By MICHAEL GINGOLD
After M3GAN became a sleeper hit in 2022, it was inevitable that the living doll would be back in a sequel. But M3GAN 2.0, opening Friday from Universal, is no mere repetition of its predecessor; its action is set across a much wider canvas while continuing to explore up-to-the-minute themes regarding artificial intelligence. RUE MORGUE got some exclusive time with returning director Gerard Johnstone to chat about upping the ante while keeping things real.
Also scripted by Johnstone, from a story he concocted with original M3GAN screenwriter Akela Cooper, MEGAN 2.0 finds Gemma (Alison Williams) now advocating on behalf of AI regulation while wrestling with raising her now teenage and rebellious niece Cady (Violet McGraw). When it turns out that M3GAN’s tech has been stolen and used to create a military weapon of mass destruction in the form of female android AMELIA, Gemma reluctantly restores M3GAN to “life” to combat her. In addition to Williams and McGraw, the encoring cast includes Amie Donald and Jenna Davis as M3GAN’s physical performer and voice respectively, and Brian Jordan Alvarez and Jen Van Epps as Gemma’s colleagues. New to the ensemble are Ivanna Sakhno as AMELIA, Aristotle Athari as Christian, Gemma’s boyfriend and fellow tech ethicist, and Jemaine Clement as rapacious tech mogul Alton Appleton.
This is, can we say, the TERMINATOR 2 of the M3GAN franchise?
That’s a fair assessment, yeah!
M3GAN 2.0 takes the story into much bigger places. After the success of the original, was the sky the limit for the sequel?
I wouldn’t say the sky was the limit [laughs]; there was definitely a budgetary limit that I was made aware of, quite often. It was more that the character of M3GAN held so much promise, and I felt there were so many ideas and situations I wanted to apply to that character. And certainly, the technology is now such that conversations about AI and what it means are everywhere, and it made the idea of doing a sequel much more relevant, and much bigger than the world of toys.
After the first M3GAN played on the idea of a child’s toys coming to life, Cady being a teenager allowed you to dig into bigger themes…
Yeah, absolutely. The first movie was about parenting, and this one is also, but an inverse of that: It’s about how M3GAN has been parented, essentially, and brought into the world, and what responsibilities Gemma has to her. At the same time, it’s about how Gemma is a parent to Cady, this human being who is constantly evolving and changing, and how difficult that is for her in so many unexpected ways. So it’s very fertile ground.
AI has advanced so much even since the first film came out, and 2.0 has more of a political bent to it. How did you approach that angle?
It’s something I think about a lot. Making these movies about AI, you’re already swimming in that world, but you can’t help noticing what’s happening all around you. Regulation is something I’m really interested in, and the film touches on that idea. I thought it made sense for Gemma’s character, having gone through something as harrowing as she did, to find an opportunity to become an AI ethics spokesperson. But as a result, she ends up doing the very same thing she did in the first movie, which is spending less time as a parent.
What was involved with the effects of bringing M3GAN back, and creating AMELIA?
It’s very important for us to keep practical effects alive, and M3GAN was brought to life in this movie in a few different ways. One of the biggest was this animatronic puppet that was really state-of-the-art. The animatronics, all the little actuators that went into making her facial expressions and her lip-synch were really leveled up on this movie. You’ll notice it when she speaks, it’s uncanny; she’s hitting every single consonant. It’s funny, because the movie is about this next-level piece of technology, and that’s exactly what she is.
It’s a very complicated movie; there are a lot of special effects, a lot of big setpieces, and with AMELIA, it was really about creating a rival for M3GAN that would be an icon in her own right. We got very lucky with the casting of Ivanna Sakhno; she inhabits AMELIA with such a fierce intensity, and she’s just magnetic. Whenever she’s on screen, she’s hypnotizing in the same way M3GAN is.
Since M3GAN’s dance in the first movie went super-viral, was there any thought or concern about finding that moment in the sequel?
Not so much about making a meme, in a sense, because that’s really up to marketing, but it’s also completely up to chance. You can’t anticipate that, and it wasn’t anticipated on the first movie, at least from my side, that that would happen. But the dance and the song in the first movie did give the audience the biggest laughs, and I knew they would want to see that come back in some way, so on this one, it was very important to figure out how to do that in an unexpected way.
There’s more humor in general this time around, so can you talk about that choice?
As soon as you have more M3GAN on screen, it just lends itself to that. She’s a really fun character, and I think once you pull her out of the shadows and put her front and center, everything that comes out of her mouth is just gold. It’s not like she just writes herself; writing jokes is difficult. The first film did have a little bit of humor in it, and the circumstances of this film just lent themselves to going more in that direction.
There seems to be a Hong Kong cinema influence in the fight scenes…
Yeah, absolutely. I was really into martial arts growing up, and you’ll notice that we get very specific, like M3GAN training on a Wing Chun wooden dummy, which is a big homage to Jackie Chan and RUMBLE IN THE BRONX. My first passion for cinema came very much from martial arts movies, so it was awesome to be able to delve into that in M3GAN 2.0. It was important to me that the fight scenes were on par with some of the best ones being done in movies right now, and our fight coordinator and stunt coordinator, Isaac Hamon, did an incredible job of stepping up the action on this one.
Allison Williams receives producer credit on 2.0; what were her contributions in that area?
She’s a true nuts-and-bolts producer. She was there with us at all the creative and preproduction meetings. She really wants to understand the business side of filmmaking and how the sausage is made, and, as she goes through her career, more of an understanding of how it all works. She’s a terrific collaborator; there are always a ton of problems that need to get solved, and she was right there with us trying to work things out.
She was also there as we were developing the story, as a sounding board, trying to figure out where her character was coming from. That was obviously very important to her. But when she shows up to set, she’s always completely committed to being a performer, and she trusts me.
Jemaine Clement is so much fun in this movie. Was that role written for him?
It doesn’t hurt that he lives not too far from me, only an hour’s flight away. But no, when I developed the character of Alton, I wasn’t sure where the production was going to be set. But when it turned out it was going to be set in New Zealand, he was the most obvious choice. I’ve been a big fan of his for a long time, and we’ve been wanting to work together, and he was just hilarious. He’s the only person in the film who can get away with improvising as many lines as he does. I have to completely hand it to him; his opening scene, especially, is a little bit me but mostly him and what he brings to it.
