Director Gerard Johnstone Shares the Behind-the-Scenes Magic That Went Into Creating 'M3GAN'
'M3GAN' Director Gerard Johnstone shares all the details that went into bringing a lifelike robot character to life and how it felt to go viral.
Image via Universal Pictures
Director Gerard Johnstone already has a hit on his hands with his latest movie, M3GAN. Not only did the film’s first trailer already go viral thanks to the creepy lifelike doll’s surprising meme-ready dance moves, but it has already received rave reviews from critics and people can’t seem to stop talking about it.
The film hits theaters Friday, Jan. 6, and follows a roboticist named Gemma (Allison Williams) who works at a toy company and uses artificial intelligence to develop M3GAN, which is short for Model 3 Generative Android. After Gemma gains custody of her niece Cady (Violet McGraw) when her parents unexpectedly die in a car accident, the roboticist brings a M3GAN prototype into their home to be her protector and companion. As seen in the trailer, that decision takes a turn for the worst, and M3GAN becomes every person’s nightmare come to life.
Horror fans are familiar with dolls and toys of this nature but there was something about M3GAN that caught people’s attention right away. The doll’s realistic features, eerie personality, smooth movements, and steely delivery when she speaks are what make her so captivating. Johnstone knows that putting her together required an equal balance of robotics and animatronics while also enlisting the help of young actress Amie Donald from New Zealand, who stepped in to do all the things a robot couldn’t do (Like crawling on all fours at the speed of light).
The director also worked alongside Adrien Morot (The Whale) and Kathy Tse of Morot Animatronics to perfect their vision and create the kind of character that would become the latest pop culture phenomenon. Complex caught up with the director ahead of the film’s release to talk all about bringing writer James Wan’s vision to life, working with Allison Williams, and all the behind-the-scenes magic that went into creating M3GAN.
Can you talk to me about what it was like to see people’s reactions to the trailer?
Just like pure delight, it felt like we just won the movie lottery because the internet can be, in general a place of hate. So to see this big outpouring of love, it was just very, very special. And it gave us a big shot in the arm because we hadn’t quite finished the film yet. But it was really nice because up until that point you’re working on this movie just in a vacuum and you just don’t know how it’s going to be received, if all this hard work, there’s going to be a point to any of it. So yeah, it was just great. It was wonderful.
I don’t know if filmmakers make this a goal, but once a part of your movie or a part of the trailer becomes a meme, you know you struck gold. Did you see the memes that have come out from that one specific dance scene with M3GAN?
Yeah, totally. And they were amazing and I just couldn’t believe how many of them there were. And I thought they were giving too much away in the trailer of the dance scene. I was like, “I just want a hint of it, something weird happening to tease people.” And Universal said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” And I didn’t know what I was talking about clearly because people just took it, recut it, put it to different music and it was just the gift that kept on giving. And I was just so happy that they didn’t listen to me. And I never really pushed it because I know that marketing is not really my thing.
Marketing is almost like what happens with the internet. It’s like you give the film to other people and they make what they will out of it. And it’s the same way with marketing. It’s like, “OK, you guys sell this however you want to.” And obviously, it’s their money. But it was just exciting to see so many. And I definitely had some favorites. I need to learn the name of the song, but the one that goes, “Hair, nails, eyes,” whatever [Todrick Hall’s “Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels.”] That one was just, it was so funny. And we show that to so many people and it was fun showing that to my mom even though there was horrible language in it.
It’s also a good time for horror films. It seems like everybody is super into superheroes and such, but now the horror genre just feels like it’s really strong. How does it feel for you to work on this film and to be able to tell this story that is not really something that we have seen in recent years?
Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because this is my second horror movie and so I guess now I’m kind of known as a horror director. But it just so happens that both the … But on the two films I’ve done, it was just the ideas themselves lent themselves to being packaged up in a horror tale. And with this one, it’s really about, it’s a technology run amuck story, but it’s just about the dangers of Ai. Obviously, it is a cautionary tale about where we are heading. And for me as a parent having to wrestle with how technology is inviting the way we parent when you get something that’s as potent as that, just a horror movie is just the perfect vessel to really bring that story to the world. But I love horror movies and especially ones that are fun, that don’t take themselves too seriously, that don’t leave you feeling icky afterward.
When you can also laugh about something that happens.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Those are my favorite horror movies. Yeah. So I think it’s great. When the whole superhero movie thing came out, when the first Iron Man came out, I was the biggest fan. It was extraordinary what they were doing with those movies. But yeah, you want to have a diverse diet, you want to have other things. It’s great that people are getting excited about other kinds of movies now.
Let’s talk about just M3GAN as the character. I know Amie Donald is playing her, but also how much of that is the actress, and how much of that is the visual effects team coming in and making that happen?
Yeah. Well, I’ve had to be tight-lipped on this for so long, but I feel like now everyone kind of knows and has peeked behind the curtain so I can let this one out. I guess there are three major components to it. I think the two largest components of it are Morot Animatronics—they made her. They physically made this state-of-the-art doll that’s just got this unbelievable degree of subtlety behind her animatronic facial movements, the micro-expressions that she can make. They worked really hard on just giving her all these subtle looks. And it’s funny because I’ve read reviews where people think that’s [computer-generated] and it’s as if we can afford CG that’s that good. Our CG’s pretty good, but it’s like there’s no way we could afford to make the whole movie that way. So she’s a real animatronic puppet, but there is only so much you can do.
We don’t have the budget of Boston Dynamics. So when she gets up and walks around and does all these amazing things, she had to be inhabited by a real person. And we kind of thought, “OK, we’ll get a young girl and we’ll train her to move like a robot, to be very still and maybe to do a robotic walk and maybe to do a couple of tricks.” But we had no idea that we would find this girl, Amie, that could do gymnastics, dance, martial arts, and could actually also act. She’s doing three-page dialogue scenes with Allison Williams and she’s keeping Allison Williams on her toes and she’s not missing a line. And she’s also imbuing the character with a degree of personality and she’s very sinister and sassy. And Amie—it’s amazing because we never had a discussion on her character—but she somehow knew from the get-go that she was really sassy and she kind of slinked around when she was doing the dialogue and it was just extraordinary.
Not only that, she’s 20 minutes up the road from where I live. So we did this search over all of North America and the world, and who’s this girl going to be? And we were supposed to shoot in Montreal and we had a girl lined up who was really great in Montreal, but then we moved the production to New Zealand. And we were like, “Oh my God, we’re going to have to find someone here. We have to at least look.” And we found Amie and it was just extraordinary. So that is Amie running on all fours. That’s Amie.
Wow.
She can run faster if she’s not wearing a coat and not on leaves. If you see her run along a carpet, blink and you’ll miss her. She’s incredible. She can get up from the floor without using her hands. All of these things we thought we were going to need rigging for, she can just do them with an hour’s practice. And then the last component though is obviously she has to wear a mask that doesn’t speak or move. So that’s why we needed CG. So we had these guys in New Zealand doing that and that was one of the biggest things they’ve ever done. And they just did an extraordinary job making it pretty seamless. And that’s the great thing, you don’t know what you’re looking at.
It is spooky because it looks realistic, but also she has a personality. I feel like that’s what we fear the most when it comes to these robots. Is that something that you all wanted to highlight? This fear that we all have of this coming to life and then one day coming after us?
Yeah, absolutely. When you look at dolls, it’s always the most realistic-looking ones that are the scariest. There’s something about them. It’s like they have a soul and they don’t have to do much. And James [Wan] obviously proved that with his films. And in prep for this film, I was watching a lot of his films like The Conjuring and Annabelle, which he produced and you realize, “Oh, she doesn’t have to do much.” So that was a great relief. Coming to this film, I realized, “Oh, she’s going to be more effective if she doesn’t move unless she needs to.”
The other big component of this was when we were going to shoot the film in Montreal, that was where Morot were based, who made the doll. And when I saw their work, they specialize in realistic prosthetics. They would make human doubles, like Jake Gyllenhaal in Source Code or Hugh Jackman in Wolverine. And you think you’re looking at the real actor. So based on that, I was like, “Why don’t we just try to make her look as real as we can?” She’s a doll, but she doesn’t need to look like a toy. And that was exciting.
Allison Williams is in a bit of horror genre mode. What was it like working with her?
Well, she’s like me in the way that she just happens to be doing horror movies. When I met her, what gave me confidence in her was just how smart she was, how funny she is and how lovely she is. So those three things combined really just make her the best collaborator. She’s very down to earth. It’s funny, even though she’s in the press, obviously, everyone’s talking about the famous fathers and everything. She’s actually one of the most down-to-earth people I’ve ever met. And so she’s a real delight. But she’s also a real study. She reads a lot, she’s always sending me articles on something about AI she’d read and we would figure out ways to imbue that into the script. She helped a lot with a lot of the dialogue scenes. Well yeah, just scenes in general really where there would be a conflict between her and M3GAN.
If something wasn’t feeling quite right, rather than telling me about it on the day, she would give me the benefit of having a discussion with her months before where we could play out the scene and figure out how to make it more legitimate and funny. And so she was just a really great collaborator in that way. And ultimately, Gemma’s character is a roboticist, designer, graphic designer, all these things at once. And after you meet Allison, you kind of realize she could be all these things. And yeah, so that’s really key.
Adrien Morot was part of the team bringing M3GAN to life. How did you make sure that you stayed on the same page?
It was really tricky because I had never done one of these movies before. And so Adrien and his wife, Kathy [Tse], are this incredible genius team of prosthetics designers that kind of helped walk me through the process. And we designed her in 2D on paper with Weta Workshop in conjunction with Morot, keeping them up to date on what we were thinking and everything. But to be honest, we had a sketch that we really liked and I thought, “Oh, this is perfect.” We were in consultation with Morot the whole time and we were all Photoshopping various things and sending them to each other on how we thought she should look. And then we came up with this design we really liked, but then they went to a 3D render. And it was really hard to take a 2D sketch and make it three-dimensional. She just looked completely different.
So we were working on that for long periods of time. In the end, I had to say, “OK, the 3D render does not look like the sketch.” But I asked Adrian and Kathy, “Can you just make sure maybe when you do her makeup and everything that we can make her look the way the sketch did?” So they made her and they did. She basically looked a little bit more like the sketch, but she was really skinny. Her body was really skinny, and her face was skinny. And I looked at the sketch and I was like, “Yeah, actually her face is skinny.” I didn’t kind of notice how skinny. She kind of looked like an emaciated cat. So I was really worried because I didn’t want to make her look like a janky Thunderbird. I wanted her to have class and sophistication.
So I was like, “Adrien, I’m so sorry to ask this, but is there anything we can do?” And he’s so great. He just cares about making a good film. And he was like, “Yeah, I get it. I totally get it. I felt the same way. And no, we can’t, but yes we can. And yes, I will.” And so he just spent the last three months giving her a fullness to her face, a fullness to her body. We had all these great scenes where we were going to actually show M3GAN with all her robotic parts, but I basically just pad it up with foam underneath that dress so that she wasn’t too skinny. And so that she’d be a good match for Amie.
Because that was the other thing. We knew that this was going to be in conjunction. M3GAN was going to work in conjunction with a real girl. So he spent all this time making sure that she just doing what needed to be done. And a lot of it just off his own dime. They really put everything into it. They were just amazing.
That attention to detail always pays off like wanting her to have a fuller, more childlike face is what makes her look so realistic.
And the other thing is, what I didn’t realize is you can design a face, but then once Adrien has to break that apart and put all these animatronics in to give her all this expression, it’s going to pinch her face in certain places and push it out in other places. So it’s going to change. And all those little subtleties just make her look like a completely different person. And so we had six dolls. So we had the main animatronic doll, and then we had a stunt doll, a posable doll. What else? A lightweight doll—a kid had to carry it. And they all looked slightly different. Well, most of those ones looked different than the animatronic. And that was the tricky thing. And so we had to do a little bit of CG work to make them look all the same. But none of us had made one of these movies before. So it was a big learning curve.
You really nailed it. From the reaction also, it feels like everybody’s like, “Oh, I’m excited to see this.”
Which is just so gratifying for everyone, especially for Adrien and Kathy. Their animatronic work, the subtlety that they gave her and her speech. I looked at a lot of robots in research for this film and I can’t see any robots that have that degree of subtlety in their expressions and in their speech. It’s like, it’s really extraordinary what they did.
As the director, what do you want audiences to feel when they’re watching M3GAN?
I mean, I hope first and foremost that they just have fun. You want to break some new ground with this doll. And my hope is that they agree that she’s something pretty special and new that we haven’t seen before and that we pushed the envelope in terms of her look, that she’s an icon and all of that. But I also ultimately, hope they think about the message of technology. You can’t really expect it to have any kind of real-world change or anything. But if people at least take home the message and they start thinking about technology a little bit more, I’d be happy.
For sure. And do you have any hopes for maybe a sequel, a M3GAN 2?
Oh yeah. Yeah. There were a lot of ideas that were kind of leftover that we just couldn’t fit into the story, a lot of looks that we wanted to give M3GAN. So the idea to do that again and incorporate a lot of those ideas that we couldn’t do in the first film would be great. There’s been a lot of talk about where we could take it and how we could even, based on the events of the first film, how we could even justify a sequel. But we could absolutely do it in a way that feels earned and hopefully is fun and surprising as the first movie has been for a lot of people.
M3GAN is now in theaters.