WELCOME TO MARWEN (2018) Production Notes
Everything You Need to Know
A bold, wondrous and timely film from a revolutionary pioneer of contemporary cinema, Welcome to Marwen shows that when your only weapon is your imagination...you can find courage in a most unexpected place.
PRODUCTION INFORMATION
"I have hope, and I have my
town."
-Mark Hogancamp
Academy Award winner ROBERT ZEMECKIS - the groundbreaking filmmaker behind Forrest Gump, Flight and Cast Away - directs STEVE CARELL as a new kind of hero in a movie unlike any that has ever been made before. Based on a miraculous true story, Welcome to Marwen reveals one man's fight to heal himself, and restore his spirit, through the power of his artistic imagination.
When a devastating attack shatters Mark Hogancamp (Carell) and wipes away all his memories, no one expects him to recover. But Mark, putting together pieces from his old and new life, meticulously creates a mythical Belgian town, Marwen, where he can be Captain Hogie, a World War II fighter pilot. Here, in Marwen, Mark can be a hero, fight his enemies, and rely on his friends. As he builds an astonishing art installation peopled with breathtakingly life-like dolls-a testament to the most powerful women he knows-he draws strength from his fantasy world to triumph in the real world.
A bold, wondrous and timely film from a revolutionary pioneer of contemporary cinema, Welcome to Marwen shows that when your only weapon is your imagination...you can find courage in a most unexpected place.
Starring alongside Carell in this genre-defying film is LESLIE MANN (Blockers, The Other Woman) as Nicol, the compassionate neighbor who captures Mark's heart and becomes the newest addition to Marwen. The other significant women in Mark's life, who become his protectors in his fictional town, include Emmy Award winner MERRITT WEVER (Showtime's Nurse Jackie, AMC's The Walking Dead) as Roberta, who works at the hobby store Mark frequents; EIZA GONZALEZ (Baby Driver, Highway) as Carlala, a strong-willed co-worker with whom Mark works at the Avalanche Roadhouse; GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE (HBO's Game of Thrones, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) as Anna, the dedicated homecare worker who visits him monthly; JANELLE MONAE (Hidden Figures, Moonlight) as GI Julie, who befriends Mark during his struggle to walk again; and LESLIE ZEMECKIS (A Christmas Carol, Beowulf) as Suzette, an actress from his favorite adult-fantasy videos who becomes a sexy French Resistance fighter.
DIANE KRUGER (Inglourious Basterds, In the Fade) portrays Deja Thoris, the alluring and enigmatic doll who toys with Captain Hogie, and NEIL JACKSON (HBO's Westworld, Quantum of Solace), who portrays Nicol's former boyfriend - and becomes Captain Hogie's arch enemy in Marwen: an SS Major in the Nazi regime. FALK HENTSCHEL (Transcendence, White House Down) plays one of the men who attacked Mark and who, in Marwen, becomes a sadistic Nazi named Captain Topf.
Working from a screenplay Zemeckis penned alongside CAROLINE THOMPSON (Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas), the director leads an accomplished behind-the-scenes crew that includes cinematographer C. KIM MILES (The Flash, Lost in Space), production designer STEFAN DECHANT (Pacific Rim: Uprising, Kong: Skull Island), editor JEREMIAH O'DRISCOLL (Rings, Allied), costume designer JOANNA JOHNSTON (Allied, The BFG), visual effects supervisor KEVIN BAILLIE (Allied, Star Trek: Beyond) and composer ALAN SILVESTRI (Avengers: Infinity War, Ready Player One).
The film is produced by Oscar-winning producer STEVE STARKEY (Forrest Gump, Flight), JACK RAPKE (Cast Away, Flight), Zemeckis, and CHERYLANNE MARTIN (The Pacific, Flight) of Zemeckis' Universal-based production company, ImageMovers. Welcome to Marwen is executive produced by JACQUELINE LEVINE (Allied, The Walk), and by JEFF MALMBERG, who directed the riveting 2010 documentary, Marwencol, which inspired the film.
THE BACKSTORY
Tragedy and Triumph
The Mark Hogancamp Story
Born in 1962, Mark Hogancamp grew up in a middle-class suburb in New York. Showing artistic promise early on, the eldest of three sons also expressed an unusual curiosity in the world around him. An early example was his fascination with his maternal grandfather, who had lost a leg in World War II-conscripted into the Luftwaffe as an anti-aircraft artillery mechanic to fight under Hitler. Growing up, although Hogancamp did not excel academically, his creative abilities flourished. In the early 1980s he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, his drawings capturing everyday life onboard the ship, and life in Europe, which he experienced during his tour.
While in the service, he married a young Russian-Polish woman whom he'd met while in college. The relationship did not last. Hogancamp spiraled into a period of heavy drinking, erratic employment and frequent visits to rehabilitation. Eventually, he was hired as a kitchen worker, staying sober while on the job but retreating to his home to drink and play guitar. All the while he continued to sketch and paint military miniatures that he gave to friends and sometimes sold.
Then, at age 38, the artist's life was forever changed.
On the evening of April 8, 2000, Hogancamp went to meet friends at a local bar in upstate New York, but by the time he arrived they had already left. Deciding to stay, he engaged in light conversation with a young man at the bar.
At some point in that conversation, Hogancamp revealed something about himself that he generally kept hidden: that he had a fondness for wearing women's shoes. Well past midnight, Hogancamp was drunk and headed home. Outside the bar, he was stopped by the man he'd met earlier and four of his friends. The men brutally attacked him, repeatedly stomping on his head and chest with their boots. They left him for dead in the middle of the road, where he was discovered by a local resident. She parked her car in front of Hogancamp to protect him from traffic while she ran to get help.
The extent of Hogancamp's injuries was beyond the capacity of the local hospital's emergency room, and he was moved to Westchester Medical and placed in a medically induced coma, followed by surgery to repair the extensive damage to his face. After Hogancamp regained consciousness nine days later, his physicians were able to assess the severity of his brain damage. Hogancamp had no memory of the attack itself. He could remember his immediate family, but he'd lost almost all of his adult memories. He also had to re-learn many basic life skills, including eating, walking and reading. He remained hospitalized for 43 days.
When funding for his state-sponsored rehabilitative therapies ran out, Hogancamp was still far from recovered. He spent the next two years sharing an apartment with a friend before moving to a trailer on the outskirts of a mid-sized town in the Hudson Valley, still plagued with crippling anxiety.
It was during this time that he rediscovered his interest in World War II and military miniatures. His shaking hands and loss of dexterity meant he could no longer draw or paint very small models, so he turned instead to 12-inch, 1:6 scale figures-dolls, military figures and action heroes. He discovered a doll he felt faintly resembled himself and named it Captain Hogancamp, "Hogie" for short. Other dolls he acquired approximated friends, family, his attackers and also evil in the world. With painstaking attention to detail, Hogancamp dressed and staged them to reflect their characters and personalities.
Over time, it seemed that a return to a normal life was beyond Hogancamp's reach. Instead, he found refuge in a world of his own creation. Needing a place for his dolls to live, work and play, he set about building a fictitious 1:6 scale World War II-era Belgian town in his backyard-using only his imagination and inexpensive and scavenged materials. Hogancamp's first small building was a bar he called Hogancamp's "The Ruined Stocking Catfight Club."
"I wanted to bring it back-my imagination-because I knew my mind was an eight-cylinder engine that's only running on one cylinder," Hogancamp said in the book Welcome to Marwencol. "So I figured to get it back, I would build my own bar. Because I always wanted my own place. So I built it...and then it looked weird all by itself out there, so I built other buildings to keep it company."
He named two of the buildings after Wendy and Colleen-his first "second-life" crushes-and one after himself. When it was complete, Hogancamp played with multiple combinations of their first names, ultimately settling on Marwencol (Mar-Wen-Col) as the name of his fantasy village.
The artist went on to devise meaningful relationships and narratives for his dolls and, with meticulous staging, he photographed them with an old 35-mm camera. He would capture the dolls' camaraderie, loves, fears, and remarkable adventures with such realism that some people who saw the photos mistakenly thought his subjects were human. His five real-life attackers lived on in Marwencol too-as Nazis who terrorized the town's inhabitants.
In 2005, curious neighbor and photographer David Naugle, who had periodically seen Hogancamp walking along Route 213 in upstate New York towing a miniature military jeep, approached him to find out what he was doing. Hogancamp showed him some of the photographs he had taken of life in Marwencol.
Naugle was amazed at the detail and authenticity of the work and, with Hogancamp's permission, shared them with the editor of the arts journal Esopus, which led to a story about Marwencol in the magazine's 2005 fall issue. The exposure prompted an invitation for a public exhibition of his photographs at a New York gallery. This created a conflict for Hogancamp, forcing him out of the protective bubble of Marwencol-and a life he could control-into the real world to which he was still struggling to return.
The photographic exhibit of Hogancamp's work was enthusiastically received and brought him to the attention of Jeff Malmberg, a documentary filmmaker, with whom he built a rapport and trust. Malmberg's subsequent documentary, Marwencol, was released theatrically by the Cinema Guild in 2010 and also aired on PBS.
It went on to win 25 awards, including two independent Spirit Awards, Best Documentary of the Year from the Boston Society of Film Critics and Rotten Tomatoes, and the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The Los Angeles Times called Marwencol "an exhilarating, utterly unique experience," while the Village Voice said that the documentary is "exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do."
Welcome to Marwencol, a 278-page hardcover art and storybook came next. It, too, received wide acclaim and in 2015 was named one of the Best Books of the Year by Amazon.
Now 56, Hogancamp continues his therapy and his photography of Marwencol.
THE PRODUCTION
Discovering Marwen
A Director, A Star and A Vision
Robert Zemeckis first became aware of Mark Hogancamp's story in 2010 when the filmmaker came across the documentary Marwencol during its airing on PBS. Zemeckis was immediately enthralled. By the time the film had ended, Zemeckis was already seeing the possibilities for a feature-length drama that could expand Hogancamp's journey beyond the boundaries of its short-form. The next morning he was on the phone with Universal Pictures chairman Donna Langley, requesting that the studio obtain the feature film rights to Hogancamp's story. From the beginning, Zemeckis' vision was to take audiences inside Hogancamp's world, to bring his Marwen characters to life and to allow us to see the town and its interconnected narratives through Hogancamp's eyes.
"What's interesting about Mark's story is that he used action figures and fashion dolls to create an entire world that he photographed," Zemeckis says. "In the documentary, I realized that Mark was telling these elaborate stories about what was happening between the photographs. That was the inspiration for me. In a film, those stories can be glued together so they don't have to be narrated by the artist. We can see them unfolding and we can present what's happening to these doll characters from Mark's imagination, and bring them completely to life. I knew it would be powerful, huge and we could do it in a way you've never seen before."
So many of Zemeckis' films focus on the strength of the human spirit, and his interest in Hogancamp's tale spoke to the human will to survive. "That struggle is inherent in all of us; it's a universal theme," Zemeckis says. "While we may never have a level of struggle as severe as what Mark went through, all of us understand the need to heal ourselves emotionally. He had this need to express what was eating him up inside, to be able to put an end to that period of his life and resolve it.
"That's what one of the purposes of art is," Zemeckis continues. "For him to do it through an artistic way, his photographs, I could completely identify with that. Everyone can understand the healing power of art and expressing ourselves artistically. Whether you sing in a church choir, doodle or plant a garden, those are creative acts. We do them so we can process the things in life that are extremely complicated and that we don't understand."
Zemeckis was not the only one who believed this impossible tale of recovery and artistry would make a compelling feature length-film. Steve Carell had also seen the Marwencol documentary and was moved to action by it. "I started digging around to see who might have the rights to it because I thought something could be done with this story," Carell says. "I found out that Bob Zemeckis did, and he'd already worked on a script. So I contacted him. This is the first time I've ever thrown my hat in the ring. There was something so special about this story, and I wanted to be involved in some way. Whether I was in it, was a producer, or had a hand in writing-I just wanted to be a part of it."
Carell's conversations with Zemeckis would lead to Carell being cast in the dual role of Mark Hogancamp and his action-figure alter ego, Captain Hogie. "Steve isn't just a great comedy actor, but he's also a magnificent dramatic actor who would fit the bill perfectly," Zemeckis says. "The other thing Steve can do, like very few actors can, is to play two roles in one film. Captain Hogie is an action hero in the vein of Steve McQueen, and Mark is a very damaged human. I knew Steve could do the swashbuckling deliciously, but I also realized he would be able to play the broken and emotionally scarred Mark character with magnificent levels of emotion and pathos."
For the actor, making sure he portrayed Hogancamp honorably was his paramount concern. "There's a responsibility whenever you're portraying somebody who is a real person," Carell says. "It's incumbent upon you to do that person justice as best you can. Obviously it's not going to be exactly him. It's not going to be exactly his life. It's going to be an interpretation, but at the same time, there are some core qualities to who Mark Hogancamp is, and I don't want those things to be lost. What drew me in to the documentary and to this project is that he's a very courageous guy. He has, against all odds, created his own method of healing. It's astonishing what he's been able to achieve, and the integrity that he has as a human being shines through. I wanted those qualities to be evident in my portrayal of him."
Zemeckis and Carell traveled to upstate New York to meet Hogancamp a month before filming began, a visit which made a deep impression on them both. "First and foremost, Mark is an artist and that's his sensibility," Carell says. "The most important part of meeting him was to try to put his mind at ease that the intentions were pure from our standpoint."
"I just wanted to sit and talk and be a part of his world for a few hours and be very respectful of him because there's a lot to his world," Carell says. "There's a lot to his recovery and to the world he's created. There is a real self-awareness of how other people perceive him and an ease about that, which I found very human. He's also a really good guy."
A Tale of Two Marks
Creating an Inner World
When it came to telling the tale, the filmmakers were careful to distinguish between Mark Hogancamp the real man and Mark the character of the film. The documentary had been elegantly told, and Zemeckis and his fellow producers were interested in exploring themes inspired by Hogancamp's journey.
But committing this character and his story to film was not without its dangers. "A story like this is a huge risk," says producer Steve Starkey. "An emotional journey like the one Mark Hogancamp went through is something that, yes, you can tell in a movie. But to go inside the character and feel him and his journey-from his pain and suffering to coming out the other side redeemed and starting life anew-through the eyes of dolls is a huge leap. Everyone has to embrace and invest in all these characters to follow the trajectory of what Mark is going through."
Carell proved to be the ideal collaborator to do this tale justice. "Steve has shown all aspects of what he's able to do as an actor-revealing a fragility and depth of a wounded character so well," Starkey says. "He's able to get an audience engaged in that character, and at the same time play this heroic doll figure, Captain Hogie, that Mark is playing out in his mind. Often you'll look at an actor and they might embody one or the other, but can they do both and really well? Steve's name is on the list and not many others are."
Those layers of complexity, Carell says, are what makes Hogancamp such a compelling character. "Mark is a guy who has undergone great trauma and has come out the other side damaged, but not completely broken," Carell says. "He is someone who, against all odds, is making a life for himself and flourishing. Like the real Mark, I see this character as a person with a great deal of integrity, warmth and kindness, but with some demons that he's trying to figure out."
And Mark's alter ego, Captain Hogie, represents a fantasy that almost every person can relate to. "We all have a little superhero inside us, and Hogie is Mark's manifestation of that," Carell says. "Hogie is a captain in the Army Air Corps and a very swashbuckling, macho, kind of no-nonsense guy - all of the things, I think, that Mark would hope to be."
But creating the world of Marwen, complete with living dolls modeled on actual people presented the filmmakers with some unprecedented challenges. This movie would require a long preparation time, and the filmmakers were bound by a rigid production schedule, which locked August 14, 2017 as the start of principal photography. "We had to cast the main actors in the movie right away, because we had to create the dolls well before we started filming," Starkey says. "The complexity involved in that, on the surface, may not seem that great, but in casting an actor we had to project out eight months ahead and schedule when they were going to work, exactly, because I had to be able to lock them up for the movie."
The dolls, not the actual actors, determined the tight, and inverted, shooting schedule. "You start the casting process with a schedule laid out by the doll manufacturer, the costume designer and the blueprint of the characters themselves as dolls," Starkey says. "All of that is backing into that date when all 17 dolls have to be ready for camera. The actors themselves will be ready, but it's their dolls we had to focus on."
Every Zemeckis movie is challenging, Starkey says, but breaking through the ceiling of cinema is always thrilling, even when it's difficult. "If you look back at the history of Bob Zemeckis and everyone else he carries along with him, there are no easy movies," Starkey says. "People would say to me, 'Well, wasn't Contact just as hard? Or what about Castaway or when you guys made Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future or Forrest Gump?' It's just the Bob Zemeckis style of moviemaking. He creates a portal where he's able to get to the core of an emotional story through the spectacle that he's created in that particular movie."
"I'm building an army of women. Women rule the world. We're just here to keep them company." -- Mark Hogancamp
Soldiers and Saviors
Casting the Residents of Marwen
A major element of Hogancamp's coping strategy and recovery was to transpose key personalities and emotions-the supportive, protective compassion of the women in his life, the cruelty of his attackers, and the fearlessness of his own alter ego-into the dolls that populate Marwen. "I feel as though men kicked me out of this world, so I made women my catalyst for revenge," Hogancamp told The New York Times in 2015.
For the film, Zemeckis needed to find a world-class cast who could capture both the real people in Mark's life and also the embodiment of what those people mean to him in the figures of living dolls.
"For a filmmaker and a screenwriter, that's fertile creative ground to have a character who takes people in real life and then embellishes them in a way that only an artist can," Zemeckis says. "It's as if everyone Mark meets in life becomes his muse. Volumes are written about painters who have a specific muse that they paint all the time. It's the same thing with Mark. People he meets are his muses, and those who harmed him become the nemeses of his alter-ego."
When audiences first meet Mark in the film, his world of Marwen is already established, but the arrival of a kind, thoughtful new neighbor, Nicol (Leslie Mann), inspires him to introduce a doll version of her into his imaginary world. "It's like watching your inner life and your outer life," says Mann, who first worked with Carell in his breakout movie role, The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, which Carell co-wrote with Mann's husband, director Judd Apatow. "This story makes going back and forth between the two worlds so powerful and interesting, because of what happened to Mark, but that duality of living in two worlds-the real world and the imaginary world-is something we all do, really, each in our own way."
The role of Nicol is pivotal on both an emotional and a narrative level, and it required an actress with great vitality, sensitivity and compassion. "Nicol represents the unattainable fantasy woman who plays the central role of being the doll love interest to Mark's alter ego, Captain Hogie," says producer Jack Rapke. "It's a razor's edge of various conflicting emotions that Leslie has to bring into this character. In Marwen, she is the girlfriend. But in reality, she is just a supportive neighbor, who understands that Mark is damaged and has a crush on her."
Mark fantasizes about a future with Nicol, but Roberta, played by Merritt Wever, is the one who shares his passion for creativity. She works behind the counter at Mark's favorite hobby store and pushes Mark to confront his attackers in court so that he can finally have justice and closure. Mark counts Roberta as a true friend, earning her a place in Marwen.
"Roberta is interested in the things that Mark is, and she has respect for the world that he has created," says Wever, whose multifaceted work in Showtime's Nurse Jackie and Netflix's Godless has earned her critical acclaim. "She's also the person who tells her cousin-who owns a gallery in New York-that she knows this guy who does this work and shows Mark's pictures to him. That facilitates the gallery show at the end of the story."
Mexican actress and singer Eiza Gonzalez, known for her scene-stealing work in Baby Driver, stars as Carlala, a cook from the Avalanche Roadhouse where Mark works who encourages him in real life and in Marwen. "She's a self-made, independent woman," Gonzalez says. "Fun, loyal, loving and caring."
For the performer, the chance to play an avatar allowed her to also explore, and expose, common pop-culture representations of Latin women. "As Carlala in Marwen, I wanted to use the doll as a way of representing stereotypes," Gonzalez says. "It was fun to bring her to life with an absurd, extreme accent, but make her more of a real woman when she's in human form. It was a great opportunity for me to use ethnicity, and the pros and cons of the stereotypes that we have, in a positive way."
Gwendoline Christie, known for her riveting portrayal of the warrior Brienne of Tarth in the HBO fantasy-drama series Game of Thrones, plays Anna, Mark's homecare worker. The Russian native comes by once a month to see that Mark is taking his medication and taking care of himself. "Anna is very self-possessed and stoic," Christie says. "She doesn't find a lot of things funny; she takes things very seriously. Likewise, as a doll, she is very precise when it comes to guarding the town."
Singer/songwriter Janelle Monae received rave reviews when she branched into features with her performances in Moonlight and Hidden Figures. Here she takes on the role of Julie - aka GI Julie in Marwen -- a disabled veteran who now works as a physiotherapist, and who helps Mark at the rehab center as he is learning to walk again. Mark appreciates her steadfast support and her refusal to succumb, or allow him to succumb, to self-pity.
"I was elated when I found out Steve was going to play Mark," Monae says. "It's a perfect role for him. He embodies what this character is and was during that difficult time in his life. There's a certain level of heaviness that comes with Mark, and Steve brings that but also adds in a light humor that only he has, especially when he's Captain Hogie. It's hard not to feel all those levels of emotion watching Steve; he's a masterful actor and I'm so honored to work alongside him."
Another alluring yet tough-as nails-woman of Marwen is Suzette, portrayed by Leslie Zemeckis. Unlike most of the other women in Marwen, Mark has never met her. But she is Mark's favorite actress in his adult-film actress, so Suzette earns a place in Marwen as a sexy French Resistance fighter. Leslie Zemeckis has been married to Robert Zemeckis since 2001 and appeared in three of his previous films: Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol.
"With Bob, it's never about simply wowing you with technology," Leslie Zemeckis says. "It's always about story and heart with him. This is Mark's personal journey but his story is being told in an interesting and unique way."
Rounding out the principal dolls is the enigmatic and disruptive Deja Thoris, the Belgian witch of Marwen. Not inspired by any known human relationship in Mark's life, Deja is mysterious, unpredictable and an agent of change, chaos, and danger. In her portrayal, Diane Kruger, who has mesmerized audiences with her layered work in Inglourious Basterds and the National Treasure franchise, symbolizes the forces allied against Mark's healing and happiness.
"Deja Thoris is a complex character who only appears in the fantasy world," Rapke says. "She represents everything holding Mark back in the world. Deja Thoris does everything she can to tear Captain Hogie down...and therefore tear Mark down in the real world. He has to struggle with this incredible temptress, who is there to prevent him from realizing his greatest self."
Unlike the other actresses, Kruger played a doll with no real-world reference, and worked only during the performance-capture portion of filming. "Most of my character work was against green screen using motion capture, where there's nothing around, which was a first for me," Kruger says. "It was interesting to get to understand how it all works; the logistics of it are quite extraordinary. I have turquoise hair, which I thought was cool, and yet there's a bit of a regret that I never got to wear any of my costumes in real life, as they were added later using visual effects. Still, I did get to do a fun, imaginary accent and fly around in a harness."
Neil Jackson, who chilled audiences as the Headless Horseman on the Fox series Sleepy Hollow, appears in the dual roles of Kurt, Nicol's aggressive former boyfriend who refuses to accept her rejection, as well as a German SS Colonel in Marwen, hell-bent on Hogie's destruction. "We see the Kurt who is appealing and was able to charm his way into Nicol's life, but there's a thinly veiled dark side to him," Jackson says. "When nobody's watching, he wears that pain and anger on his sleeve. Then there is the avatar that Mark creates upon being confronted by Kurt-a colonel in the SS who is cold, calculating and sinister."
For the entire cast, the experience of making the film, and the ideas it represents, were a rare and daring departure from the usual limits imposed on modern on-screen storytelling. "It's important to see this story in a mainstream context, as well as for legendary film director Bob Zemeckis to take this story and to express it," Gwendoline Christie says. "This film is a visual feast, the characters are electric and everybody is so delighted to work with Robert Zemeckis."
THE VISUAL EFFECTS
Living Dolls
Behind the Groundbreaking Special Effects
Mark Hogancamp creates the female dolls of Marwen not only to be Captain Hogie's loyal companions but to serve as his protectors, as they are under constant threat from the invading Nazi soldiers. While it seems no matter how many times the dolls manage to kill their assailants, the Nazis come back to life to attack again. Hence the dolls are armed to the teeth and ready to come to Hogie's defense at a moment's notice.
From both a narrative and production standpoint, the dolls of Marwen were, in many ways, very real characters and were treated as such by the film crew, including in their dialogue and costumes, the buildings they inhabited and the weapons they fired.
The creation of the figurines began months before principal photography. Designed by miniature effects supervisor DAVE ASLING (X-Men:The Last Stand), the dolls were fashioned after the actors themselves-using their own face and body scans. The enhanced facial design was achieved courtesy of Academy Award-winning make-up designer BILL CORSO (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Foxcatcher), who used a new, state-of-the-art technique called digital makeup in his designs.
Visual effects supervisor Kevin Baillie and his team then built these elements into three dimensions, which were 3D printed and painted as part of the model-making process. The dolls were then re-scanned with digital hairstyles that were either printed and put on the doll, or were specifically created by hair designer ANNE MORGAN (HBO's All the Way, Sweet Home Alabama).
Great care was taken to maintain the basic form of the dolls, including their longer necks and toy-like features. The heads were placed on bodies that had limited articulations, so that their joints would be intentionally stiff. This made the Marwen dolls' joint movements similar to what one would find on 1:6 scale products, and their movements match the movements of 2006-era dolls, when the real-life Mark Hogancamp was populating his Marwencol with them. (Doll joint articulation has advanced in the 12 years since then.)
For Zemeckis, the trick with each doll was to capture the essence of the actor, without losing either its doll-ness or the human-ness of the actor. Finding the balance was not always easy, and required an obsessive attention to detail. "It was about constantly studying what makes a compelling fashion doll, something you can't take your eyes off of-and then trying to make sure that we could inject that into our characters and create our own dolls," Zemeckis says. "If you saw them on a toy-store shelf, you'd say they're beautiful, but you wouldn't say, 'That doll looks exactly like Steve Carell!' But if you looked at it long and hard enough...you'd say 'That doll looks exactly like Steve Carell. That was the sweet spot we were looking for."
Carell himself respectfully disagrees. "My doll is way more handsome than I am," he says, laughing. "But I appreciate that in this alter-ego world I got to be such a stud. Why wouldn't you want to be in that movie? It's a fantasy come true!"
Millimeters of Accuracy
The Apex of Performance-Capture
Unlike many films, in which the visual-effects department begins its work in post-production, this epic drama required a great deal of key foundational character decisions months before a single frame was shot. Hence, much of the process was in reverse, with the team wrapping their heads around the gymnastics of all creative departments coordinating in such an intricate manner.
Early on the larger question for Zemeckis' crew was: How do we capture Mark Hogancamp's two realities-the actual world and the doll one of Marwen? "When Bob first pitched it to me, we had no idea how we were going to do it," Baillie says. "Initially, we thought we would build a large town on a big sound stage and dress the actors; then they would treat them in post to make them look like dolls-add joints and slim them down to G.I. Joe or Barbie proportions."
Early tests proved that was absolutely not going to work; not only would it prove inordinately expensive, it would be ridiculously difficult to film. The more Baillie's team investigated, the more it became evident that they should shoot the actors on a motion-capture stage. That would allow the filmmakers perfect performances, and the artists could design the doll bodies exactly the way that they wanted them to look.
Zemeckis was acutely aware that capturing emotion in the facial expressions of the dolls through their eyes and dialogue was also paramount to telling their stories. By using the faces of the actors and merging them seamlessly with their digital counterparts, the filmmakers hoped to create a persuasive depiction of the human characters inside their doll avatars.
During the motion-capture stage, Zemeckis' team filmed the performers to determine what they would look like as miniatures. "Then the digital cameras could go in and read the pores of the actors' faces and transpose that digital imagery onto the three-dimensional dolls' face," Zemeckis says. "That allowed us to make the dolls' faces move exactly like the actors'."
A moving-image capturing device, a 6k camera, proved to be one of the production's best friends. "We lit the motion-capture stage, which nobody ever does, and then used the body motion of all the actors, including their eyes and mouths," Baillie says. "That combination, at the end of the day, effectively allowed it to look as good as motion capture could ever look. We got beautifully stylized dolls, with every ounce of performance that these actors have poured into their doll characters, visible on screen."
Cinematographer C. Kim Miles' work served as counterpart to the monumental efforts of Baillie's crew. "Half of the movie is live-action, where we go out onto location and shoot using amazing cameras," Baillie says. "The sensor in the Alexa 65s is the same size as what they shot for Lawrence of Arabia, so you get this beautiful, buttery depth of field, which Kim and his team used to its fullest effect. The other half of the film, where you're in the fantasy world, we're shooting on a motion-capture stage-with very little to see there. It's a gray void surrounded by blue screen and 60 or so infrared sensing cameras surrounding this volume."
That's where the magic happens. "Infrared cameras sense dots that the actors wear on their body suits," Baillie says. "These dots tell our system where the actors are in that space, so we can record all of their body motions-down to a few millimeters of accuracy. That way, we got the full performance of the actors from all these cameras. What's also unusual for a motion-capture movie is that we took those same Alexa 65 cameras used during the live-action portion of filming, and we shot the motion-capture stage."
THE COSTUMES
Wardrobe and Weapons
Dressing (and Arming) the Dolls of Marwen
Academy Award-nominated costume designer Joanna Johnston, who has designed costumes for Zemeckis' films over a period of 30 years, was as moved by Mark's story when she watched the PBS documentary as Zemeckis and Carell had been. "The further I got into it, the more I realized the extraordinariness of this man," she says. "You just couldn't imagine it. You couldn't make it up."
The first of many challenges for Johnston was having to approach her design of the costumes essentially backwards-creating the wardrobe of the dolls in order to have them ready for the CGI technicians to be able to start their work.
Though the dolls were only 1:6 in scale, Johnston was keenly aware of the importance of every detail, knowing that the clothing would help lend realism to the Marwen characters and ultimately be viewed as larger-than-life images on theatrical screens. Without the actual dolls, which were still being constructed, at her disposal, she began her creative process in a small workshop in London, and worked with fabrication and prosthetics expert JANET BURNS (Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) to design and compile the small, delicate items the dolls would need.
Johnston discovered a whole doll world she had never imagined. "I didn't like dolls when I was a child; I was always chucking them out," she says, laughing. "Now there are mini-findings for dolls, mini-doll shoes, mini-doll-Velcro fastenings. We learned as we went. We made a load of mistakes, chucked them out and went again. Notably, our dolls are really good-looking. They've got great figures, good busts, tiny waists, nice hips and they've got long legs and tiny feet. They wear clothes very well, so once you do the job properly, the clothes look quite good."
In testing and choosing her fabrics, Johnston often worked from existing clothing that she re-cut, as well as from fabric samples. "The brilliant thing in this is that you don't need any yardage," she says. "I managed to make whole outfits with fabric samples, which are just little scraps around 10 centimeters."
In WWII Marwen, all the characters are heavily armed to protect their town, and each other, from Nazis. To complete the militarized elements of each doll, the props department researched period-specific weapons and other décor for both the Axis and Allied soldiers. Then, they went looking to purchase or create those elements in doll sizes. Adorned with character-specific wardrobe and weaponry, the dolls were again photographed, scanned and replicated perfectly in the digital world.
"Unlike with most movies, where we can do a lot of these things in post-production, we had to make a lot of key foundational character decisions for this movie months before we ever shot a single frame," VFX supervisor Baillie says. "We had to collectively get our heads wrapped around the gymnastics of all these departments coordinating in a way that is normally never done."
Orchestrating the stances and body language of the completed figurines, for both the live-action film scenes and for the recreation of the still photos that Hogancamp took, required a critical skill set. Luckily, prop master ROBIN MILLER (The Grand Budapest Hotel) knew of someone who had worked in props for years and who, amazingly, had the added specialty of photographing collectible toys for a popular website.
Deadpool's D. MARTIN MYATT (better known to the film crew as "Ringo") became the doll-unit technical director, an unusual branch of the property department. Tasked with positioning the figurines in life-like poses, Ringo worked closely with specialty costumer HEATHER OSBORNE (The Predator)-who maintained the dolls' wardrobes and kept track of the continuity of the costumes for each scene.
Ringo, in a battle of millimeters, posed the dolls to achieve Zemeckis' vision. "I was lucky to have a lot of time with Bob before we went to camera, where we were able to discuss these characters," Myatt says. "I had a better idea of how he envisioned the characters right from the beginning. I read the script numerous times and dissected the characters, trying to figure them out. I needed to understand how the movie's Mark envisioned the girls, as well as how the real Mark achieved his photography. In my mind, these were always real characters that were just shaped like dolls."
THE PRODUCTION DESIGN
No Detail Too Small
Marwen Comes to Life
Production designer Stefan Dechant first collaborated with Zemeckis as a production illustrator on Forest Gump, and has subsequently teamed with the director on a number of other films. "Bob is that this is a man who likes to keep the camera in motion, and the camera arm is his paintbrush," Dechant says. "I knew that every set we built had to accommodate his movement of the camera."
In approaching the design of Welcome to Marwen, Dechant studied the life of the real Mark Hogancamp and layered it into the set. The intention was not to imitate Hogancamp, but to create a filmic version of the character that Zemeckis had imagined. It was crucial to the entire design team to be honest about Mark's work and not make him or his town a caricature. Every decision made was based on one question: "Are we being honest to this incredible artist?"
"The film is about a man who's creating art," Dechant says. "So I wanted to look at the environments that surround Mark and make sure that we reflected that. What do these environments have to do with his process? The palette of his trailer where he lives is all nicotine and caffeine because that's what Mark's running on. He lives only for Marwen, and he is surrounded by bits and pieces of projects that haven't been completed. There's a model plane hanging on the wall and pulp art from a 1950s men's magazine with Nazi fetish paintings in it."
As the audience transitions between the trailer and the village of Marwen, the palette of the film changes from sepia tones to vibrant color. Although the actual real-world Marwencol is a single row of about eight to ten buildings, Dechant and team designed the film version of Marwen to look like a studio back lot.
"We wanted to build our own world at a scale that just happens to be one-sixth, but we didn't want to be beholden to it," Dechant says. "We didn't want to make windows like those in the real world or doors of the proper proportions. In fact, at first we were getting concerned about what the interiors would be like. We began with the church and ended up creating a structure that was way too big. Basically, we had created an actual church at one-sixth scale and then realized what we needed to do was to create a church that worked for the dolls."
The real Mark Hogancamp designed his environments to work for just a single image, but Zemeckis' film set had to work for a camera with moving images. "The Ruined Stocking bar set had to be big enough so that all the girls could dance in there," Dechant says. "But it couldn't be so big that it took over Mark's entire trailer. Those were some of the design challenges, and it was also the difference between our filmmaking and the real Mark's still photography."
Throughout the process, it was important to Zemeckis that the film's sets maintain an honest quality. The real Marwencol is built primarily from collected and scavenged objects and materials, so the challenge for the filmmakers was to replicate that look, and not create a Marwen that looked like it was built my a millionaire.
A storytelling choice Zemeckis' team agreed upon was to build the Ruined Stocking to be an exterior and an interior. "In the film, Mark has chopped a hole in his trailer and built his scale-model Ruined Stocking-so it could be both outside the trailer and inside," Zemeckis says. "This allowed him to be out of the weather and the elements and have his adventure going on all night long if he so chooses. That's one of the modifications that the movie did that wasn't in the real Mark's town of Marwen."
Set decorator HAMISH PURDY (The Revenant) and his crew worked to lend further authenticity to Dechant's designs, both in the full-size world and the doll one. The team's usual goal, when working on miniatures for a movie, is to make the objects look perfectly realistic. Not so this time. Instead, the objective was to make the furnishings and details of Marwen look as realistic as Hogancamp himself would have been able to achieve.
"What Mark does when he creates his world is that he doesn't try to make it an absolutely perfect miniature," Zemeckis says. "He just wants to evoke what a miniature little town would be emotionally. That was the trick for Stefan [Dechant]: how to make Marwen in a way that, subconsciously, we are subtly reminding the audience that this town is all made out of scrap plywood. And doing that without losing the real beauty of places like the little bar and the church."
The most pivotal set to be built was Mark's trailer, where more than two and a half weeks of filming took place. "When we were building the interior of Mark's trailer, which-under any other circumstance-would be a very simple set, we knew that it had to function on a level so that Bob could be extremely creative," Dechant says.
To accomplish this, the team sliced up all the trailer's components and rigged them so that every wall could float to the ceiling and every ceiling piece could float out into the stage. "We built a trailer where Bob could be there with his actors, and with Kim Miles, his director of photography," Dechant says. "This way they could create and not have to worry about the limitations of the environment. Everything was designed so that we were supporting Bob's cinema."
Purdy began with references from the real trailer-the way Hogancamp lived, what was important to him when working on his dolls. The set decorator referenced both the Marwencol documentary and the book, and was further aided by photographs taken during Zemeckis and Carell's visit with Mark Hogancamp.
"If you put yourself in the characters' shoes for a bit and think about it while you're dressing a set, it comes together quite naturally," Purdy says. "The amount of dishes in the sink, what Mark obsesses about, what's important to him and what's at hand. If Mark's always working on the Ruined Stocking bar, which has pierced right through his living room wall, there should be a certain amount of tools at the ready for him."
Purdy's team painstakingly dressed the principal buildings in Marwen-which included a bar, church, patisserie, tobacconist, bank, fountain and several burned-out buildings, some of which were exterior facades only. The most detailed and elaborate of these structures was the Ruined Stocking. The bar is on the main level and upstairs is the women's dormitory where all the female dolls, with the exception of Deja Thoris, sleep every night. Naturally, each bed has its own style.
"A lot of detail went into the dormitory, as well as the bar downstairs," Purdy says. "There were things we put in the Ruined Stocking bar in miniature that Mark might have derived from his real life. For example, in our movie he works at the Avalanche Roadhouse. So in the Avalanche set, we decorated behind the bar with large multicolored Christmas lights. In the Ruined Stocking set, I made sure to have small Christmas lights behind the bar so you would connect the two. There's a jukebox in the Avalanche Roadhouse. Therefore in the Ruined Stocking bar, there's what Mark considers a jukebox, which is a speaker and a couple of candle lights next to it. We crossed over, back and forth, to influence the doll houses with the things that Mark would have seen in his daily life."
Art Imitates Art
Recreating Hogancamp's Photography
Hogancamp's astonishingly realistic 35 mm photographs of Marwencol and its inhabitants brought him international acclaim, so the filmmakers dedicated themselves to ensuring that the photographs of Marwen that they created for the film expressed the detail, artistry, realism and, above all, sincerity that makes Hogancamp's photography so extraordinary. "What Mark does is that he just takes a pictures that are completely honest," Zemeckis says. "They're devoid of any irony; it becomes incredibly powerful. He sometimes doesn't worry whether things are a bit out of scale or if there's a glimpse of the real world in the background. That becomes this purity that allows his photos to exist on a level all their own."
Producer Starkey worked with unit photographer ED ARAQUEL and doll technical director D. Martin Myatt (aka "Ringo") to try and recreate that authenticity. "When you set up a tableau, it's not just taking pictures of dolls," Starkey says. "It's setting them into a situation filled with the emotion of a specific time and place, and where they're all active in a single moment. It took finding a rhythm and asking questions to feel that. 'How should they be placed in that jeep? What should her attitude be, and his? Where are they going and why? Why did they stop there? What are they looking at?' That's challenging work."
Under the guidance of Zemeckis, they got there. "It was a lot of fun," Starkey says. "It also humbled me when I started looking more closely at Mark Hogancamp's photographs and saw how much he did instinctively and artistically. I thought, 'My God, he's really good.' The doll photography was a big challenge and ultimately went on display, side-by-side with some of the real Mark Hogancamp's work in our gallery- exhibit scene in the film."
Myatt relished the chance to celebrate a fellow artist's work. "I remember the first time I came across Mark's photography," Myatt says. "Though it was very different than my own work, I always admired it. I looked at how he was able to defy gravity using the simplest of tools and I drew inspiration from his photos. It was an absolute pleasure to be able to help create something that honors his work. Speaking as a photographer, it was phenomenal to be a part of the re-creation of some of his storylines and his concepts using these fantastic dolls on the film set of a Robert Zemeckis movie."
For Zemeckis himself, the entire film was designed to honor not just the art, but the man who created it. "The emotional scarring and healing is the most inspiring part of Mark's story," Zemeckis says. "He was able to take the pain of what he went through, process it and turn it into this magnificent art. I'm proud that this film stays completely true to Mark's emotional journey. That was something I couldn't tamper with. It's not simply an amazing dramatic story; it's an uplifting story from a human point of view."
THE LOCATIONS
The Great North
Shooting in Vancouver, B.C.
Principal photography began on August 11, 2017, in Vancouver, British Columbia-and its surrounding municipalities-for an ambitious nine-week production schedule. The first location was Riverview Hospital, a mental-health facility that was established in 1913 and that was mostly shuttered by 2012. Now, the vacant structures are often used for film and TV production. Welcome to Marwen accessed one such building to serve as Mark's physical rehabilitation facility. There he meets GI Jane, who encourages his efforts as he slowly learns to walk again.
The company then moved to McTavish Road, at a rural location in Abbotsford, that the filmmakers felt best matched the real Mark's neighborhood in upstate New York. On one side of the street, the exterior of Mark's mobile home was constructed, along with the outer walls of Marwen. Across the street, they fabricated the exterior shell of the yellow house that Nicol has purchased to start a new life away from her belligerent boyfriend, Kurt. The house was situated so that its front door was visible from Mark's front window.
Over the next three days, scenes such as Nicol's move into her home, Kurt's unwanted visits, and Mark and Nicol's early meetings were filmed. Some of the exterior scenes of Mark prepping and photographing his Marwen dolls and buildings also took place at this locale.
While the art, set-decoration and construction departments continued to prep upcoming venues, cast and crew began 12 days of stage work at a studio located in Burnaby. Here, the exterior of Mark's and Nicol's homes were re-created, but with their interior sets completely dressed as well. The two homes were surrounded by expansive blue-screen draping to allow the visual-effects team to match the exterior surroundings in postproduction. This location was also where intricate filming of Mark, his dolls and the town of Marwen was accomplished.
Back on the road, the next location was Dewdney Truck Road in Maple Ridge, where a vacant building was overhauled and transformed into the Avalanche Roadhouse. This is the bar where Mark has part-time employment and befriends Carlala, who works in the kitchen, and Larry, the owner. It is also the place where Mark is viciously beaten by five assailants and left in the street to die.
Three days later, filming began in the picturesque town of Fort Langley. There, a local antique store on the main road through town was transformed into Al's Hobby House, the shop where Mark spends many hours scouring its shelves looking for supplies, new miniatures and dolls to enhance his art installation. His friend Roberta works behind the counter, supporting his creative endeavors as well as serving as a listening ear during his emotional ups and downs.
The scene of Mark's inaugural photographic exhibition of Marwen at Pillar's Gallery in New York was filmed in a converted building on Railway Street on the outskirts of downtown Vancouver. Here, more than a dozen large, five feet-by-eight-feet blow-ups --comprised of iconic photographs by the real Mark Hogancamp and those created by Starkey, Myatt and the film's creative photography team-were put on display.
The dramatic sequence inside the courthouse, where Mark summons the courage to testify against his assailants, took place on a soundstage. This was necessary for the complex lighting and camera work required to shoot the human versions of Mark and his five assailants interacting with their doll counterparts-Captain Hogie and five Nazi soldiers, who engage in a fierce shootout within the courtroom's walls.
Location and stage work now complete, the company moved onto the motion-capture volume stage in Burnaby and, over the course of 14 days, combined the magic of motion-capture technology and brilliant cast performances to bring the dolls of Marwen to life.
Additional Background
Mark Hogancamp's Gender Expression
Mark Hogancamp was brutally attacked by five men outside a bar in April 2000 because Hogancamp had communicated to one of them during the evening that he liked to wear women's shoes. Since his recovery, Hogancamp was been more open about this aspect of his gender expression, and it is an integrated aspect of who he is as a person and how he is represented in the film. Because Hogancamp himself has chosen not to label this part of his gender identity, the filmmakers chose not to, either. Hogancamp's view, and the filmmakers', is simply that Hogancamp is exactly who he is, and he does not want or need to be defined by others.
That said, it was clear that the assault that almost took Hogancamp's life was motivated by a hatred of anyone who does not express gender in a binary, hetero-normative way, and the filmmakers did not shy away from that fact. "This certainly was a hate crime," producer Rapke says. "And we stand 100 percent against any type of crime motivated by hate. The movie is not necessarily about that, but if audiences can experience the tragic consequences for the victims of those assaults, perhaps we can increase awareness and sensitivity on this issue. Mark survived, but many others have paid the ultimate price for the ignorance and hatred of others."
Welcome to Marwen tells a universal story of bravery, resilience, and healing through art in a way that both respects Mark's gender expression and introduces it in a way that, the filmmakers hope, will help people see him as a person first and foremost, and accept him for who he is.
It was this aspect of this story that moved many of the cast, including Leslie Zemeckis. It's sad to see the prevalence of intolerance and prejudice in our world today and I think that is exactly what is being worked out in this film" she says. "This story shines a light on these injustices."
