How Bruna Papandrea went from a rough school in Australia to Hollywood hit-maker

In 2016, the Australian film and television producer Bruna Papandrea was in the midst of a hot streak. The company she co-founded with Reese Witherspoon, Pacific Standard, had enjoyed a strong run of movies that included Gone Girl and Wild and was on the verge of scoring a hit with the HBO series Big Little Lies.

But the two women had started Pacific Standard with an agreement that they would “do this as long as it works for us”, Papandrea recalls, and after five years together they decided to part ways. (They continued to work on occasional projects after the split.) So Papandrea got to work on launching a company of her own, one that would have the same female-driven ethos.

“I wanted to stay focused on this idea of putting women at the centre of the stories, but I also really wanted to put women behind the camera more too,” she says over Zoom from Australia. “Female film-makers . . . should be able to make anything they want. If they want to make an action movie then I should be able to help them do that.”

Her idea was certainly in tune with the times as she launched her company, Made Up Stories, in 2017. The #MeToo movement gained widespread attention that year, and female-centric titles such as Wonder Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale attracted large audiences around the world. “It felt like the wind was on our back,” she says.

Five years later, Papandrea, 51, is having another hot streak. Made Up Stories has released 15 films and TV shows, including The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, which was HBO’s most watched series of 2020, and Nine Perfect Strangers, starring Kidman and Melissa McCarthy, which last year became Hulu’s most watched original series. It has completed three other works this year that are awaiting release. “Eighteen projects in five years, and I just feel we’re just getting started,” Papandrea says. She is expansion mode, with Made Up Stories opening a London office this month as a bridge between her offices in Sydney and Los Angeles.

Last week the film Luckiest Girl Alive was released. Like most of the work she produces, it began with Papandrea falling in love with a book: the first novel by American writer Jessica Knoll. Papandrea optioned it in 2015 — and then spent several frustrating years trying to get it off the ground.

“It felt to me like something I wanted to watch and put into the world,” she says. “It took eight years. It’s the thing I’m most proud of as a company because we never gave up on it and there are so many points where we could have.” Asked why it took so long, Papandrea responds: “Subject matter, obviously.”

The film tells the story of a young woman with a successful career at a New York magazine who is engaged to marry a man with a good job, an expensive haircut and a family pedigree. But she is haunted by traumatic experiences from her teen years, including sexual assault. She has become a high achiever while wrestling with deep-seated emotional issues.

Knoll, who also wrote the script, says the “unlikeability” of the main character, played by Mila Kunis, is another reason it took so long to get the film made. “She is someone who has sharp edges, who you don’t always like what’s she’s doing, the decisions she’s making, the things she says. But you’re intrigued by her and somehow still rooting for her . . . There are plenty of examples of these kinds of characters where, when they are male characters like Tony Soprano or Don Draper, we love them.”

The production’s fate changed when Netflix agreed to pick it up in 2019 from Lionsgate, where it had stalled, and once Kunis agreed to star, the project gained momentum. But Papandrea’s persistence was “essential” in persuading a studio to take a chance on the main character, says Knoll.

This doggedness is typical of Papandrea, according to those who know her. “She is a big believer in her projects,” says Casey Bloys, HBO’s chief content officer, who worked with her on Big Little Lies and The Undoing. “She feels very passionately about them.”

Bloys and others see a connection between Papandrea’s drive and her upbringing. She and her two siblings were raised by a single mother in government housing in Adelaide. She discovered arts and music at her “kinda rough” high school, where she also first found her formidable networking skills as a 13-year-old student. “A film crew came to my school and made a documentary,” she recalls. “I became very friendly with them and started a pen-pal relationship with the producer. I got exposed [to the business] very early.”

After high school, she dropped out of “several higher educational institutions” and began working at a café in Melbourne, where she met more people in the movie business. Within a year, she was making TV commercials, followed by a short film.

Next came a move to New York (“I had $200 in my pocket”) where she earned a co-producer credit on a small movie starring heart-throb Luke Perry. By 2000, Papandrea had produced her first full-length film in Australia, Better than Sex.

Her big break came while she was showing the feature at the Toronto film festival, where she was introduced to Oscar-winning directors Sydney Pollack (Out of Africa, Tootsie) and Anthony Minghella (The English Patient). To her shock, they asked her to work in the London office of their partnership, Mirage Enterprises. “That’s the moment that those two men changed my life,” she says. “I get chills thinking about it.”

She worked with them for five years, before moving to Los Angeles to launch her first production company, Make Movies. Then came another life-changing moment: her first meeting with Witherspoon. “It turned out that we were very like-minded in terms of putting women at the centre of stories. It was very organic with Reese,” says Papandrea.

After their partnership ended, Witherspoon set up a new production company called Hello Sunshine, which she sold in 2021 for $900mn to a company backed by private equity group Blackstone. That was at the peak of the streaming boom, which has lost steam this year. But Papandrea is not worried about a bust.

“We have been beneficiaries of this big growth in the streamers,” she says. “We’ve sold to everyone — Peacock, Netflix, HBO, Amazon, Apple — all of them. I’m still pretty optimistic about the thirst for content.”

But Papandrea says there is still much to do to make Hollywood a fairer place. She remains unsatisfied with the types of roles available to women, and she wants the studios to do a better job of marketing female-made work to a broader audience. She is also pushing for a wider definition of the kinds of films they can make.

“There’s still this idea that female-driven movies are only for women, and it just is not true,” she says. “Women drive box office, women drive viewing habits and women drive consumer habits.”

She is also embarking on a new mission: to increase socio-economic diversity in Hollywood, starting with the people she hires at Made Up Stories. “People don’t talk as much about socio-economic diversity,” she says. “[Providing] access is everything.”

Her belief is that growing up poor can give people an added drive and she attributes some of her success to it. “I do think it’s my superpower,” she says. “There is such enormous value in having that hunger.”

‘Luckiest Girl Alive’ is in cinemas now and on Netflix from October 7