Dancer, fake tears, puppets give life to killer doll
Director sought to capture ‘M3GAN’ differently than film predecessors
She’s your new best friend and humanity’s worst nightmare, a hightech artificial intelligence doll with a homicidal streak. But what do animatronics, competitive dance and eyelid lubrication have to do with “M3GAN?” They’re a few of the secret ingredients that helped bring the titular doll to life in the horror film.
A titanium terror in
Mary Janes, M3GAN leaps off the screen right into the uncanny valley in the Universal film, now in theaters, in which roboticist Gemma (Allison Williams) programs her eerily lifelike invention M3GAN to watch over her orphaned niece Cady (Violet McGraw) — until the self-learning companion bot goes rogue and starts killing anyone who gets in her way.
Ask Amie Donald, the New Zealand actor who makes her film debut as M3GAN, why the sentient doll sends shivers of fright down moviegoers’ spines, and she grins. It’s those bone-chilling eyes, she said, and they’re even scarier if you fix them on your prey while dancing toward them down a hallway.
“Looking at the person makes it so much more creepy than if you’re just doing a dance,” said Donald, who performed her own stunts and co-choreographed the killer dance sequence from the film that has gone viral on TikTok. “When you look at them, it makes them feel unsettled.”
From the start, director Gerard Johnstone said, the challenge of “M3GAN” was finding the creepiest way to capture M3GAN on camera — and do so differently than other evil doll films, like “Child’s Play,” have in the past. “The idea of making M3GAN look more realistic was very exciting, because we hadn’t seen anything like it,” said Johnstone. The trick? “She’s got to look almost real.”
The first step to portraying M3GAN on screen was to prove that she could actually be made, a task entrusted to Oscar-nominated Adrien Morot and Kathy Tse of Montrealbased Morot FX Studios. WETA Workshop contributed additional designs to the film, which reportedly cost $12 million to produce. “(Morot) built a real doll, but everyone thinks that it’s
CGI,” said Johnstone.
Working on different continents due to the pandemic, which forced production to move from Canada to New Zealand, they developed 2D designs, 3D renderings and molded full-sized M3GANs. The character evolved from a “Tim Burton-y” brunette to the icy blond and blue-eyed “Barbie come to life” seen in the film.
Johnstone switched between multiple life-sized M3GANs during the shoot, including animatronic, puppet, posable and stunt M3GANs as well as Donald, who performed her scenes while wearing a prosthetic M3GAN mask.
Working with half a dozen versions of the character using different methods, however, meant they’d need VFX to match their various M3GANs.
“We figured out a day before we started shooting that these things don’t quite marry up,” said Johnstone, who turned to FIN Design and Effects of Australia to blend his M3GANs together. “It was hard work, a lot of painstaking hours. But full credit to the team, it’s pretty seamless. You can’t really tell what you’re looking at, which is a testament to them.”
Shooting M3GAN’s close-ups involved a painstaking technical process for the film’s team of puppeteers, Johnstone added.
While voice actor Jenna Davis was later cast as the voice of M3GAN, recorded lines performed by actor Kimberley Crossman were programmed into the animatronics for on-set playback and opposite her human castmates, as Morot and Tse operated different halves of M3GAN’s face via remote control.
When M3GAN had to come alive for the cameras in scenes capturing her nuanced facial expressions and dialogue, her eyes were the windows to her soul — or lack thereof.
“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,” said executive producer Adam Hendricks of Divide/ Conquer.
The subtle feature helps to further blur the audience’s perception of M3GAN’s sentience — but it required fake tears to be administered to ensure her smooth, human-like remote controlled blinking while the cameras were rolling.
Casting international competitive dancer Donald, now 12 years old, to physically embody M3GAN turned out to be fortuitous. Although it was her first film role, the actor, who has also since appeared on “Sweet Tooth,” was off book within a week and loved doing her own stunts. “She was just extraordinary,” said Johnstone.
Working with movement coaches Jed Brophy and Luke Hawker and stunt coordinator Isaac “Ike” Hamon, she developed M3GAN’s physicality, which becomes more humanlike the longer she’s around humans. She adopted barely perceptible movements — a slight cock of the head, a step a bit too close for comfort — to maximize the unsettling effect M3GAN has on people.
“They really helped me make M3GAN come to life because they taught me how to be robotic and how to get into character,” said Donald, who sometimes performed with limited vision due to fogging inside her M3GAN mask.
With her gymnastic abilities, the actor surprised her director by proving she could perform the eye-catching stunts showcased in the film’s biggest set pieces on her own: a gravity-defying “cobra rise” where she lifts herself unnaturally from the ground, and an animalistic quad run, in which M3GAN drops to all fours and chases a bully through the woods.
But Donald’s most viral contribution to “M3GAN” came out of her first love: dancing. Not initially in the script written by Akela Cooper, Johnstone had the idea to integrate a dance moment in the film, tapping into the young actor’s skills. He gave Donald and her dance teacher Kylie Norris a set of guiding concepts for a scene in which she hunts Ronny Chieng’s David down the hallway of his own toy company, and the duo choreographed the moves that later made “M3GAN” go viral on TikTok.
“Gerard wanted it to be creepy but also kind of distracting, so Ronny wouldn’t know what she was doing,” said Donald, who filmed four takes set to “Walk the Night” by the Skatt Bros. “It was my favorite scene because I got to do what I love most.”