Originally pitched to him as “A.I. gone wrong,” Blum told Variety that he felt lucky to have been approached, and from there, they began a long period of preparation for what the killer doll would look like and how she’d work. Blum said: “The way you stick the landing is you don’t start prepping your movie until you know exactly every detail of what M3GAN is going to look like, how you’re going to shoot her.” “We’ve made mistakes in the past where we have some kind of monster in a movie and we start prepping before the monster is worked out. We learned from those mistakes, so I didn’t want to spend any money on the movie until we knew exactly how we were going to do M3GAN. Special effects go wrong when they are rushed.” Synonymous with the killer-doll genre, Chucky was the star of the 1988 movie Child’s Play, and gave many people a doll phobia. Family therapist Michelle C. Brooten-Brooks says that a phobia can commonly be caused by something that scared you as a child, so watching Child’s Play as a kid can trigger a doll phobia — much like how a ton of adults are scared of clowns due to watching Stephen King’s IT when they were young. And fears like this, which are often irrational, can be picked up via “vicarious learning through others” — aka parents or guardians still in the clutches of childhood doll phobias! As the fear gets passed down generation to generation, we’ve seen killer dolls crop up year after year to keep the cycle going. From The Boy to Annabelle, all these movies tap into that underlying sense of creepiness many of us pick up from dolls. M3GAN screenwriter Akela Cooper said: “My thing was ventriloquist dummies. I saw the Anthony Hopkins movie Magic at a really young age, and that cemented the creepiness in my brain. I was a big Child’s Play fan, too. It was always my dream to create an iconic monster of my own.” At first, we’re in awe and may marvel at the craftsmanship of something super realistic, but it’s not long before we become repulsed or fearful at how real something seems while our brain grapples with the idea that it’s really not. We’re quite simply not biologically programmed to deal with humanoid objects! With all this in mind, M3GAN’s supervising puppeteer Adrien Morot deliberately made the doll straddle the line between real and fake. He said: “There should be that fine line of ‘uncanny valley’ where the finish, the eyes, the hair, everything should be looking almost real. It’s not over the top. It’s not cartoony. It should be unsettling.” Producer James Wan said: “I would say, for the first time, that the idea of that uncanny valley actually really helps a movie like M3GAN. It actually makes her feel creepy to be sort of in between real and not quite real.” Producer James Wan agreed, stating that both he and Johnstone wanted M3GAN’s physical appearance to be created by both CGI and an animatronic puppet, to really push that line between what’s real and what’s not. Wan told Collider: “I worked with Gerard to kind of go, ‘We want her to feel as real as possible, but also at the same time, we still need to remember that she’s a doll.’ And so we don’t want to go too far [in] that direction, as well.” “The doll aspect, generally, is what makes the killer doll genre or the creepy doll genre creepy, because it’s clearly an inanimate object. It’s a plaything, it’s a doll. But the fact that this plaything could have a life of its own is what makes it scary.” Executive producer Adam Hendricks said they wanted the doll to look like a “real life version of a Polar Express character.” “The tiniest details of how her eyes would look and her stare…he was obsessed. A lot of the success of the movie is that she’s kind of human and kind of a robot.” “One of the hardest things was figuring out what M3GAN would look like and how she’d work. I give Gerard a lot of credit for figuring that out.” Donald, 12, has performed movie stunts before and is also a professional dancer — in fact, she represented New Zealand at the Dance World Cup in 2019, at just 9 years old. She won silver and bronze, becoming the first performer from New Zealand to win a medal at the competition. Donald said: “Dancing very much helps because you need balance as a robot. Robots, you don’t see them wobbling around or doing human stuff, so control and waiting around are two things that are very important that come from dance that I can use in acting.” Meanwhile, the sinister-sweet voice of M3GAN is courtesy of actor Jenna Davis, who has starred in several Disney shows, as well as Hulu’s Maggie and Netflix’s Treehouse Detectives. She said that if she had her own M3GAN, she would probably have her help clean her room, help with homework, and do “the practical things we all have struggles with.” Luckily for Johnstone, he found native New Zealander Amie Donald “just down the road.” “She’s a fun girl who’s a national dance champion, just phenomenally talented,” he said. The mask wasn’t any old mask either — it was built by Oscar-nominated Adrien and Kathy Tse of Montreal-based Morot FX Studios. Adrien added: “We had six or seven different puppets that were capable of doing different things. We had some of the head moving, eyes moving, the moving torso, and there were a couple that were capable of a full computerized range of movements.” Executive producer Adam Hendricks said there was also a puppeteer behind the animatronic who would manipulate M3GAN’s neck to look around, and that if they changed the pace or a line during filming, the mask needed to be reprogrammed. Ugh, imagine stumbling into a room of seven glassy-eyed M3GANs?! What a surreal workplace environment! Exec producer Adam Hendricks said: “Unlike a normal puppet where the eyelids are far from the surface of the eyeball, [Morot] made it just like a human being’s — the eyelid slides right against the eyeball when it opens and closes.” When it came to the highly technical mask Amie Donald wore when bringing M3GAN to life, he also explained that the realism required crew members on hand to administer fake tears to help with the remote-controlled blinking. Hendricks said: “Between every take, they were constantly lubricating the eyes, and every now and then, her eyelid would get stuck during a take which would be frustrating. At the same time, we knew that was the trade-off for having something so lifelike,” he told Los Angeles Times. Certain shots were done with a puppet, while12-year-old Amie Donald performed various scenes as the bloodthirsty Barbie. She performed all her own stunts, including a cobra rise — the Matrix-esque move which sees her lift herself up from flat on the ground using only her legs, and the spine-chilling all-fours run! Johnstone decided to add it into the film, because “it was so creepy and unexpected — it was like she was a jungle predator sizing up her prey.” He encouraged Amie to work with dance instructor Kylie Norris to create a dance that was “creepy, but also kind of distracting.” The two delivered five or six soft choreography options for the scene, which Johnstone describes as “all very strange and not what I had in mind at all, but they were all kind of great and weird and disturbing.” Once he was happy with the final sequence, he “snuck the moment into the film to see if anyone would say anything.” With the dance now an absolutely iconic moment from the film, it seems Johnstone made the right call! Keen to keep his cards close to his chest to make that cinema trip even more impactful, Johnstone said: “I was so happy to be proved wrong by Universal, who didn’t really listen to me when I said that we were giving away too much.” “At that point, we weren’t sure if the film would be anything. ‘What are people gonna think of that? Are we in our own bubble here?’ The bubble burst in a big way when that trailer dropped.” Exec producer and actor on the movie Allison Williams said: “To our great joy, basically the second the trailer hit the internet, they just got it. The memes, the copies of the dance. People understood her in this way that I absolutely loved, and we just thought, “OK. Job done. They get her, she belongs to them now.’ This is amazing.” “They are taking great care of her. They’re deploying her in the most hilarious ways to make fun of people. They just got this fierce best-friend vibe from her, and it’s been an utter joy. I mean, what more could you want?” So, the quandary for the movie’s creators was whether to stick to the gory original material, or drop the body count a little so that the film got a rating that allowed teens to see it. Screenwriter Akela Cooper said: “No shade to Universal, love them, and I understand that once the trailer went viral, teenagers got involved, and you want them to be able to see it.” “There should be an unrated version at some point. … I heard it is on the books. But yes, it was way gorier (originally). Her body count in the script was higher than in the movie.” Some were disappointed when it was announced that the movie would be PG-13, but producers Jason Blum and James Wan stayed loyal to their plans, with Blum saying: “Some of the scariest movies of all time are PG-13, so I don’t put too much stock in the bellyaching. Go see the movie, and then tell me about it.” “I really had to imagine prior what I thought she would look like. I wanted to make sure she was an A.I. with personality, flare, and sass”, she told KTLA. Talking about Amie Donald’s work on physically bringing M3GAN to life, Davis said: “It was definitely teamwork between the two of us.” To build a more realistic horror that subverts the tropes without being too meta on screen, Cooper said: “In a post-Scream world, characters have to be smart. The audience is smart. You have to acknowledge what you’re doing. That’s why the characters in the movie are like, “This is creepy” or “We shouldn’t do this!” They know.” “It’s fun to have all of that knowledge because it gives you a road map. You know what worked in the past, you know what hasn’t worked. It’s like Mario Kart, trying to get as many coins and avoid as many bananas as possible.” “I love being involved in every draft and then many, many, many months after that — years, sometimes, in this case — every cut of the film and everything in between.” “After I first saw the movie, we had a good sense that a sequel might really work. We broke our cardinal rule. I felt so bullish that we started entertaining a sequel earlier than we usually do,” he told Variety. Blum loves the character so much that he also rocked up at several M3GAN events dressed as the murderous marionette! Executive producer and Gemma actor Allison Williams said: “Those of us who were part of making it are not dumb. The idea of planting a little bit of a seed that we might wanna keep going is always a good idea.” Did that have an influence on the way M3G4N’s storyline went? Well, with James Wan and Jason Blum in talks to merge their horror powerhouses and Wan talking about how he likes to bear in mind the whole universe around each story he creates in case an opportunity to re-enter that world comes along, it seems likely that we can glean where the sequel may go from what unfolds in M3GAN. Allison Williams and Violet McGraw, who played Gemma and Cady respectively, are already onboard, with Williams acting as a producer after serving as exec producer on M3GAN.
