P.L : First of all, I want to say that I became a teacher – I teach at a public university (ESCS) and a private university (UCP) – out of a sense of social commitment. I feel it is my obligation to contribute to the strengthening of the audiovisual industry, even if in a modest way. I was an autodidact who was lucky enough to be writing prime-time fiction by the age of 24, but I learned by doing, at a time when there were few professional screenwriters in our market.

Meanwhile, I have been taking workshops abroad over the years. But not everyone has the financial capacity to take workshops in London, Los Angeles or New York, and so our obligation as an industry is to allow those who want to be screenwriters to take quality training in Portugal.

As for the secret, I try to tell stories that are meaningful to me, that provide good entertainment, but that simultaneously bring us a reflection about the complexity of the human being and the social construction of reality. I think we may be losing this ludic sense of storytelling. In today’s world (for now more in the American and Anglo-Saxon world than in the rest of Europe) we begin to feel a certain conditioning, we can only write about ourselves, about our community and never about others, and I worry about this closing that the culture of cancellation has been bringing to artists.

There are many stories that interest me. In the case of Gloria, what fascinated me most was trying to write characters who were strongly conditioned by certain mental structures, which were a reflection of economic, political and geographical factors. For me the biggest difficulty is not finding a good story, but knowing how best to tell it, and that’s the part that takes up most of my time.

P.L : João Vidal is a character under permanent construction. He grew up in a privileged context, but his passage through Africa, through the war in the colonies, will shake his conviction in the regime, which was based on the propaganda of the “good colonizer”. From the moment his eyes see the brutality of war and colonial exploitation, his certainties are challenged. Then, when he returns to Portugal, he realizes the social asymmetries, and there he feels he has to take a stand, even though he doesn’t know what stand to take, because he is beginning to have access to a world he didn’t know.

In Portugal, during the dictatorship, there were democratic movements, but the communist party was the only one at that time that had an organized and combative underground structure, which fascinates our protagonist. But only when he joins the organization will he realize that the imposed discipline does not allow for his own thinking. In a way, he is a victim of the bipolar world, where there is no room for consensus, which in a way is similar to the world today, even though the geopolitical context has apparently changed. There is a character, James, who says that we always think we are living in a special moment, but all generations have thought this way, all have had their particular challenges, wars, financial crises, and struggles for social recognition.

Pedro Lopes: Raretwas a radio center, which aimed to bring news to Eastern bloc countries free from the censorship of the communist regime. But more than that, it was an American and Western propaganda weapon that was part of the non-military component of the cold war. The Raret complex stretched over 200 hectares, had some 500 workers and operated for more than 45 years, but almost nobody in Portugal knew of its existence. It was an American city with schools, hospitals and maternity hospital, tennis courts and swimming pools, all in the middle of the countryside where complete poverty reigned.

The reason Raret was located in that place, where roads had to be built for the transmitters to get there, was because it was at the right distance for shortwave broadcasting to the Eastern Bloc. The recordings were made in Germany, but broadcast from Portugal, because the Portuguese dictator never wanted to question his position of neutrality, and this was always a game he played with the Americans. Raret, and the Lages air base in the Azores, which was essential for the American fleet to be able to refuel in the middle of the Atlantic, were instrumental in the relationship between the two countries, not forgetting that from an ideological point of view, although different, they were allies against communism, and this was one of the reasons why the fascist dictatorships in Portugal survived.

I grew up hearing Raret stories because my grandfather was an employee of Emissora Nacional, the state radio station, and often went to Raret because he worked directly with the engineer who scouted the land for the Americans. From those people who lived far away from everything I could tell a bigger story, that of the world in the cold war period.

Q : As you are an experienced Writer for Short Film, Feature Films and TeleNovelas, there was a special feeling to write for this Netflix Series. Were there parameters set by Netflix? Please inspire my filmmaker readers how the process was from Script to the Pitch to being Greenlit by Netflix and the Production and Post Production Phase ?

P.L : My experience may not serve as an example because it was all very smooth. I went to Madrid to pitch to Netflix, they asked me to write the first episode right away, and after reading it I got the green light without asking for a single change. At the beginning of the process I asked if I should take anything into consideration, and the answer they gave me was to write the series I wanted and tell the story the way I believed in. Those words were incredible, because they trusted the vision I had for the project, which we screenwriters are not used to.

Probably because we are a peripheral country, where financial investment is still not big, it brought me this advantage of not having the pressure of making blockbusters that have the obligation to win massive audiences all over the world. However, in writing Glória, I had that same goal, to reach as many people as possible, in Portugal and in the territories where Netflix is present, but telling a Portuguese story and from a narrative point of view being influenced by everything I like, that is, the American narrative structure, and the European way of developing characters, with psychological complexity.