When M3GAN opens this Friday from Universal, it will arrive on a wave of on-line publicity its creators never expected. After the trailer debuted last October, its brief glimpses of the titular dangerous doll executing some elaborate dance moves touched a nerve, inspiring widespread appreciation and imitation on-line. Eight lookalike performers even danced to Taylor Swift’s “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” (also heard in the trailer) at the movie’s premiere last month, joined by producer Jason Blum in costume (see photo below).
M3GAN director Gerard Johnstone tells RUE MORGUE that he never saw that adulation coming. “It completely took me by surprise,” he says. “I actually thought they were giving too much away in the trailer [laughs], but I’m so glad that they didn’t listen to me and kept as much dancing as there was, because we got so many more [fan-made] trailers out of that. It’s one of those strange scenarios where the film kind of marketed itself, so I just felt like we lucked out. It was really funny.”
The dancing and the rest of M3gan’s physical performance were enacted by Amie Donald, a 12-year-old native of New Zealand, where the movie was shot. (Fun fact: One of her movement coaches was Jed Brophy, a regular actor in Peter Jackson films dating back to DEAD ALIVE, in which he played gang leader Void.) “I first thought, oh God, we’re really going to struggle to find the person we need to do this,” Johnstone admits. “But we actually found Amie, who could do all these things, early on, almost straight out of the gate. She was a real miracle find, and M3GAN wouldn’t be the movie it is without her.”
As for the inspiration behind M3gan’s dancing, the director says, “It was really just–you can see in the film and even in the trailer, it’s used as a sort of distraction. But I found that it was fun, and often, when you’re segueing into the last act of a movie, you might have a musical montage, and it occurred to me that it would be really funny if whatever music was scoring the film, M3gan would wind up dancing to it. There are a couple of points in the film where it almost feels like it’s about to segue out of horror into a musical, but it seems to work, and people have really embraced it.”
Look for more of our chat with Johnstone about M3GAN later this week!
