The Kiwi director of M3GAN tells Russell Baillie how pulling off a few unusual moves helped make the film a surprise box-office hit.
Gerard Johnstone laughs ruefully about the art-imitating-life aspects to his film M3GAN. No, the Kiwi director behind the surprise box-office hit – now heading to US$100 million (NZ$154m) internationally from a US$12m budget – doesn’t have a psychotically empathetic AI Robo-Barbie causing problems at home, like the one in his movie.
But M3GAN is also a story about parenting. In this case, how workaholic toy engineer Gemma creates the titular doll as a big sister-come-nanny for her orphaned 8-year-old niece Cady, who she has no time to mother – an extreme case of interactive tech as a useful pacifier.
Johnstone admits to times thinking he’s the worst parent in the world when he’s fobbed off his kids because of some pressing job thing, especially in the past couple of years as he worked on M3GAN. It’s his first Hollywood film after his 2014 homegrown horror-comedy Housebound suggested he was destined for bigger things.
“The irony was I was making a movie about a woman who doesn’t spend enough time with her child while I was doing the same thing to my two boys,” he says the day after first showing the film to his New Zealand crew – and to his elder son.
“He really loved it. He’d actually seen a lot of it [during filming and editing] … but he was into it. It’s funny because he’s 10 now, but all he’s ever known is that his dad makes horror movies but he’s never really seen the evidence of it. So for him to kind of see this thing that Dad’s been working on for so many years, and that people like it, it’s awesome. I just feel like I’ve won the dad award.”
Johnstone was a hired gun on the film by prominent US horror producers James Wan and Blumhouse studio head Jason Blum, who wanted him to bring the askew humour they saw in Housebound.
He says the parental tech-neglect theme in the script by Akela Cooper resonated with him, citing the regular conversations with his wife about his sons’ screen time.
“I have kids and I’m living this nightmare, and all of those anxieties were so much of the script … but it’s fun to be able to kind of put a little of that into a movie and exorcise those demons in a way.
“I’m not throwing parents under the bus. It’s more just to comment on just how hard it is. It’s really hard, and I don’t have the answer. I just wish more people were talking about it.”
But the reason M3GAN has been second only to Avatar: The Way of Water at the US box office since its stateside release early this month isn’t because of its satirical social commentary or message to parents. An eerie dance sequence by the lifesize doll which wasn’t in the script and added by Johnstone became its own TikTok-friendly marketing hook, complete with M3GAN dance squads at NFL games and on late-night talk shows.
“I didn’t realise that the dancing was going to be like the gateway drug into letting people know that this is more of a comedy than a horror and that it’s okay to go to one of these movies and laugh as much as you’re screaming.”
That early buzz convinced Wan and Blum the film should aim for the bigger potential audience of a US PG13 rating, rather than an age-restricted R – something that Johnstone had originally argued for.
“I was one of the first people to kind of raise their hand and say this is relatively good-natured … it’s not mean-spirited. If we could curb a couple of these deaths, and we’d still be able to say the same thing, but maybe we could get a PG13 rating. But I was assured that was a bad idea and a horror movie with an R rating is a badge of honour and we should stay the course.”
Two weeks from finishing, the order to reduce the blood and body count came through and Johnstone was frustrated but relieved at making his film less slashy and sweary via reshoots and editing.
“I always felt like shooting those scenes felt a little bit icky, like it was kind of like low-hanging fruit – just throw a bucket of blood on someone. I don’t think that’s the tone of our movie – we’ve made a movie that people who don’t like horror movies can enjoy.”
There had been other hitches along the way. The 2019 release of horror film Child’s Play, which brought back the once supernaturally possessed doll Chucky as a malfunctioning killer android, paused production for a while. Then, after M3GAN got the green light, the pandemic derailed what was to be Johnstone’s first overseas production, in Montreal. It shifted to Auckland, with a Pakuranga cul-de-sac doubling for Seattle suburbia and AUT for the toy corporation headquarters.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of Johnstone’s first triumph as a film-maker – winning the first 48 Hour film competition, something he did again a few years later. He co-created and directed The Jaquie Brown Diaries, which ran for two acclaimed seasons in 2008-09, before Housebound – which starred Morgana O’Reilly and Rima Te Wiata as mother and daughter in a seemingly haunted house – became his calling card and got him US representation and a foot in the door. Though the door has been slow to swing wider.
The near-nine-year gap between his debut feature and his second has included Johnstone being attached to a few projects that never came to fruition, such as producing an American remake of Housebound and rewriting a screenplay as a possible director of supernatural superhero movie Justice League Dark, which didn’t survive Warner Bros’ troubles with its comic-book franchise.
After the disappointments, taking on a low-budget, quick-turnaround Blumhouse movie seemed like a good idea, says Johnstone, even if it did eventually take four years. Still, with the buzz and spectacular profit margin the film is generating, it’s likely that Johnstone won’t be stuck at home for his next project. Unless, of course, M3GAN has her revenge on Pakuranga in a likely sequel.
Johnstone does have a New Zealand film on his to-do list, a movie set in his hometown Invercargill about international powerlifting champion and local hero Sonia Manaena.
“It’s a really great story that’s very dear to my heart, and I don’t want anyone else going down to Invercargill, making a movie there and ruining the accent. I’m hoping that we get to do it soon.”