Gerard Johnstone on M3GAN 2.0: An Empire Podcast Spoiler Special Interview

0:14Chris Hewitt:Hello pod, I'm Chris Hewitt and welcome to this Empire Podcast spoiler special, interview special with Gerard Johnstone, director of Megan 2.0. over the next 45 minutes or so you're going to hear my in-depth chat with Johnstone about the sequel to yes, Megan his killer doll movie which came out here in the UK in early 2023 and became something of a sleeper hit at the box office not just here but around the world and turned its titular star into a cultural phenomenon so much so that Megan 2.0 is a much bigger proposition less weighed down by Blumhouse's usual meager budgets than most It's also not a horror film, although the first film was barely a horror at times as well.

0:58Chris Hewitt:Instead, it is an action comedy, a deliciously and deliriously daft and camp riff on Terminator 2, in which Megan, played once again by a combination of actual puppet, CG, and two actresses, Amy Donald as the doll and Jenna Davis as the voice, returns to do battle with a bigger, badder robot, Emilia, played by Afana Sakno. the movie has not done that well at the box office whether it's a case of the popularity of the character being overestimated or whether horror fans rejected the change of genre and decided not to show up whether it was a mistake to open this in the summer maybe this is a property that belongs in January or February or whether there's some other reason or reasons why it has struggled to put bums on seats it has struggled to put bums on seats which is a huge shame for in my opinion this is an absolute hoot of a movie which made me laugh as hard as any film this year and I'm surprised and disappointed to see that it hasn't been embraced by moviegoers chances are of course if you're listening to this then you have seen the film unless you're one of those weirdos who searches for spoilers for stuff that they haven't seen no judgement that is me with a lot of TV shows saves a lot of time but if you have seen it then hopefully you loved Megan 2.0 like I do and you've come here to find out more about it So there's no point preaching to the converted here.

2:21Chris Hewitt:But if you do know anybody who's on the fence about it, then encourage them to go see it while it's still in cinemas. They won't regret it. Probably. Anyway, to the interview with Gerard Johnstone, which was conducted a few days before the movie opened. He wasn't in his native New Zealand, but in a very classy rental in Los Angeles. And he was very generous with his time as we talked and talked and talked about the movie's key themes, its twists and its turns, the importance to the plot of characters who aren't killer dolls including Alison Williams' Gemma and Violet McGraw's Katie and of course we talked about Lat's song and Megan please don't take this to the chorus one of my lines of the year so far I had an absolute blast talking to Gerard Johnstone and I hope that you enjoy listening to it so hold on to your vaginas and enjoy you meat sacks we are delighted to be joined on this Megan 2.0 spoiler special by the film's writer and director Gerard Johnstone.

3:19Chris Hewitt:How are you, sir? I'm very well. Thank you for having me, Chris. We just had a little chat just before we pressed record and started talking about spoilers. And you were talking about how the end of this movie, you know, finishing this movie has been a bit breakneck for you. And you've been out in the streets grabbing shots. So what was the last thing you shot for making 2.0? The last thing, like there is a sequence in which Amelia, the villain of the movie, has kind of hacked into Alton Appleton's cloud service played by Jermaine, who plays a sort of a big tech billionaire with access to, you know, half of North America's cloud service.

3:56And once she hacks in, she creates this digital chaos and scares the shit out of everyone. And so we wanted to show a lot of that mayhem in the streets. And one of the ways we did that was, you know, to show these billboards freaking out. So while we were in the edit, very last minute, nearly, nearly, you know, things were, had already shifted, migrated over into the sound mix. We had a couple of guys out, out in my rental car, by the way, shooting, just running up and down the street, shooting, getting shots of billboards so that we could then quickly turn them over to VFX and make them glitch out.

4:29Amazing.

4:30Chris Hewitt:When, when did you shoot the ATM going rogue and spitting cash out? Yeah. So interesting. It feels that we shot in like three different territories. This does feel like our own version of a Megan impossible film also by virtue of the shooting locations. So, you know, we had a unit in Canada getting a lot of the car chase stuff. And then we also still had a unit back in New Zealand shooting all of that stuff with the ATM. And then I had, yeah, my guys out in my rental car going up and down sunset Boulevard trying to capture stuff. So, yeah. So that was quite recently. That was only, it feels like only a month and a half ago that we were getting those last little pieces.

5:11Chris Hewitt:Oh, my God. I've got some sort of like, it feels like land sickness, you know, like your head, like your body's perpetually in motion and you're working morning till night. And we've only really just finished the film and it was really just ripped out of my hands because, you know, there's so much more I would have liked to sort of fine tune and perfect. but having said that, you know, everyone assures me that the movie's a blast and, and, uh, you know, I think it would be probably look, it would probably be diminishing returns if I got to fix every last little thing. Talking about shaping the movie, the, you know, the choices that, you know, that you make as you're rushing towards the, the finish line with this thing, um, things to include things to cut out, uh, correct me if I'm wrong on this, Gerard, but because I, uh, I've only seen the movie once, but the, the Megan super fan in the trailer, I remember speaking to you from the magazine and you said to me you weren't sure that he was going to make the final cut and he didn't I was probably 100 % sure at that time that he was not going to be in the movie but it's yeah you shoot all these things and and you know you are you are shaping the movie and there's a version of that that could have worked it was part of a longer kind of media montage about how the world had changed in the wake of Megan and we wanted to kind of acknowledge the fact that no matter what she'd done, there would always be sort of ardent fans of hers.

6:34But yeah, but it wasn't, ultimately, there just wasn't the bandwidth to tell that story in the movie. But it's surprisingly, it's like the, it's surprising that that's the one that people have picked up on. There are others that are clearly seen in the trailer and I'm sure I'm going to hear about that. Wait, where was that shot? But that's the funny thing about making these movies. It's like, you know, marketing will comb the footage and sometimes they'll use takes and you're like, don't use take 9B, obviously, you know, why are you using that take? But, you know, they've got to start things on the marketing train.

7:13So, yeah, it's a tricky thing trying to promote the movie while, you know, a movie's unfinished.

7:20Chris Hewitt:Maybe we'll talk about some of the other stuff that didn't quite make it in a few minutes, but let's talk about the stuff that did make it. You said Megan Impossible there. Yeah. Which is clearly a deliberate turn of phrase because this movie, I mean, there's so much going on in this film. It is an action movie more than a horror film. You know, it's evolved away from the model of the first movie. And it really had strong mission vibes for me as well. Can you talk about it going in? And have you seen The Final Reckoning? Because these two films share a lot of DNA. I know. Isn't that funny? It's funny, I'm a huge fan and I have studied those movies, you know, from a point of, you know, Chris McCrory is one of the greatest kind of most accomplished, talented minds in the business.

8:08And obviously, you know, Tom Cruise as well. Yeah, I'm a big fan of those movies. And going into this one, there was a similar feel about it. We would joke on set that, you know, we would refer to the film as Megan Impossible as a working title. And, yeah, massive, massive influence on the movie. But it was so funny to sit and watch Dead Reckoning and realize that they were getting into AI and then we were getting into it's like, what was happening here? Some weird kind of crossover. Yeah, it's strange.

8:45Chris Hewitt:Yeah. And the final reckoning in this are I don't know if you've seen the final reckoning yet. I have. Yeah, they're great. Awesome. But there's such interesting companion pieces because yours is the bright day glow. Very pessimistic, but there's an optimistic sheen as well to AI and working with AI and cooperating with AI. And, you know, it's here. The genie's out of the bottle. There's nothing we can do about it. So we got to learn how to cooperate with it and show it a better path. Otherwise, we're all fucked. And then Mission is so dark and somber and pessimistic. I'd love to see these films double-built.

9:22Yeah, well, I mean, I guess, you know, we can talk about spoilers in the movie, but I was really nervous. I was really nervous. It's like, oh, shit, I wonder if they're going to do the same thing we are and have some sort of twist. And I wouldn't have put it past them, you know, to do that. So that's what I was most nervous about and so relieved when they didn't do that.

9:39Chris Hewitt:Which aspect were you most nervous about them potentially doing the same thing? Well, you know, but the whole thing with this film is figuring out it was, you know, Amelia is a mechanical Turk. and, you know, not actually, you know, being, being steered, you know, as a device for mad anti AI regulation zealots. And I just thought, Oh shit. You know, like to me, cause once you live with a twist for a while, it feels very obvious. It's like, Oh shit, is someone else going to do this idea? And we're going to, we're going to be coming a month after mission. We're going to look stupid. These are the thoughts that keep you up at night.

10:18Chris Hewitt:can you talk about crafting the plot first of all knowing where you wanted to go picking up from megan yeah so so essentially you know how it happened is before i before i had officially come on to the movie um i had heard that james um james had wanted to do um yeah we spoke about this a little but james had this james had the idea of another doll uh and and towards the end of Megan 1, I had already been thinking about where the story could go with Megan and was really, for whatever reason, was open to the idea of there being a more nuanced story to tell about AI. And we always tell the story of AI going bad, but in a weird way, AI is just doing what it's trained to do.

11:06And Megan had this very strong moral code. And, you know, she went to the nth degree, you know, to pretend Katie and that included murdering people and animals and children. But at the same time, she never she never acted out of malicious intent. It was always acting. And people imprinted that on her a little bit, that it was malicious and evil. But you can argue from a scientific point of view or a computer science point of view that she was just following her objective. so when James said what about going in this direction I almost immediately knew that this gives us an opportunity for this to be a redemption story and then I think I spent about a week thinking about Amelia what she could be and it made sense to me that we moved out of the world of toys because the technology is so incredible that it just feels like if this actually if Megan actually exists it's like the military and China and Russia, they'd be chomping at the bit to kind of get their hands on this, this technology because she'd be the antidote to drone warfare, you know, and she could be such an incredible spy and you don't have to feed her, you know, keep costs down.

12:23But at the same time, I was just exploring my own feelings and my own fears about AI and just thinking god if something like Emila existed and did go on a rampage that would be a great way to scare people into making sure this never happens and so it's almost like I took my own wants like I'm very you know cautious about AI and and and uh my own fears and and kind of like kind of made the villain a version of that really um and and just thought about what if happens if you you're so dogmatic in your beliefs that you kind of lose your humanity and in a weird way. And at the same time, you're kind of not giving AI enough of a run or enough understanding and not treating it the same way you would or you should.

13:18It's kind of like a parenting allergy. I keep going back to this thing. In a weird way, this film is also a parenting allergy about we are the parents of AI and we're bringing it into the world. And when I started to think on those terms, it became really interesting and narratively fertile because now Gemma's having, it's not just a redemption story for Megan, but Gemma's having to contend with her actions and think more deeply about her role in creating her, not just in the damage she caused, but in the fact that she maybe didn't really spend the time she should have with Megan. And what if Megan feels like a forsaken child?

13:51Like Megan is really Gemma's first child. And so, yeah, so all of these things were sort of bubbling in the initial first kind of couple of weeks before I started diving into the script.

14:01Chris Hewitt:And then the script as well, the story of the film, you bring in other elements. I want to talk about Christiane in a second. But the element of the motherboard and that twist and everything playing into that, where did that stuff come from? So I did a research trip to Silicon Valley and we have sort of a tech expert, Alex Kelfman, that worked at Google for a long time and he lives in Palo Alto. And so he kind of gave me a little bit of a tour and I went and visited Google. But one of the most amazing things was he took me to Xerox Park. and that's the heart of, sorry, Xerox Park. I keep calling it Xerox because we sort of like did our own version of it in the film.

14:47So he took me to Xerox Park where it all started. And I just thought, God, how funny, how funny, like these tech giants of, you know, Xerox was Apple of its time, but it still exists in the heart of Palo Alto next to Tesla, next to Google, next to Apple, you've got Xerox Park. And it's like this James Bond-esque facility, like this brutalist kind of building that's kind of nestled into the hills. And it's still there. It's a really big building and it's still really active. And it has a little museum inside. You go inside and it has like all the things that we, you know, we did a little nod to in the film.

15:27But it has like a sole with an electronic shoe insert. And it has like the first, you know, they invented the mouse. they invented the kind of I think I call it the GPU or what all of the stuff that Apple sort of like used and then sort of built their company on it was invented by Xerox and I couldn't help but think wow what are they doing down there like how are they still here and you know and so that also helped inform this idea the idea of like well what if a company like this actually stumbled onto AI way back when in the 80s and they realized holy shit we have to we have to figure out a way to keep it in a cage and all of our resources will now just use to kind of like start this little specter type society that like hunts for you know bad AI or technological advancements that we don't want the world to have and so it's almost like this kind of anti-AI specter organization started to form and there was a great rumor about a urban myth that Alex told me about, about a photocopier that did start to correct documents.

16:36And I was like, how funny is that? So, so just like, it seemed really fun to tell a modern story about Megan, but also go way back to the eighties and how robots used to be so fun and so cute. And, you know, We never were thinking about this kind of Skynet kind of reality back then. They were just super cool and quaint. And so it was fun to kind of juxtapose Megan with that era.

17:08Chris Hewitt:Let's talk about Christian because he is the antagonist of the film, ultimately. The film is filled with people kind of telling Gemma that something's off about this guy. and you know and he and just even the way he pronounces his name is annoying so yeah are you hoping that that some audiences will be going okay this guy is clearly up to no good or or how did you approach that that twist well it's very interesting you know we we definitely didn't want people thinking that the challenge was how do you create a character that seems amiable enough but in a weird way is a bit of a third wheel and is creating, is kind of creating a divide between Katie and Gemma getting closer and also in a weird way is telling the audience on a subconscious level, oh, if there's going to be a third member of this family, we want it to be Megan.

18:05As messy and broken as this family triangle is, I want the audience to be thinking, no, Megan should be in this position. but no, I didn't want people thinking that he was going to end up being a villain. So it was a real challenge to make sure that Amelia's story felt so much so that it was drawing you into her intentions and you weren't thinking about anyone working behind the scenes. And it took a little while in the edit to get there and reshoots helped with that. But in some of the early screenings, it was really obvious that he was the bad guy. It may still be to some people, only if people are looking for it, if they've heard the little twist, they may be looking for him.

18:48You can't do anything about that. But I think we did some good work to kind of, I don't know, make him more palatable so that you weren't guessing that he was the villain until right before he turns. I know that people, right before he turns, people are getting it, and I know that, and I'm okay with it at that point. But yeah, I definitely tried to keep that under wraps until that point.

19:13Chris Hewitt:I'm very slow about this sort of thing, Gerard. So it was about 10 minutes after he shot Tess, I was beginning to think, there's something off about this guy and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. And then he said, anyways. And I went, he's a prick. Take him down. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I should say, he is, Aristotle is just, you know, he makes that character so delicious. and as kind of slightly annoying as he was as a potential love and interest for Gemma, he's just delightful as a villain, you know, because he's got such a strange offbeat kind of nature about him.

19:51Yeah, he was really fun.

19:53Chris Hewitt:We haven't talked that much about Megan and Gemma and Katie yet, but one last villain I want to talk about because tech giants don't come away from your movies very well and you have Jermaine who is just absolutely hilarious in this film I was so sad when you killed him off because I thought we could have another scene or two of this guy being an absolute dunderhead can you talk about that character as well? Jermaine, him and I have been kind of trading emails for a little while about wanting to work together so this was just such a great opportunity to just let loose with Jermaine and he does exactly that like he's maybe the first actor i've worked with that you know he is a big improviser and people often say to me they always want to know what was improvised on set and in a movie like this when you've got an animatronic puppet you can't improvise there's no you can't you can't improvise with megan she she it spends to the the puppeteers have to spend two weeks programming in every kind of syllable um so there's everything is just planned to the nth degree but uh with with Jermaine fortunately he wasn't he didn't have any scenes uh opposite Megan so he could just cut loose and he yeah it was he's amazing to just no no single take is the same um and you just have to you just have to kind of keep track of it uh but Allison's great as well like the scene with him and Allison he's improving and but Allison's also you know a really great improviser so uh it was it was a match made in heaven and he just runs away with it he eventually just starts directing Allison and was like, I like what you did on take three.

21:33Can you, and I'm just sitting there thinking, well, who am I to intervene? I think these guys have got it. I'll just go, I'll go get a burrito.

21:40Chris Hewitt:Yeah. The bit where he takes a picture of her with his eyes. Yes, totally. Yeah. That's him. That's just him. Like he's obviously got a little grab bag of things he's been thinking about. And yeah, they all kind of come out in the moment. And, but you do kill him ultimately pretty brutally. Yes. I'm guessing is, is there going to be another R rated cut of this movie? Like there was with the first one. There is. And look, there'll be more gore and there'll be a couple more scenes that might help you make sense of some things. I don't know, but if you weren't sure, maybe they'll fill in the blanks.

22:19But yes, there was some just things like tendrils, Like, you know, when an arm is severed, there are just some delightful icky bits that the prop guys made that we just had to, like the version we've got looks a little bit like a skin sock because we just can't show any of the stuff that was hanging out. But that stuff was really, really fun. So it'll be fun to see some of that stuff back in the R-rated cut.

22:52Chris Hewitt:Yeah, absolutely. But when you do kill Alton, you rip his spine out. Yeah, there's a little bit more juice and spinal fluid on the spine. Actually, it's a different take. Luckily, Ivana was such a pro, she managed to do like a PG-13 take where the bloodied spine disappears behind her hand. And then in another one, it's there for everyone to see and the stuff kind of falling off of it. It looks like some strange kind of crustacean. It looks like a weird lobster that's been down under the sea for too long. once you saw what Jermaine was doing, were you tempted to keep him around for a little bit longer or was the story so locked in that you couldn't have Alton survive?

23:31Well, you know, I know that I'd be getting hassled about how many kill, you know, the kill count compared to the first movie. So he was just, no, he was a necessary, and he's such a hard actor to get ahold of as well that I thought this is the only, so we're going to have to kill him off before we, you know, get ourselves into a situation where we, you know, schedules are all over the place because of Jermaine, Clement has availability.

23:55Chris Hewitt:That's true. I have to say, though, the body count's way up, isn't it, on the first movie? Yeah, it is. It is on this one. Yeah, yeah. And obviously, that was the fun thing about having a character like Amelia, who doesn't quite have a code the same way Megan does in the first film. She's just out for vengeance. So yeah, she takes no prison. So that was pretty fun. Which brings us on to Megan and your use of Megan in this movie. before we talk about some of the specific things you do with her can you talk in general terms about you know being aware coming into a sequel of what people loved about Megan in the first movie and wanted to make sure that you you give people what they want but you're not just playing the hits for example so she dances in the film so was that a struggle for you to find out where and when she would dance in the movie to make that organic and she sings of course My God, I want to talk about that sequence because it may be so hard.

24:50Chris Hewitt:So just planting those seeds and finding ways to do that without just simply being seen to be ticking boxes. Was that tough? Yeah, that's exactly how you described it is exactly the way I approached it. I knew that it was just those two elements. It's like if we don't have her dance and if we don't have her sing, people will be pissed off. But outside of that, it was really just about – you know, finding new ways to explore the character of Megan and what we could do with her. And it was a great opportunity to remind people she's not just a doll. Like, she is an entity. So having her consciousness uploaded to the smart home and sort of, you know, at the end of the first movie, I was like, well, this is great.

25:40Like, this is, oh, my God, we can have, we can see, you know, she can be a ghost kind of like haunting them from the digital dimension, you know, in the cloud. And you're never quite sure where she is, but she has this kind of omnipotent power. And so when I realized that like, oh, I could do like almost like a weird haunted mansion thing with her, you know, in the tonal screen and then the TV. And, you know, I thought, this is really fun. And it just seemed like I didn't, it didn't ever feel like, oh, I've got to also do a nod to this because it always feels like you're just watching, I don't know, it just seems like a cynical cash in to kind of do that.

26:22So it definitely veered away from that. But with the dance, there was a few different ideas on how to do it. At one point, I thought maybe her and Amelia have to have a dance off or Amelia might break into dance and distract Megan and she may be distracted in the same way she distracted David and maybe annoyed herself for that. But eventually I landed on the situation where the last thing she wants to do is dance, but she has to because of the situation. So she's forced to dance. And I thought that felt pretty delightful. But there was a lot of pretty passionate debate and certainly amongst myself and the creative producers over when and how to do it.

27:07But we're all happy with where we landed on with the dance.