By Sarah Lyall / New York Times News Service
SANTA MONICA, California—It was the morning after the Golden Globes featuring Meryl Streep and her impassioned remarks, and the visiting stars had turned in their gowns and begun to clear out of town. But Nicole Kidman was at HBO’s offices, taking one last meeting before going home to Nashville.
The subject was Big Little Lies, the seven-episode series that she coproduced (and stars in) with Reese Witherspoon and that will begin airing on HBO on February 19. Based on the best-selling book by Liane Moriarty, the series features five women—the other three are played by Shailene Woodley, Zoe Kravitz and Laura Dern—in an upscale part of Monterey, California, that lends itself to social satire. As the story opens, parental warfare is threatening to break out following an unpleasant incident at the local elementary school.
First on the agenda: how to market Big Little Lies to reflect the humor, but also the serious drama and frothy melodrama.
A preliminary teaser campaign had already begun. Ads were appearing in magazines. Along Sunset Strip, billboards showed the words “It’s a Wonderful Life”, with the “F” knocked out of the final word and sliding away. Trailers emphasizing different aspects of the story had started to appear on television and digital media. Kidman said she wanted to ensure that domestic violence, perhaps the story’s darkest theme (unless you count homicide) received proper public attention and was not overshadowed by the outré histrionics. “We want to navigate it properly and to instigate some discussion about it around the show,” she said.
Len Amato, president of HBO Films, said it was tricky to get the right balance. “If you only see a small bit of it, it could be really reductive.” He added: “We’re not doing Desperate Housewives here. Nothing against Desperate Housewives, but that wasn’t the focal point of why people wanted to make the series.”
Kidman is taking a lot of meetings like this one these days. In 2010 Blossom Films, her production company, made its first film, Rabbit Hole, a low-budget movie in which she played a mother grieving over the death of her child. It was an unexpected success. “I thought, oh my gosh, I can actually do this,” Kidman said in an interview later.
It opened up new possibilities for her in an industry known for being inhospitable toward actresses who have reached the unfortunate age of 40, even those who have won Oscars best actress. (Kidman, 49, won for The Hours in 2003.) Since Rabbit Hole, Blossom has produced the romantic comedy Monte Carlo and the unhappy family drama The Family Fang, and recently has picked up its pace in optioning the rights to books and plays. In today’s Hollywood, the best way to play interesting roles, or to ensure that complicated stories about adult women get to the screen (whether in theaters or on TV), is to take creative and business control.
“It’s allowed me to shape my career in terms of being able to find things that I may not get offered, that I wouldn’t get the opportunity for,” Kidman said in an interview after the meeting.
On this Monday in January, Kidman commanded the room, though she was relaxed, and at times playful (introducing her producing partner, Per Saari, she said the two are so close that “we’ve been married for 14 years”). Wearing navy-tailored trousers and a crisp white shirt, she seemed taller in person, her Australian accent all the more striking because her non-Australian accents in her work are so familiar.
It makes sense that Big Little Lies became a series on HBO rather than a feature film at a major studio. As superhero and other tentpole movies dominate the release schedules of the major studios, even bona fide movie stars like Natalie Portman, Daniel Craig and Bradley Cooper are bringing their projects to places like HBO, Showtime, Amazon and Netflix.
“There’s not as much of a separation anymore,” Witherspoon said in a telephone interview. “There’s a bigger pool to work in, the talent base is much broader than it used to be, and it’s become sort of a blur—what is television, what is a movie?”
Just two-and-a-half years elapsed between conception to finished project. In spring 2014, Bruna Pappandrea, Witherspoon’s former partner in her production company (Pacific Standard), who is also friends with Kidman, read a galley of Big Little Lies, thought it was great and called Witherspoon, who was in New Orleans shooting Hot Pursuit. Entranced by the book, Witherspoon got Kidman, an old friend, to read it, too.
Kidman said she was drawn in by the many moods of the book, by its strong female characters, and that “as much as it’s about women who are feuding, who are trying to destroy one another, it’s also about friendships.” (The character she plays, Celeste, seems to have a perfect life, including a hunky younger husband played by Alexander Skarsgard, but it’s a façade that begins to peel away as the series goes on.)
She called Witherspoon back. “I said, ‘I’m in if you’re in,’” Kidman recalled. “And she said, ‘I’m in. Now all we have to do is get it.’” That meant persuading the author, Moriarty, at home in Australia, to sell them the exclusive rights.
Kidman was on her way there for a vacation, and she and Moriarty met in a coffee shop in Sydney. Moriarty said she had not expected much from the meeting. “I’ve had other books optioned before, and other authors have said, ‘Never get too excited until the day they start shooting,’” she said by telephone. “And Nicole said, ‘If I option it, get excited because I don’t just option things for the sake of it.’”
Witherspoon then enlisted Jean-Marc Vallee, who directed Witherspoon in Wild—“And then Reese sends Jean-Marc an e-mail,’” is how Kidman described it—and the two women then hired David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, The Practice) to write the screenplay. At first they weren’t sure which network would be the best fit. But Kidman had worked with HBO before, as the star of Hemingway and Gellhorn. “I knew what they had to offer in terms of really allowing a project to percolate and grow,” she said.
What ensued was a burst of all-female networking activity that Kidman compared to the way the A-list friends from the Ocean’s 11 films conduct their business. She and Witherspoon began working the phones. “Reese and I were like, ‘“OK, let’s go for it,’ and suddenly Shay was in”—that’s Woodley—“and she signs on because Laura Dern, who’s one of her best friends, goes, ‘I’m in and I’ll talk to Shay,’” Kidman said.
The experience has been rewarding enough that she and Witherspoon’s production companies last year optioned Moriarty’s latest book, Truly Madly Guilty. (Kidman’s company has also optioned a novel called The Expatriates, which has what she calls “three amazing roles for women” and is set in Hong Kong.)
With HBO, Kidman is also working on the dramatization of another novel she optioned, Reconstructing Amelia, about a mother who sets out to find out why her daughter committed suicide. (Naomi Watts is in discussions to play the main character, Amato said.) Kidman said she feels intuitively that this one ought to be a film, rather than a limited series, which appears to be fine with HBO. “It’s delicate, the balance, how you make these things,” Kidman said, of the decision to embark on a series or a feature.
Image credits: Ryan Pfluger/The New York Times