Creative force Jodi Matterson is putting Australian television on the global map
Jodi Matterson made her name as the executive producer behind Australia’s most acclaimed television, having worked with Nicole Kidman and Sigourney Weaver. Now, she’s taking her biggest gamble yet.
To be a producer, says Jodi Matterson, is to be a gambler. Producers are always taking risks, both on the people they work with and the stories they tell. Producers gamble on whether they can sort out the visas necessary for a plane full of actors in the 15 hours it takes for the flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. Matterson did this in 2020, on Nine Perfect Strangers. “That is just the kind of stuff that happens,” she says, shrugging easily, as if she were commenting on an adverse weather report. Producers gamble on those, too. On Force of Nature, the sequel to The Dry – “we should have called it The Wet,” Matterson says, deadpan – she gambled on how long she could pick leeches out of director Rob Connolly’s nose, how long the cameras would last in torrential rain, how long she could ask Eric Bana to endure near hypothermia while acting beneath a gushing waterfall. Matterson remembers thinking: “He’s going blue. And you’re like, ‘Can we get this shot?’”
“I always say to people it’s so hard to qualify what a producer does,” she sums up. “Everybody knows what a director does. Everyone knows what a writer does. But I don’t think there are two producers who are the same.” The unifying factor is a daring spirit, combined with an insatiable need to be in the room where it happens. “The addiction to being in the centre of chaos,” agrees Matterson. Being a producer necessitates rolling the dice and going all in. But what happens when the person you are gambling on is yourself?
On a Friday morning in April, Matterson is on all fours wrestling with the floor-to-ceiling windows of a meeting room in her offices in Sydney’s Paddington. Standing at 163 centimetres tall, with feet so small (size 35) she volunteers to bring her own shoes to this Vogue photo shoot, Matterson is tiny but projects a no-nonsense, get-shit-done attitude. Windows wrenched open, she finally sits down, black hair tumbling over one shoulder, eyes locked at full attention. Matterson has been taking a lot of meetings here this past year. It’s been 12 months since she left Made Up Stories, Bruna Papandrea’s production company behind such gambles as Nine Perfect Strangers and The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. Matterson was managing director for seven years, overseeing the organisation’s Australian output. “We had the most incredible run,” she says. “We made so much stuff, and things that I’m incredibly proud of.”
But for the past year she has been in this office at work on Silent Firework, her own production company. Or rather, four companies. Matterson has backed herself, in partnership with directors Abe Forsyth and Glendyn Ivin and fellow producer and former head of children’s content at the ABC, Libbie Doherty, to create the next wave of appointment television. Their remit is unconstrained; the launch slate includes an animated series for preschoolers, a septuagenarian serial killer drama, a queer erotic thriller, a major unscripted series with Gina Chick, a project with Prima Facie playwright Suzie Miller and an upstairs-downstairs soap set in the world of ski resorts.
“A lot of people have said to me, ‘Why have you started four companies? Isn’t it enough to just start one?’” Matterson says and laughs. It is a little risky, she admits, but she’s not afraid to take a risk. “By nature of wanting to do this job, you love to gamble. And for me to walk away from a really successful company and situation, it is a gamble.” She says this firmly, her shoulders square. “But that’s exciting.”
To understand how Silent Firework came to be, we need to go back to 2021. Matterson was in Alice Springs for six weeks making The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, a project she had championed at Made Up Stories. “I sat up all night reading that book cover to cover, ’til like 4.30 in the morning,” she remembers. “When you say to people you want to make a sweeping epic about cyclical domestic violence and trauma set on a flower farm in Australia, it doesn’t scream easy, commercial. We are just going to give you the money to do that, no problem. That was a tough road.”
On set, amid the red dirt and the trailers, Matterson had a revelation. “It hit me like a truck that I wanted to have another baby,” she says. A doctor friend told her, plainly, “You have more chance of blowing up the Death Star than getting pregnant at this age.” She was 45 years old. There was a one to two per cent chance she would get her second child. “I’m a betting person,” Matterson thought. “Let’s do it.” She went through one round of IVF on the set of Force of Nature, “schlepping my hormones down to Victoria and putting them in the fridge in the catering truck, injecting myself in the mud”. Matterson laughs, a little ruefully. “Surprise, surprise. It wasn’t successful.” She tried again, this time in Sydney, away from the eye-of-the-storm chaos of a film set. “I got the miracle,” she says. Her daughter was born in 2023. A week later, Matterson was back on set, as cameras rolled in Sydney on the television series Strife, starring Asher Keddie.
But that’s not the end of this story. When her daughter was only three months old, Matterson went to see a doctor about persistent night sweats. The producer thought she was experiencing perimenopause. The reality was she had a 27-millimetre nodule on her lung that a respiratory specialist told her was clearly lung cancer. “We started talking about chemo and surgeons and the whole thing. The whole world just kind of spun around,” Matterson shares. After a “very invasive” biopsy, she received some good news. The respiratory specialist was no longer certain about their previous certainty. Her options were simple: she could have surgery to remove the nodule, which would damage her lung capacity, or wait around while monitoring it. She rolled the dice and spent the remainder of the year in and out of scans and doctor’s offices. Just before Christmas, she learned the nodule had shrunk. “They could say unequivocally it wasn’t cancer,” Matterson says, exhaling deeply. She got through family Christmas and checked herself into a retreat, her mental health in shreds.
“I think at that point, because I’d been running on adrenaline for so long – seven years of production back to back, having a new baby, having this health scare hanging over me for six months – my whole nervous system just collapsed,” Matterson admits. “It was like, ‘What am I doing with my life? Like, what am I doing?’”
At the retreat, alone with her thoughts, the seeds of an idea for her own production company took root. The trip coincided with the 20-year anniversary of Matterson’s first movie, the Sam Worthington-starring AC/DC tribute film Thunderstruck. “It felt really significant,” she says. “It felt like I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I’ve been told there’s nothing wrong with me, so god willing, I’ve got at least another 20 years of doing this. It’s just the midpoint of the story.”
Matterson leans back in her chair. She has been telling this story, walking through its loops and bends, for almost half an hour. She knows it’s a wild tale, one that she couldn’t have comprehended unless she had gone through it herself. “I’m so grateful for the health scare, because I think I can honestly say had it not been for that, I would’ve kept going,” she admits. Instead, she “blew up her life”, she jokes, blindsided her family and former business partner, and bet on herself.
“It really wasn’t something I had been thinking about for a long time. It hit me as soon as I was told I was healthy,” she explains. “It was such a shock to me. And when I said it out loud, it was such a shock to everybody.” When you realise how you want to spend the rest of your life, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. She finished at Made Up Stories on Friday and began Silent Firework the following Monday. “Life is really fucking short,” she concludes. “There’s no time to not do the thing you want to do.”
The structure of Silent Firework – one super production company encompassing three separate entities – is exactly what she envisaged plotting out her future at that retreat. This unique organisation encourages her producing partners to invest in the business alongside her, while also giving Matterson enormous freedom. “At Made Up Stories, we had a very specific brand, and I’m so passionate about the projects we made, but they all came from that very female lens,” she says. “I will always do things in that space, and I love that space, but also my tastes are really, really varied.”
Silent Firework is launching with a roster of projects whose shared DNA is simply that they are designed to entertain – and entertain on a grand scale. Matterson is making her first unscripted series, a project working closely with Alone: Australia winner Gina Chick. Doherty, who oversaw the colossal global success of Bluey at ABC TV, is shepherding a glossy drama mired in the succession battle over an empire of ski resorts in Queenstown, New Zealand. Forsyth is sinking his teeth into an adaptation of a soon-to-be-released thriller novel. Landing that deal saw Silent Firework beat out “a lot of massive producers, big international companies” in a hotly contested auction for the rights, Matterson says, proudly.
Naming the new business was “harder than naming my two children”, she admits, and she outsourced the heavy lifting to an external company. The result struck her as apt. “You have fireworks anywhere in the world and people are drawn to them,” Matterson says. “People want to see it. That, to me, is why I got really excited about the name. Because that’s the goal. I want the most people possible to see the things we’re going to make.”
There is an anything-goes, all-bets-are-off energy to Silent Firework’s slate. “There are no rules,” Matterson says on more than one occasion during this conversation. Does it feel good to have no rules? “Oh my god,” she exclaims, “it feels amazing.”
After 12 months of meetings, brainstorming, pitching and writing, production will begin on Silent Firework’s first series in a matter of months. “I can’t wait,” she declares, grinning. The past year has been an endless hustle. Matterson spent the first half of this week on 2.30am Zoom calls, meeting writers in the United States and producers in Taiwan in the middle. “We are literally working every hour god has, around the clock, to do what should take a couple of years and do it in a year,” she says.
Silent Firework is backed by five people, none of whom have a background in film and television production. “On the one hand, that’s amazing because I have complete freedom,” Matterson concludes. “No one has said to us, ‘You can’t do that.’ It’s all of us trusting our gut and going, ‘This is what we want to do.’ If we succeed, it’s on our own terms. And if we fail spectacularly, it’s all on us as well.” Matterson is smiling. “Which is kind of exciting.”
This story is from the June issue of Vogue Australia.
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