D.J. McPherson.
After 10 years as a professional screenwriter, D.J. McPherson’s career has reached a sweet spot, with a hot-shot Hollywood producer attached to her first feature and a streaming platform backing her 10-part drama.
Mark Williams, the co-creator/producer of Netflix’s Ozark, will produce His Name Is Jeremiah, the saga of a teenage girl who struggles to reconnect with her estranged mother, with McPherson’s partner Jack Christian.
Filming of the TV series Did You Miss Me? was set to start in Queenstown New Zealand before the lock down as a New Zealand co-production. She’s not ready yet to identify the streamer or the co-producer.
Last November His Name Is Jeremiah won Truant Pictures’ inaugural screenplay competition.
The LA-based McPherson, who is now back in Melbourne, sent the script to Williams because she loved the dark, comedic tone of Ozark, now in its third season.
The following day he told her he loved the project and was keen to produce it with Christian, the executive producer of Great White and Black Water: Abyss.
The plot sees the teenager, who was brought up in foster care while her mother spent 10 years in jail, develop a dangerous obsession with a missing boy (Jeremiah). That sets off off a chain of events which unlock mysteries from the past and present.
The head of production/management company Zero Gravity, Williams’ resume includes the movies The Accountant, A Dark Place and A Family Man.
Casting is underway for the two leads and an LA-based Australian director is attached. The plan is to start shooting in Coober Pedy early next year.
McPherson tells IF she had long wanted to write a film about a mother-daughter relationship and decided to focus on that project while she recovered from heart surgery in Virginia.
Did You Miss Me? revolves around a girl who turns up exactly one year after she went missing with no memory of who she is or where she had been; it turns out she had entered a parallel world where time stands still.
Her development slate includes The First Law, a sci-fi/fantasy/horror movie she co-wrote with Christian which centres on a grieving robotics engineer goes to extreme lengths to protect her sons from the global pandemic that took her husband. It won the grand prize at the 2019 Creative Screenwriting Unique Voices Screenplay Competition.
D.J. toured the world as a professional musical theatre performer until suffering a career-ending knee injury, so decided to pursue screenwriting.
“I was always a prolific writer, keeping a journal and writing stories for myself while on tour, so transitioning to professional writing was a natural progression,” she says.
Her breakthrough came when she and Christian created, wrote and directed the animated series Get Ace for Network 10 and Hulu, which was nominated for an International Emmy Award in 2015.
“It was the most enormous undertaking,” she says. “I storylined all 52 episodes of the first series and wrote a bunch episodes too. But writing 52 episodes was a job way too big for one person, so we put together a writers room of six super talented writers. It was inspiring to work with such a hardworking and experienced team in such a collaborative way.”