I was born in Buenos Aires and raised in Southern California, which means I spent my childhood translating. Language, culture, the story my family told about where we came from and the one happening around us. That turned out to be useful training. Directing is mostly carrying meaning across a gap.
My career started in television, at Univision, as an Associate Producer and Director. Live television is a blunt teacher. There is no second take. The show airs whether you are ready or not, and the audience never sees your reasons. You learn to decide fast and own the result in public. I have carried that muscle through every job since.
From there came international production through The Media Center, and in 1987 I founded Total Media Productions. Commercials, filmed content, and eventually features. I directed and co-wrote Immortal Combat with Sonny Chiba, Roddy Piper, and Meg Foster. I directed Spin with Fernando Carrillo, Shalim Ortiz, and Elika Crespo. Touched. Wanna Be Me! Different genres, different budgets, a different set of problems every morning.
Commercial work gets dismissed by film people. That has always struck me as foolish. Thirty seconds teaches economy like nothing else can. Every frame either earns its place or it goes. Years of that discipline change how you shoot a feature, and how you cut one.
The industry eventually admitted as much. Ridley Scott and Tony Scott came out of commercials before anyone handed them a feature, and it shows in the best sense: visual clarity, preparation, rhythm, knowing exactly what the audience needs to see. The disciplines are different. The lessons travel.
Features taught the other half. A film set is a small civilization with its own weather. The director's real job is not calling action. It is protecting the conditions where good work can happen. For the actor searching for a truthful moment. For the crew solving a hundred physical problems no audience will ever notice. Sonny Chiba did not need me to tell him how to fight. He needed me to know what the scene was about. So did everyone else on that set, from the leads to the gaffer. That is the job. Know what it is about, and defend it.
Then the ground moved.
Distribution fractured. Audiences scattered across a thousand screens and stopped waiting to be programmed to. A lot of filmmakers in my generation treated that shift as the enemy. I went toward it.
Through Burn Media Group I spent years inside digital media. Marketing, audience development, video, automation, and eventually artificial intelligence. I built businesses in it. I was not observing the change from a distance and writing think pieces about it. I was in it, as an entrepreneur, with my own money on the line.
Some people read that chapter as time away from filmmaking. I understand why it looks that way from the outside. It was the opposite. It was the most concentrated education in audiences I have ever received.
Here is what I mean. In traditional production, the audience was an abstraction. They existed somewhere past the distributor, past the network, past a ratings report that arrived after every decision had already been made. In digital, the audience talks back within the hour. You learn what attention actually costs. You learn that nobody owes your work ninety seconds, let alone two hours. You learn to watch what people do instead of what they say.
Every filmmaker believes their story deserves an audience. Digital taught me how audiences are actually found, held, and earned. That knowledge used to live in other departments, far from the creative work. I think it belongs in the room where projects are developed, from day one. At Cineira, it is.
Entrepreneurship taught its own lessons. When you have run companies, met payroll, and lived with the consequences of your own projections, you read a budget differently. You respect money that is not yours. You stop confusing activity with progress. Those habits travel well into film development, where the temptation to confuse motion with momentum is everywhere.
And AI? I use it daily and have for years. I will write more about that another time, but the short version is this: these are tools of speed and access, and they are remarkable. They do not know what a story is for. That part is still ours.
Which brings me to Cineira Studios.
People call it a return, and I let them, but the word is not quite right. You cannot return to a place that no longer exists. The industry I came up in, with its gatekept distribution, its slow feedback, its handful of buyers deciding everything, is gone. I do not mourn it. In fact, not returning to that industry may be the single biggest advantage I have. I carry no institutional habits to unlearn, no old model to defend, no nostalgia to protect. Cineira gets built for the industry that actually exists.
What Cineira does is develop original and acquired properties for film and television. Strong characters. Compelling concepts. Stories where choices carry consequence. Our first feature in development, Deadly Winter, is an action thriller about an assassin, raised by the man who murdered her parents, who must go back into the world that made her to keep her hidden three-year-old daughter from inheriting it. Entertainment first, always. But underneath the genre sits a mother, a child, and a debt coming due. That is the kind of material I came back for.
Four decades in, I know exactly what changed and what did not. The cameras changed. The pipelines changed. The buyers changed. The audience's patience changed most of all. What never moved an inch is the reason any of it exists: a character on a screen wanting something badly, and a room full of strangers who suddenly care.
Everything I learned out there, in television, on sets, in business, in digital, in AI, comes back to serving that one moment.
I am not rebuilding what I left. I am building what comes next.
What never moved an inch is the reason any of it exists: a character on a screen wanting something badly, and a room full of strangers who suddenly care.