'Moana 2' Co-Director: Dwayne Johnson, Quibi & a Status Quo Shift
I talk to Dana Ledoux Miller, a Pacific Islander and Hawaiian film school grad, about her road to a massive hit. Plus: The National Film Registry
A lot of lists of films have been flying around in the past few weeks, so you’d be forgiven for missing out on one of the quieter but most consequential ones: the annual Library of Congress list of 25 films to be added to the National Film Registry.
Today’s newsletter will mostly be dedicated to my conversation with Dana Ledoux Miller, the co-director of the massive hit Moana 2, who has a lot to say about the years of grinding through the TV business to get to directing a film which has grossed $359 million domestic and almost $800 million globally. But first I want to take a moment to acknowledge the humble National Film Registry — and the good news it brings each year for films that might not have gotten their due the first time around.
I like to think of the National Film Registry as a kind of time capsule, or insurance policy against the vagaries of time. Given Hollywood’s notoriously bad tendencies about preserving its own history, it’s a comfort to know that the 900 titles already on the Registry will remain preserved by the Library of Congress for something approaching forever. Because the film registry is overseen by historians and film scholars — though the public is encouraged to make submissions — the breadth of what’s in there is astonishing, from Thomas Edison’s earliest documentaries (how about that “Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze”!) to Joe vs. the Volcano.
This year’s 25 inductees are similarly diverse, with Oscar heavyweights No Country for Old Men and The Social Network right alongside the early animated film Koko’s Earth Control. You don’t have to be an agreed-upon masterpiece to be historically significant.
But I do like to think of this list as a chance for redemption for some films that were even a little underappreciated in their time. Dirty Dancing and Beverly Hills Cop were treated more as blockbuster filler than instant classics in the 1980s, but now get to live forever. When Edward James Olmos set out to make his directorial debut American Me in 1992, nobody wanted to make it, as he told the Library of Congress. Now it’s officially part of history.
So if you’re the person behind a best picture runner-up this year, the way The Social Network was in 2010, or making a micro-budget indie like Jessie Maple’s Will — another new registry entrant — take heart. Not everyone may be caught up to your genius today, but the Library of Congress may eventually get there.
See the full National Film Registry, including this year’s entrants, here, and get inspiration for your next movie night.
From Hawaii to Hollywood
Dana Ledoux Miller, co-director of one of the biggest movies in the world right now, has an IMDb page that will tell you exactly the kind of Hollywood dues she paid to get here. She was a production assistant on Hawaii productions like The Descendants and Soul Surfer, and is even credited as “on-set wonderwoman” for an indie called All for Melissa. IMDb doesn’t even capture her stint as an intern on the set of Lost, which she did while she was still a film student at the University of Hawaii.
“I don’t think anyone says, ‘I want to go to film school in Hawaii, that’ll really help me make it,’” admits the California native, now 38. “But I don’t think I would’ve gotten confidence in the same way had I gone anywhere else. Hawaii is really the first place where I had ever been that really understood what it meant to be a mixed Samoan person.”
Ledoux Miller, whose father is Samoan, specifically credits director Alexander Payne, on the set of the Hawaii-set The Descendants, taking the time to ask even production assistants like her what they wanted to do with their careers. When she made the leap to Hollywood, working as a writers room assistant on The Newsroom and a series of writers rooms from there, she challenged herself to make pretty much anything but the personal stories she imagined when she was a film student in Hawaii.
“I kind of got obsessed with this idea of, ‘Let’s see if I can make a career out of doing something different every time,” she recalls. “I love character. I love shaping a story. And fundamentally that’s what needs to happen across genres.”
It took a short-lived Quibi series, called Last Resort about a Polynesian family-run resort in Hawaii that’s cast into chaos after a tech billionaire tries to buy its land, executive produced by Dwayne Johnson, who is also half-Samoan, for Ledoux Miller to return to her roots — and realize just how few people in Hollywood shared her heritage. “As the only Pacific Islander writer working, that I know of at the time, I was on a very short list,” she says.
When the Quibi series allowed her to hire a room full of Pacific Islander writers in 2019, it opened her eyes. “I knew fundamentally that there was enough talent to have a room full of Pacific Islanders,” she tells me. “I couldn’t prove it because I’d never experienced it before. So to get to have that — it was so inspiring.”
In 2022 Ledoux Miller cofounded PEAK Pasifika, which aims to support rising Pacific Islander talent in Hollywood. At that point she was also launching her first series as a showrunner, the Amazon series Thai Cave Rescue, for which she teamed up with Wicked director Jon M. Chu. It wouldn’t be long before another collaboration with Dwayne Johnson — and probably the most famous Pacific Islander character in movie history — came calling.
Going Beyond
Ledoux Miller was already at work on the live-action Moana, slated for July 2026, in which Johnson reprises his role as the demi-god Maui, when the team working on Moana 2 asked for her help in early 2023. At that time it was being developed as a Disney+ series, and Jared Bush — a Disney veteran and writer on the original Moana as well as the new ones — thought Ledoux Miller could help shape it into what it could become.
“The show just kept growing in an exciting way, but not in a way that felt like Disney+ could handle,” Ledoux Miller remembers. After internal work-in-progress screenings, the team would be asked by their colleagues, “Why isn’t this a movie?” Eventually Bob Iger and Alan Horn gave their blessing to make it just that, in what now feels like one of the single best decisions of the post-streaming boom: Moana 2 has now outgrossed the original (in nominal dollars though not yet when you factor in inflation), and heads into the lucrative holiday season with room to continue racking up global box office.
Ledoux Miller, who’s credited as a co-director on Moana 2 alongside fellow first-time directors David G. Derrick Jr. and Jason Hand, says it’s a misconception that Moana 2 was hastily assembled from what were originally TV episodes. “We were still very much in the development writing stage,” she says, when the switch was made. “There’d been a little bit animated here and there, but we got to really craft it from the ground up as a feature and that was exciting.”
Moana 2 was a learning curve for Ledoux Miller on many levels, from making an animated film for the first time to crafting a story as a musical. At the same time, “I see more of myself in this film than anything I’ve ever done before,” she says. “The whole ethos of the story is, to me, a declaration of the Pacific Islander worldview — this idea that we are better in community. To me, that is my biggest achievement in the film.”
Ledoux Miller realized only a few weeks ago that she had fully moved past her original film school assumption that she would only ever make movies that nobody would ever see. She’s been revisiting the film in packed theaters full of paying customers as well as getting dispatches from around the country. One friend in Oklahoma texted her from a theater so full of Moana 2 moviegoers that the popcorn machine overloaded and caught fire.
“I don’t think you can prepare yourself for what a Disney animated film response is,” she admits. “I mean, I come from TV. I’m really grateful if people are watching at all.”
