Whenever a producer in recent times has exited their partnership with a star, quite often said producer’s output is not as robust.
It’s a very different situation for Bruna Papandrea, who after peeling off from Reese Witherspoon’s Pacific Standard Production Company, has been on quite a roll with such TV hits as HBO’s The Undoing, Netflix’s Anatomy of a Scandal, Luckiest Girl Alive, Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers and now the Prime Video limited series, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart based on Holly Ringland novel. This is all under Papandrea’s six-year old production banner, Made Up Stories, which is devoted to female-centric stories.
On today’s Crew Call, we talk with Papandrea about why she went solo with Made Up Stories, the genesis of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, and more.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows the story of the title protagonist. At age 9, she tragically loses her parents in a mysterious fire. She’s taken to live with her grandmother June (Sigourney Weaver) at Thornfield flower farm, where she learns that there are secrets within secrets about her and her family’s past.
The series, which currently has four out of seven episodes dropped on Prime, is set against Australia’s wild natural landscape. In the first episode alone, there’s jaw dropping shots of burning cane. The series’ visual aesthetic brings to mind another Down Under-set classic and how its environment mirrors its characters’ arcs: the 1971 Nicolas Roeg directed feature, Walkabout (granted a sophisticated YA movie with very different themes than Lost Flowers of Alice Hart). Papandrea chats about her production output coming out of Australia, which teed up during the pandemic with the surprise local movie, The Dry, starring Eric Bana, that title grossed an amazing $15M locally as theaters were reopening from Covid back in late December 2020. There’s an upcoming sequel, Force of Nature: Dry 2 in which Bana reprises his role as federal agent Falk, who this time is investigating a missing hiker.
Papandrea still shares some projects with Witherspoon, the big one being the HBO 8x Primetime Emmy winning series, Big Little Lies which starred the latter with Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Zoe Kravitz, Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern. Papandrea shared a Primetime Emmy Limited Series win for the HBO show back in 2017 with Witherspoon, David E. Kelley, Jean-Marc Vallée, Nicole Kidman, Per Saari, Gregg Fienberg, Nathan Ross and Barbara A. Hall.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately,” Papandrea muses to us about a third season, the second of which was left with a cliffhanger and its lead characters marching to jail. Papandrea tells us what needs to happen for a third season to occur.
Papandrea also reflects on the current state of strikes: “Writers define my entire business and always have; I think these discussions are super important. I’m happy to hear that people are back to the table.”
“It had to happen at this time,” says Papandrea about the strikes, “contracts are up, there are big issues at play.”
One of the first projects out of the gate once writers and actors are back to work for Made Up Stories will be the second season of Nine Perfect Strangers.
Listen to our conversation below:
