It didn’t take long for Welcome To Marwen director Robert Zemeckis to realize that the 2010 documentary Marwencol had all the ingredients for a feature film adaptation.
“I was channel surfing one night and it was playing on PBS,” Zemeckis tells Metro. “After about 15 minutes I started to think there was the germ of an idea that could be expanded into an interesting and compelling feature film.”
The story that Zemeckis found so “hopeful” was that of Mark Hogancamp, who after being violently assaulted and left for dead by five men just for admitting to being a crossdresser constructed and photographed a miniature World War II village in an attempt to regain his memory.
“It is about the triumph of the human spirit,” explains Zemeckis. “Even more than that I was fascinated by the idea that it spoke to the healing power of art. That it was vital that this guy invented a new art form because he couldn’t draw anymore.”
“He used that new art form of photography to create this world that allowed him to process this incredibly tragic thing that happened to him. I thought that was really magnificent.”
Is Welcome To Marwen true?
When Welcome To Marwen dives into the doll-world that Mark has created we see animated, doll-like versions of Steve Carell, who plays Hogancamp, as well as Leslie Mann’s Nicole, Merritt Wever’s Roberta, Janelle Monae’s GI Julie, Eiza Gonzalez’s Caralala, and Gwendoline Christies’s Anna, each of whom perform the heroic actions that Mark envisions, which helps him to deal with his PTSD.
In order for Welcome To Marwen to work, Zemeckis knew it was integral that these animated sequences blended perfectly with the real world scenes, especially when it came to tone.
“You don’t want it to be sentimental or melodramatic. It is a balance that you have to do in most stories that you tell.”
“The key to it is dealing honestly with things that are very much real and not sugarcoat them or make them a fairy tale story. I could do that in the doll world, but not in the real world with Mark.”
But while Zemeckis was so inspired by Mark Hogancamp’s story and art that he immediately set out to write and direct Welcome To Marwen, he only used the real events as a springboard rather than strictly adhering to the truth.
“It is not another documentary,” says Zemeckis. “But it certainly uses the real events as big bullet point events in his life story. As an outline if you will. As a springboard.”
“But most of the movie is more fictionalized, rather than it being another document again of what happened to him. Because in the documentary he tells us the story. It’s not dramatized in anyway.”
There’s one important distinction between Marwencol and Welcome To Marwen, too, insists Zemeckis.
“The key difference between the two is I saw that in-between these photographs he took were these elaborate story in the doll world that were only in his mind’s eye. I thought that should be where most of the movie takes place, in the doll world.”
Welcome To Marwen is released on Dec. 21.
