THE WRITE STUFF
Producer Bruna Papandrea has perfected the art of transforming page-turners into show-stoppers, writes Siobhan Duck
FIRST came Big Little Lies. Then The Undoing. Now Nine Perfect Strangers. And behind them all has been Bruna Papandrea – the Australian producer could write her own tome on how to adapt books for the screen.
Nine Perfect Strangers is the latest project from Made Up Stories, the production company Papandrea founded in 2017 to champion female filmmakers, adapt novels written by women and create productions featuring more complex female characters.
“I was a woman in my 40s who was like, ‘ Where are the stories I want to see?’ ‘ Where are the women?’” she recalls.
“Mostly it came [from being friends] with a lot of actresses of this age group who would say to me: ‘Can you read my scripts?’ I would, and the roles were the girlfriend, the wife. It was always someone in the background. And these were big-name actresses. And I was just like, well what’s happening? Where are the stories, you know? I was just so fatigued by seeing the same male stories. And it’s still happening, by the way. We still have this amazing double standard. So, it’s not like we have solved all the world’s problems.”
Like hit series Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers is based on a book by Australian author Liane Moriarty and once again sees Papandrea collaborating
with her friend and fellow producer Nicole Kidman, who has played a major part in bringing the production of the show to Australia.
“I think it’s my fifth time now [working with Kidman],” Papandrea says. “You have some of those relationships where you just want to work together again, and so we find things
[so we can] and we do a lot of repeat business with everyone, including our actors.”
Co-producer Jodi Matterson agrees. “When you work with someone of Nicole’s calibre,
it’s such an amazing experience on set because you know you truly are working with someone who is extraordinary. She has the ability to completely inhabit the character.”
The $100 million Amazon Prime Video series was filmed in Byron Bay and also stars Melissa McCarthy, Michael Shannon, Samara Weaving and Asher Keddie as guests at a fictional health retreat run by Kidman’s character.
“Liane always deals with these amazing ensembles of characters, and she really knows how to craft these brilliant plots,” Papandrea says. “The great thing for me about her books is that nothing is really what it seems, and I think that just makes great fodder for entertainment.”
Papandrea is just one of the many talented filmmakers who have migrated to television in recent years. “Nobody wanted to do TV until George Clooney became a movie star,” she says. “We used to use that as an example [of why TV was a good place to start your career], but we can’t any more because now everyone wants to do TV – including us, by the way.”
Matterson adds that television offers opportunities to tell more complex stories than film allows. “You can live with a character instead of having 90 minutes – or 369 minutes, if you’re a Marvel movie – to tell a story,” Matterson explains. “You’ve literally got hours and hours, potentially over multiple series, to really dig in and really get into somebody.”
As Papandrea says, TV has long been the groundbreaking medium for women’s stories.
“I go back to even Ally McBeal or Nurse Jackie,” she explains.
“Shows like that put these really complicated women at the centre. TV was the first to do that.”
NINE PERFECT STRANGERS
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