This was published 1 year ago
‘You want Jodi in your tight circle’: The Aussie producer adored by Kidman and co
She’s behind a string of hits, including The Dry, Nine Perfect Strangers and The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. Jodi Matterson’s calling? To sell Australian stories to global audiences.
Jodi Matterson: “Nobody knows what producers do. And that’s fine.” Credit: Peter Brew-Bevan
Does anyone know what producers do? I don’t think so – in which case Jodi Matterson may be the most important person in Australian TV and film you’ve likely never heard of. In the past five years, she’s produced shows that have topped the Australian box office, set records for global streaming audiences and brought as much as $500 million into the Australian economy. Her films include The Dry and Penguin Bloom; her streaming series range from Nine Perfect Strangers to recent hit The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.
Yet she’s unknown outside the industry. She does not have her own Wikipedia page; she almost never appears in red carpet photographs; even the production company which she co-founded, Made Up Stories, through which all this work has been done, is usually described as belonging to her high-profile business partner, Bruna Papandrea. (In fact, Papandrea, Matterson and Papandrea’s husband, Steve Hutensky, are co-founders and partners in Made Up Stories). As Matterson’s older sister Elisa Irwin puts it, “Jodi would rather die than have anything be about her.”
To be honest, such invisibility is disconcerting: can Matterson, who is 47, really be as significant as people say? But people as diverse as actors Nicole Kidman and Eric Bana and businessman David Gonski all sing her praises. “You definitely want Jodi in your tight circle,” says Kidman. “She is a great producer: meticulous and super-organised,” says Bana. “In a world where many people overstate their abilities, she is both deeply talented and extremely modest,” says Gonski. Indeed, the general tone is summed up by actor Isla Fisher (who stars in Wolf Like Me, a series produced by Matterson about a reluctant female werewolf: the second season is released next week): “If a giant natural disaster suddenly threatened earth, Jodi would be my first text. And if she didn’t answer for whatever reason, I would try and think ‘WWJD: What Would Jodi Do?’ ”
In recent years, even the most famous Australian names in producing – Emile Sherman, Baz Luhrmann, George Miller, Cate Blanchett – have not matched Matterson’s output. In the past half-decade, there’s no one who has produced more high-end Australian films and streaming series, using Australian stories, actors and crews. But if this makes her seem like someone who wants her name up in lights, or for the rest of the world to even know who she is, she does not. “Nobody knows what producers do,” Matterson says calmly. (She says everything calmly.) “And that’s fine.”
I meet Jodi Matterson a week after the premiere of her Amazon-funded, globally released, massively hyped The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, which is based on the bestselling book by Australian Holly Ringland and stars Sigourney Weaver. By the time of our interview, this series has already set a record for the highest viewership of an Australian streaming series worldwide on its opening weekend. Matterson, however, is sitting on the couch in her unobtrusive terrace in Sydney’s Alexandria, giving her baby daughter Sidney a bottle. (She and husband Michael Napthali also have an 11-year-old, Matilda.) Dressed in jeans and a black hoodie, Matterson has coal black hair and topaz eyes, and looks simultaneously self-possessed and uncomfortable.
The reason nobody knows what producers do, she says, is that every producer is different. “There are producers who are financial deal-makers; there are producers who organise contracts. Some bring talent, because they have a relationship with a particular actor; some invest their own money. And some are purely creative and have nothing to do with the financials at all.”
So what kind is she? Matterson looks apologetic. “I’m kind of all of them.” She sources stories, she works on scripts, she seeks out directors, she finds actors, she drums up funding. Once productions are underway, she is on set all day, every day. “Lost Flowers is Jodi’s show,” says partner Bruna Papandrea. “I keep trying to tell people – she willed it into being.”
Matterson took six days off when her baby Sidney was born in March – and fielded calls and emails all the time.Credit: Peter Brew-Bevan. Hair & make-up by Max Serrano; Styling by Jolyon Mason. Matterson wears Bottega Veneta croc embossed trench, knit, earrings and boots.
Career-wise, Matterson has done it all: trekked across deserts, waded through waterfalls, adjusted Sigourney Weaver’s wigs and squashed leeches out of director Robert Connolly’s nose. She’s also given herself IVF injections while on set in the wilderness, and driven hours through the dark from doctor’s appointments to be back on set when shooting starts. “She is totally committed,” says Eric Bana. “There are producers who wouldn’t contemplate shooting more than 20 metres from the road where the catering truck needs to park. There was a version of The Dry, for instance, which could have been shot two hours closer to Melbourne, which would have made her life a lot easier, frankly. But she never once suggested it.”
As husband Napthali – a media and entertainment lawyer and full-time dad – points out, this commitment “is not without costs”. The pair met in 2003, when Matterson was trying to get her first movie up, and Napthali seems both devoted to, and worried about, her. This is a woman, after all, who only took six days off when Sidney was born in March – and fielded calls and emails the whole time. “I say, ‘Honey, the show will go on if you’re not on set at 6am,’ ” he says. “But she’s on a mission.”
A mission that recently became a little more hair-raising than anyone expected. A few months ago, Matterson faced a health scare that would terrify most of us, and did terrify her (not to mention Napthali, who still looks wide-eyed when he talks about it). Matterson sits deeper into the couch, pulls her hoodie sleeves down, and nods. “Yes,” she says. “So now, I’m trying to take a step back.”
As a child, there was little about Jodi Matterson to suggest she’d grow up to a career wrangling hundreds of Hollywood types halfway round the world to make a $100 million-plus series in the hinterland of Byron during a global pandemic (as she did with Nine Perfect Strangers, starring Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy and Bobby Cannavale). She grew up the youngest of three kids in Umina, 90 minutes north of Sydney, where the most glamorous building in town was the local RSL. She describes her family as “half carney folk, half builders”. Her cousin, Laura Murphy, is the composer and lyricist behind Bell Shakespeare’s The Lovers and Gough Whitlam musical The Dismissal; her brother is a spray painter.
Nicole Kidman in Nine Perfect Strangers.Credit: Amazon Prime
But as a child, something in Matterson’s low-key soul did thrill to the stars and spangles of showbiz. “She knew every word of Singin’ in the Rain and Gypsy by heart,” recalls her sister; she travelled to Gosford to attend the Johnny Young Talent School and to Sydney for drama classes, run by actor John Noble. But a centre-stage career was never on the cards. “I think I knew I wasn’t good enough,” she says matter-of-factly. And she wanted to be in control of her own destiny. “As an actor, singer, even a director, you have to wait for someone to give you work. I wanted to create the work myself.”
Her first producing gig came in 1997, after legendary producing pair Andrena Finlay (Paws, Me Myself I) and Al Clark (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Chopper) took their daughter to a Starlight Foundation fundraiser on Sydney Harbour. Matterson, who’d started a Pirates and Fairies party company as a side-hustle while at uni, produced the event. It was clear to Finlay and Clark that this tiny person (Matterson is only 163 centimetres) already had an intuitive grip on the levers of showbiz power: owning the idea, sourcing the talent, controlling the money. “She was very self-contained, very self-effacing,” says Finlay. “But she had this instinctive entrepreneurship, this passion for creating worlds. Very unusual.” Finlay offered her a job as assistant on the film she was producing, Me Myself I, with Rachel Griffiths. And from her first day on the job, says Matterson, she knew. “One hundred per cent: this is what I was born to do. It was instantaneous.”
Arc Edit studio in Sydney’s Alexandria is a Tardis-like building, inexplicably unobtrusive from the street. Inside, Matterson, in jeans and trainers, is working on post-production for Strife, a new series based on Mia Freedman’s memoir. When I arrive, she’s sitting with film editor Deborah Peart and director Stuart Bowen, who are eating lunch. “We need to talk about the next show,” says Matterson to Peart as I arrive. “Yeah. I’m not sure about my schedule,” says Peart casually. “I’ve got another potential thing.” Matterson swings back, topaz eyes focused. “How potential is potential?” she asks. “Have you said definitely yes? How long would it last?”
Bowen, meanwhile, who is young with a quirky, intense air, is finishing his curry. “Jodi gave me a chance,” he says, referring to his job as director on Strife. “We’ve known each other for years and years. She was the first person I came out to. She’s really good at supporting you, but letting you find your own way.”
Matterson with (from left) writer Sarah Scheller and actor Asher Keddie on the set of Strife.Credit: Kane Skennar
Matterson finishes quizzing Peart (who later agrees to edit Matterson’s next show, Liane Moriarty’s The Last Anniversary) and heads into a concrete-floored editing suite. She makes sure I have water and biscuits, then makes half a dozen calls: to writers’ agents, to her assistant, to her nanny Kimberley Webster, who has been with the family full-time for nine years. “I Googled everything you can do about baby snot,” she tells Webster. “I’ve got the humidifier, the sucker, the baby Vicks.”
We go next door for a meeting with Strife’s post- production supervisor Lisa Jacobi, who looks thrilled to see Matterson. “I’ve got a big list of things to go through with you,” Jacobi says. For the next half hour, they discuss various Strife-related crises: the design of the credits; how to resolve a legal snafu; how to manoeuvre money to make the budget work. Even though Matterson, post-baby, is only having protein shakes for lunch, and Jacobi is currently fasting 20 hours a day, they both talk calmly through the problems. “Thank god,” says Jacobi as we leave. “Thank god I saw you.”
As we head into yet another suite, a fire alarm goes off and we all troop outside. Matterson conducts a Zoom call on the street, then we go back inside for a meeting with Strife’s music supervisor Andrew Kotatko, who is wearing a velvet jacket and looking freaked out. It’s his responsibility to secure licensing rights for Strife’s music. “We all know what Nina Simone costs!” he cries. “And Daft Punk! Macy Gray?!”
“I know,” says Matterson soothingly.
Made Up Stories co-founders (from left) Steve Hutensky, Bruna Papandrea and Jodi Matterson.Credit: Mark Rogers
Kotatko looks down at a sheet of paper he’s holding. ” ‘Evelyn goes to the Portaloo to 30 seconds of Enya,’ ” he reads. “Well! Enya’s never going to approve that.” He pauses. “Evelyn goes to the Portaloo and passes a macrobiotic meal – she might go for that.” Matterson smiles and Kotatko giggles. “It’s so nice to have you here!” he says impulsively. “Where have you been?” Matterson murmurs something about taking a step back, and he looks at her as if she’s making a terrible joke. “What? Well, I feel a lot safer now you’re here.”
What kind of person makes a great producer? Al Clark should know. As well as being a famous producer in his own right, he was Virgin Film’s founding head of creative affairs and production, and has also served on the boards of the Australian Film Commission and Screen Australia.
“In this industry, everyone is invariably complimented on their talent,” he says. “But what distinguishes Jodi is her judgment. She makes decisions quickly, clearly, unerringly. She also pays attention, and she has an
innate lack of melodrama. But her undervalued and crucial skill is consistently good judgment. She’s had it right from the beginning: right from Thunderstruck.”
Thunderstruck was Matterson’s first movie. Released in 2004, it’s a rollicking Aussie love letter to AC/DC, about four young blokes (one played by a youthful Sam Worthington, still unknown enough to be killed off in the first half hour) who make a vow that if one of them (ahem, Sam) die unexpectedly, the others will cross the country and scatter his ashes beside Bon Scott’s grave.
“And because we don’t know what we don’t know, I had no idea that AC/DC are one of the hardest groups in the world to get licences for,” Matterson explains when we meet again, back at her quiet terrace. On most productions, the music editor negotiates these deals: on Thunderstruck, like pretty much everything else, it was Matterson’s job. “And this entire movie is about AC/DC,” she explains. “I needed three or four of their songs; I needed to use their likeness; I needed their merchandise. I basically needed more than they’d ever given to anyone.”
At the time, the person in charge of all AC/DC licensing requests was Fifa Riccobono, then CEO of Albert Music in Sydney. She laughs at the memory of Matterson tipping up with her long list of needs. “She was so tiny, so passionate,” Riccobono recalls. “I think I told her there was a 99.999 per cent chance [AC/DC] would say no. Getting their songs is really, really expensive, and really, really rare. But I have to say, dealing with Jodi was a lot of fun.”
In their first conversation – and multiple subsequent ones – Riccobono, on AC/DC’s behalf, did indeed say no. But Matterson kept trying. “I think I called Fifa once a month for a year, maybe?” she recalls. “I would say, ‘Can I just have a cup of coffee with you?’ And I tried to have some new thing to tell her each time, just to move the needle slightly. You’ve got to somehow find a reason to keep in contact, and whoever you’re dealing with has got to take your call, and kind of enjoy talking to you.”
Riccobono laughs: “I did enjoy talking to her! She was so tenacious, so enthusiastic. And she did keep adding these little bits to the story, so I’d put it forward again. She was just so determined. It was like there was this tiny gap, and she just squeezed through.“
Thunderstruck – replete with AC/DC music, songs, images and bad school uniforms – was one of the top Australian films of 2004. This is a mild accolade at best, as Matterson wryly acknowledges, but it’s also beloved among many AC/DC fans, several hundred of whom feature in it as extras, and has inexplicably become a cult classic in Norway. Other movies followed: Razzle Dazzle, Not Suitable for Children, Down Under, 2:22. With the exception of 2:22 (which Matterson describes, correctly, as a “f---ing terrible movie”) all these productions featured original Australian scripts, actors and settings. Watching them now, they all share a recognisable, Strictly Ballroom/The Castle-style charm. The only problem is that not one came remotely close to being a Strictly Ballroom/The Castle-style success.
Matterson loves everything about producing. She loves helping directors realise their vision; she loves giving people – from huge movie stars to first-time costume designers – opportunities; she loves the whole insanely complex, crazy business. But even so, “It got to the point where I was getting more and more frustrated because I felt like I wasn’t getting to the next level,” she admits. “I’d made a bunch of things and I knew what I was doing, but I just needed that …” she makes a sprinkling motion “… whatever it was.”
Magic fairy dust? I suggest.
Matterson smiles. “Maybe. I was just going round and round.”
Sigourney Weaver and Matterson on the set of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.Credit: Courtesy of Jodi Matterson
Things reached a peak – or, perhaps, a nadir – in 2015. Matterson was producing a movie called Down Under, a darkly violent comedy about the Cronulla race riots, written and directed by her close friend Abe Forsythe. There were huge issues with the financing – “My husband used his inheritance from his mum to keep things going” – and the distribution, which meant the film only received a very limited theatrical release. “I love that movie so much, and I’m incredibly proud of it,” says Matterson. “But it basically never saw the light of day.”
She sits back on the couch. “I literally reinvested a 100 per cent of my fees back into it, so I never saw a dollar: I worked for a year for nothing.” She hunches forward. “And it was also just exhausting and hard and terrifying and stressful. I could have lost my husband; I could have lost my house.” She stops, looking apologetic. “I was fed up,” she says. “And I was also like,
‘I don’t want to do this by myself anymore.’ ”
Made Up Stories was founded by Matterson, Bruna Papandrea and Steve Hutensky in 2017. Papandrea is an Australian-born, highly respected producer, whose earlier career was mostly in the US, where she founded and ran a production company, Pacific Standard, with Reese Witherspoon until 2016. Her husband, Steve Hutensky, is now the chief operating officer of Made Up Stories, but in the US during the late 1990s and early 2000s he worked as a lawyer at production company Miramax, co-founded by Harvey Weinstein. It was in this role that, in 1998, Hutensky was involved in the signing of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with two alleged victims of Weinstein, Rowena Chiu and Zelda Perkins. These NDAs, say the British women, contained excessive restrictions and were signed under duress.
As the full extent of Weinstein’s crimes has emerged, this period of Hutensky’s career has come under scrutiny – which in turn has impacted Made Up Stories and, by extension, Matterson. Hutensky, who declines to comment for this article, has never been charged with acting illegally or in breach of professional ethical standards (unlike Weinstein’s head UK lawyer, Mark Mansell, who in 2019 was referred to a disciplinary tribunal by the British Solicitors Regulation Authority over those 1998 NDAs). It has also never been shown that he knew the full extent of the allegations against Weinstein at the time, or whether those allegations were true. Nonetheless, Rowena Chiu continues to claim, both in Australia and overseas, that Steve Hutensky bears a moral responsibility as part of the machine that silenced Weinstein’s victims.
Within the industry in Australia, Chiu’s claims have led some to query the ethics of public money from Screen Australia being awarded to projects by Made Up Stories (more than $5 million since 2018-19). Others feel uncomfortable that a company so openly championing women and women’s stories has this story about excessively harsh NDAs that silence women in its history, however tangentially. Still others point out that if all the lawyers who have represented terrible people are themselves vilified, there would be no lawyers left in the world.
Matterson, for her part, has no public comment to make about the events of 1998. She did not know either Papandrea or Hutensky during Hutensky’s time at Miramax. Made Up Stories was founded in 2017, just as the first #MeToo
stories were breaking.
The Dry (released in 2020) was the first film Matterson made fully under the Made Up Stories banner. It won three AACTA awards (Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts) and is the 14th highest grossing Australian film ever, beating Muriel’s Wedding and Priscilla. Overall, she’s completed 11 projects at Made Up Stories in the past seven years, including four still to be released. This is more than double the work rate of her previous 12-year producing career. Made Up Stories has also produced another six projects in that time that Matterson did not physically produce herself.
Eric Bana and Genevieve O’Reilly in The Dry.Credit: Ben King/IFC Films via AP
As show after show has rolled off the line, a key facet of the ones Matterson has been intimately involved with (though all three partners are involved in every Made Up Stories project) has been their settings – which have all been in Australia. “You [could] see her commitment and love of the Australian film industry,” says Nicole Kidman, recalling the process of making Nine Perfect Strangers in NSW after the original US production was shut down due to COVID-19. “She was able to keep our production moving forward during the hardest time, where it was difficult to make anything anywhere in the world. It was glorious.”
Of course, if you already live in this country, making shows here allows you to be more efficient, and thus more productive. But even so, 11 shows in seven years sounds, frankly, ridiculous. Napthali is far too loyal to agree with this. “But I do think she pushes herself too hard,” he concedes. “It’s unbelievably exhausting for her.” People say this sort of stuff all the time, of course. But in this case, Napthali was proved correct. In the middle of this year, disaster struck. (Or so it seemed.) As disasters often are, it was preceded by a long line of triumphs. In the previous 12 months, Matterson had worked on Lost Flowers, Force of Nature (The Dry’s sequel), the second series of Wolf Like Me and Strife. She’d also, then 46, been through two rounds of IVF.
Matterson and Napthali had always intended to have another baby. “But of course it’s never the right time: you’re always in the middle of a production, you’ve always got this other big thing coming,” says Matterson. “My obstetrician told me I had a one-in-a-1000 chance, but I knew if I didn’t try, I’d never be able to let it go.” Incredibly, after only two attempts, using her own eggs and Napthali’s sperm, she became pregnant with Sidney, who was born this March. “It was like a miracle.”
Matterson with her daughters, Matilda and baby Sidney, and her husband, Michael Napthali.Credit: COURTESY OF JODI MATTERSON
The miracle lasted until Sidney was eight weeks old. Then Matterson began having night sweats. “I thought I might be going through menopause – because I’m nearly 100! – so I went to the doctor and got the full work up.” Before she knew it, Matterson was at a respiratory specialist being told that a nodule on her lung (first spotted after she collapsed in a hotel room with a pleural effusion while doing extra shooting for The Dry four years ago, as you do) had grown to more than six times its original size and was, in fact, lung cancer.
“The specialist said, ‘You have a malignant tumour in your lung.’ He was talking about chemo and radiation and surgeons. I still hadn’t had a biopsy, so I was trying to say, you know, ‘Maybe it’ll be okay?’ And he said, ‘I know that’s what you want to hear, but I’ve seen thousands of these scans. This is cancer.’ ”
Matterson describes the next two weeks waiting for the biopsy results, with typical understatement, as “very sobering”. But when they went back to the specialist, another miracle occurred: the nodule was benign. “Michael and I both burst into tears.”
What lies ahead for Matterson? She has a baby; she has an 11-year-old daughter; she has a devoted husband; she has a new awareness of the fragility of life. But she also has a supercharged career that’s only getting bigger. Last month, US online entertainment website Deadline ran a story suggesting Made Up Stories was for sale. “That’s not true,” says Matterson firmly. “We’re in the very early stages of looking at different partnerships, different investments, different opportunities.
“We’ve got 62 projects in the pipeline; we’ve got a massive $100 million studio movie with Universal coming up. We don’t need some big international partner to do that stuff; we’ve spent seven years laying the groundwork so we can do it ourselves. But if people want to come and talk to us? If there are opportunities out there that we haven’t thought of? We’re open to that.“
Matterson maintains she wants to stay in Australia and raise her girls here. “But professionally, I want to do huge studio movies and massive international TV series. I want the biggest audiences I can possibly get.” For perhaps the first time since I met her, I can hear the excitement in Matterson’s voice, the relish at the thought of such global reach. “And so yes, that does mean we’ve got projects coming up that are shooting overseas and that I’m going to be travelling a bit. But my absolute aspiration is to find universal stories that can be set here.“
Fair enough. But even if this happens, we’re not really in “taking a step back” territory, are we? Matterson looks sheepish. “I’ve been saying that for years,” she admits. “But I’m not sure I could, really. This job is so much of who I am.“
She pauses. “There’s always a moment on a project where you have to make a call that it’s going to happen,” she says suddenly. “Even though it’s not happening: you have to act like it’s happening in order to get everyone on board. It’s like driving a manual car, where you’ve got to release the clutch at just the right moment. You can’t be crazy: you can’t lead people up the garden path when it’s got no chance. But you have to have the ability to see earlier than everybody else that it can happen.“
She smiles, and I think about what she’s actually saying: project after project, year after year, each involving millions of dollars and hundreds of people; each resting on her willingness to take, basically, a massive leap of faith. In 2021, she tells me, there was a moment when it seemed like Wolf Like Me wouldn’t happen. Made Up Stories had hired the cast, opened an office, begun paying people’s wages – but no one had bought the show, which meant there was no money to fund it. “The window was closing and closing and finally the line producer came to me and said, ‘Jodi, we need to pull the pin.’ And I was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We just need another 24 hours.’ And in that 24 hours, we sold the show.“
Most people would find such an experience horrifying. But not Jodi Matterson. “It’s intoxicating,” she says.
Hear Jodi Matterson discuss her producing life with Amanda Hooton on GW Talks.
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