Fiona McIntosh – author of a wartime historic drama about Nazi theft, The Pearl Thief – is joining the elite club of Australian women whose female-centric books have been adapted for film or television by Hollywood powerbroker and producer Bruna Papandrea.
Papandrea, who was born in Adelaide, helped make a household name out of Sydney writer Liane Moriarty with the TV series Big Little Lies, starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, and the wellness resort mystery Nine Perfect Strangers. She also lit a fire under the career of Melbourne writer and former journalist Jane Harper, whose murder mysteries The Dry and Force of Nature became films starring Eric Bana.
McIntosh is thrilled to be in their company after Papandrea’s company, Made Up Stories, announced it would produce The Pearl Thief, an epic story of love, betrayal and theft set in pre and post-war Europe. Papandrea has brought on board screenwriter Nick Drake, whose film One Life told the story of an English stockbroker, Nicholas Winton (played by Anthony Hopkins), who helped get Jewish children in Prague to safety at the start of World War II.
McIntosh, who lives in Riverton in the mid-north on a property she shares with her husband and their dogs, says she almost missed connecting with Papandrea when the first expression of interest came. At home during the worst of COVID, working on her novel The Champagne War, she had a voicemail from a stranger asking her to call back to talk about The Pearl Thief.
“I thought, ‘I can’t ring individual readers back to have a chat about a book you’ve loved’,” she says.
“A lot of people seem to think they can just ring you up and say, ‘Can I meet you for coffee?’ And you sound like a diva when you say, ‘I just don’t do that, I’m sorry’.”
The mystery reader persisted with a voicemail saying how much she loved The Pearl Thief and really wanted to talk to her – and again, McIntosh was pleased but not inclined to respond. The third time, the author returned the call and found herself speaking with Monica Saunders-Weinberg, heir to the Westfield fortune and head of an angel investor movie production business, Hana Black Productions.
She told McIntosh she was the child of a Holocaust survivor and had avoided reading about it, but picked up The Pearl Thief at the insistence of friends and was deeply moved. While McIntosh was still wondering to herself how Saunders-Weinberg even got her number, she heard her say: “I want to make this into a film.”
“At this point my throat closed because this is what you dream of,” McIntosh says. “You have this sort of little daydream that that’s how it happened, and I thought, ‘Is this a joke?’ But that’s how it happened.”
Saunders-Weinberg organised for McIntosh to get to Sydney for a breakfast meeting, warning she might bring someone with her. By now it was early 2021, and the other person was Bruna Papandrea.
“I felt like I was walking through a blur,” McIntosh says. “The team is there and they’re all chatting about how they were going to do this.”
While McIntosh was struggling with her scrambled eggs, Papandrea looked over at her and asked: “Are we going to do this? Will you give us permission to adapt your book?”
When she agreed, there was a scream of delight from around the table and the deal was done. McIntosh sat there amazed at what was unfolding as they went on throwing around names for the lead character, a mysterious French museum curator named Severine whose revelation about the provenance of a magnificent piece of jewellery sets off a high-stakes hunt for a Nazi and also sees her own tightly controlled life unravel.
For the record, McIntosh has in mind someone European rather than Australian to play Severine. Her dream choices include French actress Marion Cotillard (Inception, La Vie en Rose) or French-American actress and former Bond girl Eva Green (Casino Royale, The Three Musketeers).
“I love all the angles of Eva Green’s face. Or someone like Rooney Mara (The Secret Scripture),” she says. “So I am really leaning into those elfin-faced people.
“They are the names that arrive from me, but who they end up with, I don’t know. It will be for all sorts of reasons.”
I felt very connected to the main character… she is very brittle and fragile and has glued herself back together again
The rights were acquired by Saunders-Weinberg, who worked with Papandrea, and Papandrea’s husband Steve Hutensky, to move the project forward. The delay between 2021 and an announcement in May this year was because Papandrea, who works simultaneously on multiple projects and shares her time between Sydney and Los Angeles, wanted to keep the project under her control, including bringing in Drake for the screenplay.
The film deal continues a dream run for McIntosh, who defied the odds from the outset by striking gold with her first book, Betrayal, written in five weeks 15 years ago and picked up by a global publisher with a request for a three-book deal. Now on her 46th book, she has always written with an eye for screen potential and how a story might present visually.
The gold body chain in the British Museum on which Fiona McIntosh modelled the Ottoman pearls in her novel.
“I have always thought like that and it’s because I am, I think, a little bit strategic in what I write and how I write it,” she says
She is rapt that the film producers chose The Pearl Thief, and says it is her favourite of all the books she has written.
“It is the most emotional I’ve ever felt whilst writing a book. I felt very connected to the main character, who is a very broken woman, she is very brittle and fragile and has glued herself back together again.
“She walks through life very cold, not engaging too much, friendly but not with a single good friend. I loved all that iciness about her, and then she sees something that unlocks the box of hurt she has locked down.”
The jewellery at the heart of the story, a pearl necklace, was based on a magnificent piece of Viking jewellery McIntosh saw in the British Museum and which stuck in her mind, but which she inadvertently changed from a body chain of heavy gold into one with pearls. The real Viking original inspired the back-story for the fictional pearl jewellery, which she wrote came from an Islamic harem and was sold to the Russians and later to a Jewish family who kept it for generations.
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McIntosh is a prolific author and her next publication, The Fallen Woman, is out in October. She says she has not had time to stand back and take stock of joining Moriarty and Harper in attracting the attention of a Hollywood filmmaker, nor what it will be like to see one of her stories on screen.
“I feel like I have joined some club, somewhere, but I never think that I have the kind of profile they (Liane Moriarty and Jane Harper) have,” she says. “All of my audience is incredibly happy it’s happening and most of them would say that of all my books, The Pearl Thief is their favourite.”
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