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Walter Iuzzolino: [Laughs] I'm not an insane megalomaniac. One day I got a call from the Chief Creative Officer at Channel 4, and she said, "Walter, you're going to faint slightly, but I've got an idea… It's not definitely going to happen, but can I model this with the name Walter Presents?" I kind of went [pulls a terrified face], purely because, as much as I am vocal and passionate about stuff, I am also quite a shy and reserved person. I'm still petrified about the onscreen thing, because really I'm just a weird geeky Italian who loves foreign drama.Is it true you watched 3,500 hours of television in order to select the programmes?
Yeah, more than that now. My brain's quite frazzled. I'm not kidding. It's stressful to do something that you're living in your head. It's a bit like writing, when you go, "This is either my big novel or my big nothing."One thing I've found with watching [so many shows] is that, frequently, the very best dramas are the ones that start slow. So the first couple of episodes are scene setting, and you go, "Is anything going to happen?" and suddenly they go "BANG!" [In the opening episodes] these shows paint a broader picture of community, family, a political party, whatever it is, and then they zero in on the characters and you're riveted.
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They're all absolutely interconnected, in the sense of the specific criteria we used to choose them. The notion was that we didn't want to create anything that was elitist or snobbish. We wanted to go big, broad, shiny and mainstream, [but] with intelligence and class.It was a great joy for me when we started, because if your only real filter is exceptional quality then it's gonna be amazing fun. It's a bit like HBO – you're gonna see stuff that ranges from The Sopranos to Six Feet Under to Sex and the City. The scope of what a channel like HBO does is extraordinary, and in a similar way, that was our filter. What I think's unique to this service is the range; our filter is precise, but it's wide. We just go: excellent writing, excellent acting, excellent directing. That's all we're looking for.Do you think TV's overtaken cinema in terms of its quality?
Without a shadow of a doubt, I believe television is the new cinema and that cinema's gone. And I say this as a huge lover of film – I was raised on Bergman, Fellini, Woody Allen and Truffaut, so god knows I love cinema. But I think that mainstream cinema is now completely constrained into an X-Box, 3D, CGI, product-placement world. The medium of storytelling is squashed into 80 to 90 minutes, where you have to have the big product placement, the game that goes with it, the 3D effects so you can shove in the glasses and charge £1.50 more… All of that is a terrible brace on cinema being really interesting.
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What do you think about current UK television culture?TRENDING ON NOISEY: Welcome to NOISEY – Watch the Trailer for Our Upcoming TV Show
I'm a terrible, crazy Anglophile. I've been living in the UK for 20 years and I think it's the most culturally-progressive country in the world, I really do. As an island it's very outward-looking – it's curious. It is no mystery that the big wave of international success for drama has come from the UK. It is here that Scandi [noir] made its reputation, and because it became successful here, America and other countries go, "Why are 2 million people in the UK watching that thing with subtitles?" I think the UK is the maker of absolutely great cultural prototypes. The audience here is open and excitable enough to have created a real market for international drama.What about the phenomena of binge-watching that's cropped up as a result of online viewing – is this a good thing for the industry?
It's heavenly. I don't think there's any negative association with the notion of binge-watching, because it's associated with great narrative in storytelling. One beautiful thing about it is that most people binge-watch as a couple or with family, so it's a shared experience.
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My dream is to create something that is a bit peculiar and interesting, to create an international reputation for what I think is great, because I believe that no matter where you live, audiences are smart and audiences like a good story, and they will enjoy beautifully-crafted storytelling, regardless of wherever they are. And so I think it would be really exciting to reach that global audience.You can check out Walter Presents and their current selections here.@quietlyitgoesMore on VICE:'Germany Now Is a Utopia': Meeting the Creators of Deutschland 83An Interview with Louis TherouxTalking Ten Years of 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' with Two of Its Stars