Clara Machado Endemol Shine Boomdog
Clara Machado, director of Development and Scripted Operations, EndemolShine Boomdog, said that 2022 was very positive because they completed the series Volver a Caer, with Kate del Castillo, which premiered on ViX in early 2023. It is an adaptation of the EndemolShine Australia format, A Beautiful Lie, a reimagining of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
“It’s a very important project for us because it’s the first fiction we do with Kate,” commented Machado, after expressing her satisfaction with the results.
“We used the Australian version that we really liked and adapted it from there. It is a reimagining that takes place in the current time, taking the most important themes of the original story, such as love, fidelity, love impulses, and family, and the issue of when love becomes a habit in a marriage after a certain time, as well as how people react to those impulses,” she explained.
For Machado, the classic is very current and also timeless because it addresses a situation around a woman that’s being judged and finds herself immersed in a spiral from which she cannot get out. “Although we adapted the Australian version, we went through the classic a lot, we read it, we studied it many times.”
The Spanish writers Almudena Ocaña and Aurora Graciá Tortosa were behind the project, with a team working to ‘tropicalize’ or adapt the script to Mexico’s ways of speaking. “Both helped us in all the female parts and drama and, above all, the male character who is the husband, to try to create the circumstances that push Ana’s character to the limit, which I think we did,” she said.
For Machado 2022 was an important period of development since they worked with a great IP, the book by Carlos Fuentes, Vlad. “It is a short novel that reimagines Dracula in Mexico at the present time and we are developing it together with Carl Zitelmen and Manuel Cravioto, as showrunner. It has also been a very important development for us.”
She added that they are bringing interesting topics with the long series and the return to melodramas, within the rise of longer-winded series, and that they’re pushing melodrama mixing genres with thrillers, and romantic comedies. “That has been a big part of the focus and what we want to drive forward in the coming months.”
She assured that the content that will be ruling again is melodrama, “I think that we are experts in love stories and human beings need love stories.”
