 40 chapters. I have worked hard these three years.”
Regarding his projects for the US and Europe, he said that although it is a challenge to speak to these audiences, with Who Killed Sara? he learned that to be global, “you have to look at your navel.”
“If you start writing globally, you become super dull and trivial. You build something without self-identity. One thing I have learned in the last four years is that specificity and localism have a flavor that, if well written, engages with globality whenever you are telling a story that generalized in diverse realities,” he said, adding that he grew up watching Brazilian novels in Chile, where he knew little about some of the topics addressed there. However, he liked getting to know Brazil. “I empathize with the emotions even if I didn’t understand some topics,” he said after mentioning that seeing something different that he could relate to was attractive.
Netflix will be a potential client of his production house, which is devoted to content development and has a writer’s IP library with about 30 books. He commented that they have about three or four film projects with these properties, although they can also take projects from writers they like or books interesting to acquire the rights.
