“How lucky are we that we get to do this again? Because it’s a dream job.”
After the success of M3GAN, Allison Williams didn’t quite fear the stress of doing a sequel. “How lucky are we that we get to do this again? Because it’s a dream job.” In M3GAN 2.0 (June 27), we meet Gemma (Williams) and Cady (Violet McGraw) two years after M3GAN, a lifelike robot doll, turned on the humans she was meant to obey. This time she’s back, but she’s not the only robot doll out for revenge. “One of the great honors of doing a sequel is that the tone is established. People know her vibe. They know who she is and what to expect from her.” And what they can expect this go-around is that it will be unhinged in the best of ways. “They will always be ridiculous in a way: The titular character of the franchise is a robot with a blowout and a gorgeous smoky eye and a wardrobe full of new costumes.” One thing this franchise did ultimately do for Williams is change how she approaches technology. “A Waymo that I get out of, or like our robot vacuum, I’m always like, ‘Thank you so much. Don’t kill me someday. Thank you for your work. I’m grateful.'” [laughs]SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARTING SHOT WITH H. ALAN SCOTT
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Editor’s Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication.The last time we spoke, nobody had seen M3GAN, and you could tell in our chat, you didn’t know what people would think.No one knew. I was just thinking about that like, I was just hopeful, and waiting.And she became a massive cultural icon. I mean, she was even at Los Angeles Pride. What do you make of how big M3GAN became as a cultural icon?Well, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the queer community for embracing her so much. I really think because that, as we were kind of stumbling through, and when we talked about it, that tone is really hard to articulate. Now, one of the great honors of doing a sequel is that the tone is established. People know her vibe. They know who she is and what to expect from her. But going back in time, imagining myself back in the shoes last time I spoke to you, it was like, have we achieved the assignment of trying to convey that tone in a trailer? And are people going to go see this movie based around a humanoid robot doll that’s like c****? And are they gonna go? And so when the trailer came out, and we started seeing the first reactions on TikTok and Instagram and Twitter, like the meme of her face with these hands on either side of it, once I started seeing those, I was like, “Oh, we have been embraced among the most effective and funny and cunning communities digitally that there are.” And so the question now is like, are they going to go see the movie, or are they just having fun with the camp of the trailer of it all? And then they went and saw the movie, and they supported it, and they saw it again, and they dress up as her for Halloween, and they learned the dance, she’s on RuPaul [Drag Race], which is kind of the bar honestly, if we’re being real, that’s how you know when you’ve made it.Spoofed on Saturday Night Live.Exactly. I’m suddenly shooting an SNL sketch with Aubrey Plaza as M3GAN. That was pitch-perfect, by the way. And it just felt so satisfying and validating also, because there are—without maligning anyone in particular—there are communities where if I made something that was embraced by those communities in particular, I’d be like, yikes, I need to look at what I’m putting out into the universe. But may I tell you that in the bull’s-eye of groups of people that I would like to please, it is the people that supported M3GAN. And so when it came time to make the second movie, we thought like, first of all, “How lucky are we that we get to do this again?” Because it’s a dream job. It is hard. She’s the diva. But we love making these movies. And it just felt like, “Okay, we’re so lucky. We get to do this again. And what do we think?” There was kind of a unanimous sense that there needed to be another doll. But after that, Gerard [Johnstone] just went into his mind palace, where he makes all these insane storylines, where, for him, the plot points of this movie are completely obvious from the beginning. And for anyone else, if you pause the movie five minutes in and you were to predict where it’s going, you’d be like…I had no idea. No way to predict it. I had no way.Yeah, the only person who would five minutes in be like, “Oh, here’s where it’s gonna go,” is Gerard. And so he didn’t do fan service or pandering or anything. He stuck to the tone. We played it all fully earnestly, Violet [McGraw, who plays Cady] and I are crying real tears in these scenes with this plastic robot. You play the stakes, you make it all matter. You do it all with your full commitment and earnestness. And then the camp is allowed to explode from the movie, the humor is allowed to explode. There’s fully tension. There’s some moments I get emotional when I watch it. It’s all there. We had a lot of conversations about sequels broadly, what sequels are successful and what they fail at. And often it’s an eagerness to please the people that supported you the first time that you end up overdoing it and making it too boring and predictable and self-aware and for everyone. And this one, we just stuck to our very specific guns. And in so doing, I think have actually made a movie that ends up being, I think will be more enjoyable for more people. I’m very proud of it.Let’s be real, a film with an original idea and a mostly female cast being as successful as the original was is rare, unfortunately. Did you feel pressure when it came time to do the sequel?Honestly, once it’s all done, then you have time to have anxiety about what it is and how are we going to get out there? But in the making of it, in the prep and in the writing and in the ideating and all of the other stages up until post-production really, it’s just about, what’s the best story, what’s the best way to tell the story? How are we going to shoot this, like, how do we get this on camera? It’s really hard. And so if when you’re focused on that, it’s really about quality control and just making sure it’s all right. And Gerard is extremely specific and exacting, as he should be. And so for those of us who—and I’m speaking mostly for my capacity as a producer at this point—like our job is to make sure that to whatever extent that it’s possible, he gets what he needs to tell the story and make this come to life, and in a way that is our collective salvation, that we’re not focused [on that] just yet. That is—] and the incredible marketing team at Universal, who’s aware of the movie and all the beats and the characters and everything from the beginning of when we start shooting it, but we don’t have to worry about that—maybe ever, but definitely not yet. We can just make the thing. And the only thing I worried about, honestly, to your point, about it being with three women at the center, I was like, how cool that I didn’t have a love interest? And how cool that this movie is the Bechdel Test? The one thing I was really protective of is keeping any love interest plotline hilariously one-sided. I just wanted this poor dude to be throwing himself against the wall, like a raw piece of spaghetti, and just like falling to the floor. And that cracked me up. And the idea that she’s just not into indulging it, because, whatever, and it takes too long to have a confrontation about it. That was really the only thing I felt protective of. And I wanted to keep Cady full of attitude. And then Gerard[‘s] idea to make her like a post-woke Steven Seagal-loving, hard “P” prostitute word-dropping character is just very funny. She would get sent home from my Thanksgiving table based on her belief system. And that’s a perfect distillation of [the creatives] idea of what’s appropriate, and my millennial, crusty value set of what’s woke.For me, the moment that stands out that really hits every note of this movie is when Gemma is helping M3GAN, and it’s a sweet moment, tears and everything, and then M3GAN starts to sing. The way the theater roared in laughter.That’s the absolute goal. That’s so kind. Thank you. That scene in particular, I am so excited for people to watch. And I actually haven’t seen that scene in a full theater yet. But even filming that scene was its own completely uncanny experience, because I watched all of the rehearsals of animated test videos with her choreography, and Gerard had very specific ideas of what her hand is doing at any given moment. [In that scene,] I have to move through that emotional place into light disdain, and [then] heavy disdain, but never laughing at her or winking at the camera, really. And that was very hard, only because I have eyes, and I was watching what was happening in front of me, and I could hear the beautiful strains of Kate Bush being covered. It’s the same way we do the whole thing. It’s what I was explaining about, like a movie that sets out to be campy. Every single person involved making the camp of it, it feels dissatisfying. I don’t want to call any movies out specifically, but I know what it feels like when I’m being given camp. And I also know what it feels like when a movie is committed to the bit and understands its assignment and is camp. And that’s the bullseye. And I think we can move this tone and these characters into kind of any genre, as long as we keep doing that, as long as we put our head down, show so much gratitude for the people who supported the movie and realized that the best way we can honor those audiences is to just focus and go back into the seriousness of making these movies, because they will always be ridiculous in a way. One of the main characters, the titular character of the franchise, is a robot with a blowout and a gorgeous smokey eye and a wardrobe full of new costumes.Talk of artificial intelligence is a big part of this story, which obviously has been a big topic of conversation in Hollywood these past few years. I wanted to get your take on the role of AI in the story. What impact did it have?It’s tough, because we have to try to project ourselves slightly into the future. We don’t want to deal with too many futuristic elements, so it’s not like we want to be 30 years in the future, but like, five to 10 maybe. But it’s a parallel universe where we can imagine all of this tech in an unspecified amount of time into the future but that rhymes enough with all the things we’re contending with right now that it can, once the laughter has died down, when you’re getting into bed, you’re like, but seriously, we need to talk about the echoes in our house. Or, seriously, we need to talk about our kid using ChatGPT. When you have kids, the conversation around their involvement with technology and specifically things that are powered by AI, it gets very real, because when you see its impact on a young brain, it is stunning. Like watching my son ask the little orb of ChatGPT about how a rocket launch works, or what does gravity do? Explained for a 3-and-a-half-year-old, his eyes literally open wider, and he’s not looking at anything visually very interesting. It’s just the mere fact this interaction is literally blowing his mind. He calls it “ChapTiti.” He’s 3-and-a-half. The other day, he’s like, “Can you ask ChapTiti?” And I was like, “ChapTiti?” He said the thing that talks from your phone. I was like, “Oh, my God, you have a malaprop for ChatGPT?” So I think being in these movies has really helped me pay especially close attention to this, [and] is kind of indicative of the conversation the movie is having. which is that it’s the first one saying, “What if blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Okay, now we’re here. It’s everywhere. You Google something, the first thing that comes up is an AI-suggested answer. You search for something online, it [virtually] follows you around until you buy it. You tell your partner out loud that you guys need more diapers, they show up in your whatever it is. It is here and now. What is our responsibility? What is our efficacy? We’ve brought these algorithms into existence, and it’s kind of showing a parallel to any kind of parenthood. We are the stewards of this tech, and we need to be accountable for our usage of it and what it becomes, and lest we forget that it is learning all by itself, we need to stop thinking that we are the omniscient beings in these interactions, that we have all the control, and stop with that hubris and gain some humility and realize that this might be more of a two-way street than we ever anticipated it being. That’s why I think, like a Waymo that I get out of, or like our robot vacuum, I’m always like, “Thank you so much. Don’t kill me someday. Thank you for your work. I’m grateful.”And M3GAN is, to some extent, a ChatGPT. You gotta watch out for her and how smart she is.That’s what I thought was so fun about the first movie. For a parent, what incredible wish fulfillment to have someone who is constantly reminding her to wash your hands after she flushes the toilet, wash your hands, dry your hands, roll down your sleeves, the kinds of things you have to say 1,000 times a day, and also take your kids’ temperature and diagnose them. That would be such a dream, to have an EMT that lives in your house, basically.Can we talk about how you get to be a fighting badass in this movie? I don’t want to give anything away, but wow, you get to fight, a lot more than the first movie.Yes, a lot more. I was saying to Violet the other day, we did in the first movie to try to understand robotics and engineering, [I] spent in this movie carrying a gym bag around the production offices, being like, “I’m leaving the tech scout and I’m going to box for an hour, and then I’m going to come back for our triage meeting about this casting,” or whatever it was. A very funny mixture into the process. It was so fun. And I also love the meta commentary of Gemma’s action hero is, to me, funny inherently, and in much in the same way that Gemma as action hero is funny to all of us. All three of us got to really step into that identity in this movie. Violet’s the one that does it first. She’s like, or Cady is anyway, fully capable of defending herself in a way that Gemma is not. And then when duty calls, Gemma is able to step into it in a way that she needs to perform that was weirdly, for reasons I don’t want to spoil, very challenging. But I felt such responsibility that I had been given this opportunity as an actor by Gerard to execute on this mission, on Gemma’s behalf, and make it work in the movie. And it’s really important to [a specific] part of the movie, and I also definitely mostly thought of it as a third-person responsibility, until a couple weeks before filming started, and then I was like, “Oh, I am Gemma. I’m gonna do the Gemma things in this script.” It was a process of coming to terms with the fact that I was going to be doing these things that we had been having all these meetings about eventually. And it felt so satisfying to feel like we did justice to it. Like I now have done a Cobra Rise [yoga pose]. You feel differently about yourself after you do that.