While her film broke box office records, earning $225.2 million in its five days and becoming the highest-grossing Thanksgiving opening of all time, moana 2 Writer-director Dana Ledoux Miller previously worked at Target.
“I was wearing sweatpants and going to get the Christmas tree with my kids. There’s such a disconnect between what’s happening at the box office and real life,” Miller said with a laugh, adding that her four-year-old child was in trouble during the film’s premiere. Falling asleep during the movie. “You spend a lot of time making something so that people will go see it, and then suddenly, so A lot of people will see it.
When the first Moana At the time of its release in 2016, Miller was working as a screenwriter on TV series such as newsroom, drug lord and designated survivor. Miller, who is of Samoan descent, attended the University of Hawaii before heading to Los Angeles. “I was six months pregnant with my first child and all I remember is the lights went out and the first words were said in Samoan and I immediately started crying,” Miller recalled.
She added: “I went to film school in Hawaii. It’s not that I wasn’t familiar with the local film world, but the scale of a Disney film taking the language of my people and putting it on a global screen, in that moment I knew my children were going to enter a world that was different from the one I grew up in.
The film was a watershed moment in the entertainment industry for Pacific Islanders. “I talk to people all the time and say, ‘I’m Samoan and I have a lot of stories to tell!’ It’s like a blank stare,” Miller said. “If I didn’t pitch [Dwayne] “rock” [Johnsons] Or Jason Momoa, there’s no touchpoint as to what that might mean. and Moanashe had a point of contact, a comp, something to point to.
A few years later, she was in a meeting at Disney and was told that the studio was planning to create an animated TV series about a female lead. But Miller had just sold a Thai cave rescue drama produced by Jon M. Chu to Netflix and was unable to pursue the project. As one can imagine, she wasn’t happy about the missed connection. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this is what I’ve always dreamed of doing, but I can’t do it.’ My manager said, ‘These things always come back. “I was like, ‘You don’t know anything! What do you know!’
But by 2022, the situation has indeed reversed Moana Writer-director Jared Busch and Disney have been in touch about a new live-action version of the film that’s being planned. Miller began working on the film and eventually worked on the animated series, which Busch eventually convinced the studio to make into a second theatrical film. As a result, Miller began co-writing not one but two films Moana The first of the movies starring Bush was released during the Thanksgiving holiday.
moana 2Miller, who co-directs with David G. Derrick Jr. and Jason Hand, is set several years after the first film and follows Moana as she receives a A story about a summons from the ancestors and a journey to the ocean to lift a curse that has been plaguing people. “If she was connected to her past in the first movie, what is she connected to in this movie? We liked the idea of her being hopeful,” Miller said.
In the first film, a group of consultants from the Pacific Islands with varying areas of expertise (from history to agriculture to folklore) come together to form the Ocean Cultural Trust. The trust helped guide Miller and other filmmakers in shaping moana 2. The results, she said, can be seen in the crew members who embarked on the journey with Moana, including farmer Koehler, engineer Lotto and historian Moni.
“They really represent homegrown talent that truly spans oceans,” Miller said. moana 2new role. “We have a farmer in a canoe, which is how they crossed the Pacific thousands of years ago. You can trace the plants they brought with them along the way. They had incredible scientific minds to build these canoes. And, in Before colonization, we had no written language, so we were all oral storytellers.
For her part, Miller founded the nonprofit PEAK to create recreational opportunities for Pacific Islanders in the hope of sparking interest among Pacific Islanders. Moana Movies were born in this industry.
Entering its second weekend at the box office, moana 2 expected to continue its reign. The post-credits scene at the end of the film moana 2 Setting up the conflict for a possible third film. While Disney has yet to announce the next film in the series, Miller said she hopes Moana’s story will continue, saying: “The first film was very much a Polynesian story, but the Pacific is made up of many different of culture and people, so to open up the entire ocean, I think the possibilities are ripe.
