Hit maker Bruna Papandrea’s movie career blooms
From the ’burbs of Adelaide to big-time Hollywood producer with a knack for picking the next big thing. How did Bruna Papandrea do it?
In August 2019, Naomi Watts was in the kitchen of a modest, ocean-view bungalow in Sydney’s Newport Beach, blow-drying the feathers of a baby magpie. The story of how that magpie came to be there, on set with the Oscar-nominated actress for the family drama Penguin Bloom, is a long, weird and winding tale that goes some way to answering the oft-posed question: what is it that movie producers do?
If you’re Bruna Papandrea, Hollywood deal-maker, feisty champion of women in film and, with best friends Watts and Emma Cooper, a producer on Penguin Bloom, it’s a question of what don’t you do. From her early days chauffeuring crew and sewing prop curtains to, more recently, helping to scour the country for a miracle fledgling in the depths of winter, the 49-year-old powerhouse is used to pulling out all the stops in her quest to entertain.
Papandrea has dedicated herself to bringing women’s stories to the fore while plotting her own path from a housing commission childhood in a working-class Adelaide suburb to a gilded post as one of the most powerful Australians in Hollywood. The high-art pulp thriller Gone Girl: that was hers. Wild, the film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s triumph-over-adversity adventure tale: also hers. Both blockbusters were the result of a partnership with Reese Witherspoon, with whom she co-founded production company Pacific Standard in 2012. The pair rebottled lightning with two seasons of HBO’s Big Little Lies, the Emmy-winning murder-mystery that provided not one, but five, substantial female roles, before Papandrea struck out on her own two years ago with the shingle Made Up Stories.
Her company produced last year’s television hit The Undoing, another high-gloss whodunit, starring Nicole Kidman, and current box office triumph The Dry, based on the bestseller by Melbourne author Jane Harper. As credits roll on screens big and small, it’s not uncommon to see Papandrea’s name scroll by, and Made Up Stories often has half a dozen projects in production at once, all of them buzzy. Nine Perfect Strangers, the television miniseries based on Liane Moriarty’s book (again starring Kidman): that’s Papandrea’s. As are Anatomy of a Scandal, for Netflix, a film adaptation of Luckiest Girl Alive, TV series Tell Me Your Secrets, and Ashley’s War, a film based on a true story about women soldiers serving in Afghanistan. Refusing to be boxed in by genre, period or demographic, she’s inked a deal with Agatha Christie Ltd to develop a TV series around the author’s iconic sleuth Miss Marple and acquired the rights to develop for TV Elizabeth Acevedo’s best-selling YA (young adult) novel Clap When You Land, which is written entirely in verse.
Is there a pie she doesn’t have a finger in right now? Mere coincidence, insists Papandrea, a self-effacing pronouncement that Watts scoffs at. “It’s not luck with her,” says the actor. “She’s a machine. I’ve known her since she was 17 and she’s always worked really, really hard without giving up.” Even before Papandrea started teaming up with power players like Witherspoon, Kidman and Ashton Kutcher (she ran his film company Katalyst), she was, says Watts, “the sort of girl who’d read three books in a weekend and 12 scripts standing on her head. It’s hard to keep up”.
A voracious reader with great taste, Papandrea has an uncanny knack for spotting the book set to become The Next Big Thing. She and Witherspoon optioned Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Strayed’s Wild as manuscripts only to see them both, upon publication, hit the top of the bestseller lists on the same day. Harper’s The Dry was also snapped up before publication.
Papandrea has a confidence that means she never second-guesses, an instinct that lives deep in her gut and is rarely questioned. And she powers through disaster as just another challenge. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, a number of Made Up Stories projects had to be jettisoned. Papandrea barely broke stride. With offices in Sydney as well as Los Angeles – where she normally lives with her US producer husband Steve Hutensky and their seven-year-old twins, Avalon and Roman – relocating to her relatively Covid-free birth country was a no-brainer. The family moved here in June last year and, happily for the Australian film industry, the über-producer brought her work with her.
Follow the twisty, rutted roads from Byron Baypast banana plantations and macadamia farms up into the lush rainforest of the hinterland and you’ll come to a modernist luxury retreat called Soma. Lots of glass, expanses of blond wood flooded with natural light, a freshwater infinity pool and geodesic yoga dome make it the perfect stand-in for the wellness retreat called Tranquilium that author Liane Moriarty imagined as the setting for her novel Nine Perfect Strangers. It’s so perfect, in fact, that it’s hard to believe that Soma and the pretty Northern Rivers region was Plan B.
Moriarty’s Sydney-set Big Little Lies was transplanted to telegenic Monterey, California, for the HBO series and a California shoot was also originally planned for Nine Perfect Strangers. Then Covid-19 hit. Papandrea and good friend Kidman, who is also a producer, started talking about whether the eight-episode shoot could be done “back home”. “When we decided that maybe we could pivot and do it in Australia we were both like, ‘Right!’” Papandrea says. “There’s so much to love about working here. Then it became, ‘Would Melissa McCarthy come to Australia…’”
With the top-lining US actress on board, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Shannon and Regina Hall soon followed, and locals such as Asher Keddie and Samara Weaving rounded out the cast. “I don’t think I’ve asked anyone since Covid, ‘Would you like to come to Australia?’ and they’ve said no,” Papandrea says. “And then no one wants to leave.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison was thrilled with the relocation, and a little starstruck. “Australia is in the box seat to attract productions to our shores and we are privileged that one of the first is Nine Perfect Strangers with our Nicole Kidman,” he said as filming kicked off in August, just a month after the Federal Government capitalised on Australia’s low rate of coronavirus infections by announcing a $400m honeypot to lure big studio film and TV productions. The international production was expected to inject more than $100m into the NSW economy and support more than 250 full-time and 1300 casual jobs.
PM’s happy. Cast and newly employed crew, also happy. Papandrea, who based herself in Byron for the shoot while her children were in school in Sydney, is happy – and relieved. As a sufferer of the incurable auto-immune disease lupus, she is considered high-risk for Covid-19 and feels “a lot safer” in Australia. “My kids are American, we have a big business in America, but because I think I am so compromised, I’m not rushing back yet,” she says. “We just take it one day at a time; as long as we can keep working, we’re here.”
November brought news that another Made Up Stories production was shifting from Hollywood to Australia. Pieces of Her, an eight-part Netflix series based on a Karin Slaughter book and starring Toni Collette, will shoot in Sydney’s Homebush this year, delivering 400 local jobs and contributing an estimated $58m to the state’s economy. “We are also looking at moving an American movie here, and we have a lot of Australian stuff we’re making too,” says Papandrea, citing an in-the-works screen adaptation of Holly Ringland’s The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, “one of the most beautiful books we’ve ever optioned”.
Can you, I begin, see a point where Hollywood… “Comes here? Yes,” Papandrea jumps in. “I get two calls a day, I’m not kidding, saying, ‘Hey, we want to come over’. I just now had a call from a showrunner friend in America…”
Clean, safe, comparatively virus-free, with funding incentives: Australia’s looking like a filmmaker’s utopia. “People also love coming to film here because there’s a no-bullshit thing,” she says. “You can’t really have a hissy fit if you’re a star in Australia because the crews look at you like, ‘Who do you think you are?’ Which is good, you know.”
The mercury’s nudging 40 degrees in Sydney’s inner west, causing the purple burst of jacarandas outside the window to droop. But Papandrea’s enthusiasm is unflagging. Curled on a snow-white couch, she’s lit up with the kind of brio that struck Witherspoon as “fun and formidable” and led legendary director Sydney Pollack to describe her as “passionate and opinionated”. On the way over, she’d driven past an 18-storey mural of Kidman splashed across the side of a Darlinghurst apartment building to promote The Undoing and she’s gushing: It’s amazing. It’s exciting. She loved making that show.
Would she want to see her face plastered across Sydney like that? “Oh god no!” She throws her head back and hoots. “When I was younger, you know, I applied to all the drama schools; I thought I wanted to be an actor. I got rejected from NIDA, VCA, WAAPA, so I thought, ‘That’s a sign isn’t it?’ And now, I wouldn’t want that to be my life; I love being behind the scenes.”
Papandrea tried on many hats before finding her groove. She studied commerce and law at Melbourne University but dropped out after six months to pursue a more creative arts degree at Adelaide University, which also stalled at the six-month mark. She toyed with being a journalist, wrote a few plays, did some theatre workshops.
But she kept coming back to the grown-up pen pal she’d made when she was a smart, motivated 13-year-old studying at Fremont High in the rough-edged Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth. The school had a strong commitment to music and the arts and, one day, film producer Cristina Pozzan came to make a documentary about the school musical. It was Papandrea’s first exposure to showbiz and she was hooked, staying in touch with Pozzan through a letter-writing blitz that stretched across years. “That was how I first became interested in producing,” she says now. “I attribute that school with making me see what was possible.”
She moved to Sydney in her twenties and was soon producing commercials for the likes of Coca-Cola and KFC. Her first feature-producing gig was in 2000 on the rom-com Better than Sex, with David Wenham and Susie Porter, a job she was steered into by a friend, the director Rob Connolly. (Papandrea’s labyrinthine network of connections is such that 20 years later, in what she calls “an amazing symmetry of friendship”, Connolly would direct a film she produced, The Dry.)
Better than Sex toured the festival circuit and in Toronto she met Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley. Six weeks later she was running the London office of Mirage Enterprises, the production company Minghella owned with Sydney Pollack. It was her big break and led to work on movies such as The Quiet American in Vietnam and The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency in Botswana.
In 2008, she moved to Los Angeles and began producing under her own banner until a fateful dinner party four years later at the home of Australian actress Isla Fisher and her husband Sacha Baron Cohen. She was seated next to Reese Witherspoon and was intrigued to hear her decry the one-note “wife or girlfriend” roles she was continually being offered.
Bonding over a shared love of books, they went on to found Pacific Standard, with a mandate to put complex female roles front and centre. It was an odd-couple pairing: Witherspoon is the daughter of a doctor and a professor, a former child actor, an Oscar-winner; Papandrea’s beginnings were humble. “I grew up very poor, with a single mother in a housing estate house; we didn’t ever have anything,” she says. “But I think it’s really important to not have stigmas; it’s why I always talk about being from there. I always say you make that your superpower; make it a challenge, not the thing that’s stopping you. Try and put yourself in the way of opportunity, which is what I did.”
Papandrea has an affinity for producing, she says, as she’s naturally “pretty bossy”. But her role is more nuanced than that: she imposes her will, not hammer-like, more like a maestro on a podium, wielding a baton to give focus to an ensemble of creative individuals, translating her vision into glorious entertainment. “I have the best job,” she says. “When you’re reading a book, you’re in a position of ‘Could I make this into something?’ That’s very exciting to me. It’s about identifying that unique story and then putting people together to realise the best version of it. I love curating a great team and I don’t just mean the actors and writers and directors; it’s also the production designer, a favourite [director of photography] I’ve worked with or the editors or post supervisor.”
She reads often, and fast. “I look for originality,” she says. “I just look for a uniqueness of voice, mostly, and the creation of a world that I want to see.” Often she makes content she’d watch herself: sophisticated thrillers with strong female protagonists (Fatal Attraction and Malice are all-time favourites). Sometimes it’s just a feeling.
When Emma Cooper, whose background is in publicity and marketing, came to her with a book about an injured woman and the magpie that helped her heal, Papandrea was in the middle of the first season of Big Little Lies and loath to take on anything else. But Cooper urged her friend of three decades to watch the promotional trailer for a book called Penguin Bloom by Bradley Trevor Greive and Cameron Bloom, husband of the protagonist Sam, a young mother paralysed after an accident in Thailand. “The trailer went for two minutes,” says Papandrea. “I called Emma back and said, ‘We have to make this movie’.
“All you have is your instinct, right? One thing I always say to the women I work with is, ‘Don’t just agree with me; don’t wait until someone else speaks to give your opinion.’ Because I’ve seen rooms in Hollywood where – and this is true particularly of women – they’ll wait for their boss to have an opinion.”
The notion of being swept up in the glamour of Hollywood elicits another hoot. “I’m so not overawed by it,” she says. “Obviously, I’m friends with some of the actors, but for me it’s about being on set with my producing partners. I get crushes on people’s work; that to me is what excites me about Hollywood. You go to the Golden Globes and the Emmys, it’s exciting but it’s not inherently who I am. There’s a part of it that’s fun but my favourite thing to do in the whole world is be with my family and my girlfriends and play cards, cook for them. I love that my mum enjoys it [showbiz]; she comes to the premieres and it’s my job to introduce her to all the Hollywood stars.”
Papandrea drops names but not in a name-dropping way. It just so happens that many of her closest friends are well-known, part of a squad of Australian expats that gathers regularly for birthdays and the odd destination wedding. Lately, friendships and work have begun to overlap. “You’re always a bit nervous working with friends – you’re like, ‘Oh god, will it change the dynamic of a long-term friendship?’ ” she says. But it’s been fun to work with Nicole, who I’ve known for 20 years, and it’s been fun to work with Naomi for the first time. I’ve had great experiences and I can see doing more of it.”
Watts says she and Papandrea have a second project in development but “it’s far too early to talk about it”. The pair met in the early 1990s through Watts’ photographer brother Ben, and became close during shooting for the 1997 drama Under the Lighthouse Dancing. “She’s always been generous,” Watts says. “The type of girl who would go out and buy ridiculous presents for everyone. She’s got boundless energy and boundless ideas; she loves doing things that make people feel good, and storytelling is an extension of that.”
Papandrea is determined that the rising tide of her success should lift all boats. It’s because her hard-knock background “is always in the back of her head”, says friend and producing partner Cooper. “She believes in giving people a chance, not putting them in boxes because of where they come from.” In April, she spearheaded a coalition of A-list Hollywood producers in launching It Takes Our Village, an industry initiative that has so far raised more than $1m for below-the-line film and television crew members impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.
Not only does Made Up Stories focus on hiring women for roles in front of and behind the camera, but Papandrea has committed to diversity across the board. “I found myself a few years ago realising I was hiring girls who went to Ivy League schools,” she says. “I mean, half of all Hollywood assistants went to Ivy League schools; that’s how you get in. So I made a decision a couple of years ago to hire people, particularly at the assistant level, who didn’t usually have access.” She tucks her legs beneath her on the snow-white couch. “It has made me think a lot about giving people that first break because someone gave it to me.”
Penguin Bloom is in cinemas now.