Cult leader

TV and film producer Rachel Gardner. Photo / Richard Robinson

She met her husband when he crashed a wedding, abandoned a great career opportunity on a beer-fuelled whim, and has gone from reading fortunes to telling tall tales: if they weren't part of Rachel Gardner's CV they would be plot devices in her movies and television shows.

But these life lessons have something else in common — an understanding of how unspoken conventions can be bent, and the ability to act with verve and conviction.

It's why people would revisit Gardner's Covent Garden stall where, armed only with a book, tarot cards and hippy-length hair, she managed to make enough pseudo-sense to cover rent and pints. It's also why the 37-year-old has a reputation as a deal-closer, a skill that has taken her from a standing start to joining the leading pack of New Zealand television and film producers in four recession-riddled years.

So far she has steered television series including The Lion Man and The Pretender —that rarest of creatures, a funny local comedy — as well as film projects including Apron Strings. Her latest creation, the upcoming 13-hour TVNZ drama series The Cult, is being touted as Nu Zild's answer to the JJ Abrams' meta-stories Lost and Fringe.

The show, which debuts in September and has a weighty cast including Lisa Chappell and Danielle Cormack, deals with a group of 20-somethings trying to escape a mysterious cult and its charismatic leader.

There are several reputations riding on The Cult's success, including Gardner's. This is her first foray into prime-time big budget television drama and if worst comes to worst you'd expect her to have a fallback option prepared — she has already had a crack at everything from chin-stroking academic to fortune teller, science journalist, dotcom-er and full-time mum.

It's an impressive collection of careers but Gardner has never paused long enough for reflection. Which may be why she is so terrible at remembering dates — milestones like marriage and the births of her three children are rather hazy. Looking back doesn't seem to mesh well with ambition.

Gardner, whose maiden name is Trial, is a fourth generation Westie. For years her family owned orchards flanking both sides of Oratia's Shaw Rd. It was a good life but one that left her feeling trapped. As she says, it's quite easy to live an entire lifetime in one suburb when food, home, friends and fun are all within a short walk of your front door.

Things changed when she met Charmaine Pountney, the formidable former principal of Auckland Girls Grammar. "I was a white working class girl in this school that was very Polynesian and Maori," says Gardner, "and they only seemed to employ feminists so my eyes were as round as saucers. I remember my first assembly in third form, Pountney gave us this speech: 'You girls, don't let men treat you like meat.' I was like 'this is insanity'. I was surrounded by all these women who really pushed this attitude that was all about drive, ambition, career, responsibility and independence."

Sufficiently fired up, she left for England as soon as she was 19 and set about getting her act together. "At first I had one shit job after another until I figured out that if I didn't sort myself out I'd never have a career, and I'd always wanted that."

So she enrolled at University College London and, despite her arty leanings, started a science degree. "Back in fifth form this teacher told me not to sit School C science — I hated science because of her, so I didn't, and that really pissed me off. I carried that around for years and I eventually decided on science, just to show her. Kind of pathetic really, but it was really interesting." Then halfway through it, Gardner says, "I fell in love with the wrong man at the wrong time in my life and had a baby."

Her plan had been to return home for further study but once baby Max arrived London looked like being home for the foreseeable future. Which was just fabulous actually — she and Max's father lived among the hippest young things of Primrose Hill and they joined a circle of increasingly famous faces with brand new babies (don't ask who, apart from describing them as A-list actors and musicians she's not telling. That wouldn't be "nice".)

The lifestyle didn't come cheap and though tarot cards proved the most lucrative sideline she had yet found, they weren't a likely career path. She began writing freelance for titles like the Financial Times and did well enough to be a finalist in the Daily Telegraph's Young Science Writer of the Year award.

This was a direction she could see herself heading in, so once she'd finished her degree Gardner re-enrolled at the London School of Economics and Political Science and completed a masters. She was rescued from a life of academia when she was headhunted for what seemed like the job of a lifetime. At the same moment her marriage fell apart. She's reluctant to discuss the latter, to the point of protecting the name of "the wrong man at the wrong time", but the job provided a distraction from her personal life.

Dr Foster Intelligence was set up by two senior London newsmen to collect raw data from the British health services and repackage it into idiot-proof bites for ordinary people to use. Gardner quit everything and leaped in, hoping to ride the great 90s dotcom bubble.

Her first mission was to coerce suspicious medicos into providing the information they needed. That she managed it was "a triumph of perseverance, charm and intelligence" says Dr Foster's research director Roger Taylor. "We were gutted when she eventually said she was leaving. It's hard finding people like her. I don't think any of us had any idea the she would end up in film and TV but we certainly would have predicted that she would be successful at whatever she decided to do."

It was also during this period that Gardner returned home for a close friend's wedding. At the same time Jimmy Gardner, creator of the Allteams sports management website and DJ about town, was convincing a very recent acquaintance to invite him to his wedding. His theory was that weddings were a great way to introduce future friends to the fold. So it was somewhere in the merry melee that Rachel met Jimmy, a moment she says changed her life.

That first encounter bloomed when they met again in London some time later. These were exciting, if testing, times. She had a new relationship, London was caught up in post-9/11 paranoia, son Max had started school, work was full-on, and the dotcom bubble had burst. "Everything had felt very complicated, a bit hard, for a while," says Gardner. "Then one Friday night we were sitting in a pub when one of us, I really can't remember who it was, said: 'Hey, let's go home [to New Zealand].'

"We're both quite intuitive, impulsive people, but if either of us had thought about it alone nothing would have happened. Instead it was all 'yeah, that's a great idea'."

First thing Monday morning, they quit their jobs and started packing up their life. "It was all done really quickly. Next thing I was sitting on the plane coming home and having a panic attack. It was the first time I'd thought about it, like 'what the f*** have I done?' I really loved my friends, my job and the people I was working with."

It was January 2002 and Gardner was standing at Auckland International Airport with impressive references, some English pounds from selling the house in Primrose Hill, and no idea of what she was doing here except that it wasn't going to be journalism. There was no rush: why not take a year off to figure things out?

She was still hard out figuring when she met up with a friend at Ponsonby Rd's SPQR restaurant. Also present was Imogen Johnson, owner of talent agency Johnson & Laird, and the two hit it off immediately. Gardner saw an opportunity to invite herself into Johnson's office, a fancy name for the front room of her house. "What do you want to do?" asked Johnson. "I haven't figured that out yet," replied Gardner.

So they divided the labour and the single landline, with Johnson looking after the actors while Gardner focused on writers and directors. They developed a system so when an important call was expected, one would answer the phone posing as the other's assistant. The trick was making sure you got the company name right.

"We had a brilliant time," says Johnson. "Rachel's a one-woman whirlwind, totally fearless, and the work seemed natural for her because of her writing background, it was just a part of her. But she quickly came to the frustrating realisation that the industry was too immature to support a freestanding agency like hers. She was having to go out and find work for them [writers and directors], so you could say the shift into production was a natural progression from that . . .

"I don't think she's there yet, but where's there? There is no there and that's the whole point, there's just the next step. That's the exciting thing about this industry, it's like doing your hobby, and the exciting thing about New Zealand is that we have this opportunity to evolve really quickly."

As for Gardner, she sees production as the career that life has been preparing her for. "There was no sudden realisation," she says, "it was more of a gradual realisation. I was 30 and discovered I had finally figured it out."

Then, just when she needed to, she met Robin Scholes, one of the country's most experienced producers, responsible for movies such as Once Were Warriors, The Tattooist and Crooked Earth. After discussing a mutual love of documentary work, Gardner set off to find a project they could work on together. After weeks of research, funding proposals and meetings she got the go-ahead for Colin McCahon: I Am. It wasn't the perfect start, some within the art world are still grumpy that their names weren't spelled correctly, but it set Gardner on her way and, more importantly, provided her with an invaluable mentor. That Gardner didn't let the criticism put her off and instead got stuck into more work helped convince Scholes she deserved further help and advice.

"I really believe in her," says Scholes. "You must learn how to recover from these things and make yourself better, it's about being prepared to work really hard and to keep going because it's the nature of this business that you can do all that hard work and still not produce anything for long periods. A lot of people get into it wanting instant results and success and that's not always possible."

Still, Gardner has come a long way in a short time. In 2007, just a few short years into her career as producer, she was voted Woman to Watch by WIFT (Women in Film and Television) New Zealand. During those years she also gave birth to two more children (son Arch, now 5, and daughter Eve, 4) and has conjured a grand home with Jimmy from an inner city youth hostel.

Scholes describes Gardner's work so far as "top quality". A lot of this she puts down to the successful partnership Gardner has forged with fellow producer Philip Smith (who wrote the script for The Cult.) Together, the pair own production house Great Southern Film & Television, which has grown rapidly over the past five years to become one of the country's largest. After being named producers of the year in 2008 by SPADA, their company dominates the field at this years Qantas Film and Television with 20 finalist nominations.

"This is a hugely competitive business," says Gardner. "You always need to be clear that there's an audience for your idea, that it's not self-indulgent art.

"The Cult is a huge risk, our reputation is on the line and by giving a big drama series to a new production company TVNZ has put a lot of faith in us. You only get one shot at something like this; if it goes wrong, who on earth would give us $7.5 million to have another go? But I'm really proud of what we've done, I think we've achieved what we set out to do and I think a lot people are going to be surprised by it."

All the same, she's dug out her tarot cards again.