Robert Zemeck­is: ​‘We’re very close to hav­ing com­plete­ly syn­thet­ic actors’

With more than four decades of Hol­ly­wood moviemak­ing under his belt, Robert Zemeck­is knows a thing or two about cut­ting it in a ruth­less, rapid­ly-evolv­ing indus­try. From achiev­ing ear­ly suc­cess with Romanc­ing the Stone and Back to the Future, to strik­ing awards gold with For­rest Gump and Cast Away, to break­ing new tech­ni­cal ground with Who Framed Roger Rab­bit and The Polar Express, the Illi­nois native has amassed a remark­ably var­ied and for­ward-look­ing filmography.

Through­out his career Zemeck­is has always piv­ot­ed between glossy spe­cial effects vehi­cles and more inti­mate char­ac­ter stud­ies, but his work always retains a sense of artis­tic flair and show­man­ship. These two modes com­bine to cap­ti­vat­ing effect in Wel­come to Mar­wen, which drama­tis­es the trag­ic yet life-affirm­ing true sto­ry of Mark Hogan­camp (as played by Steve Carell), who built a minia­ture world to escape his own real­i­ty. We sat down with the direc­tor to chat about the mak­ing of the film, the cur­rent tech­ni­cal inno­va­tions chang­ing the face of main­stream cin­e­ma, and the eerie pre­science of Back to the Future Part II.

LWLies: When did you first become aware of Mark Hogancamp’s story?

Zemeck­is: I had no idea about any of it until I watched the doc­u­men­tary, which would have been around 2010.

And what drew you to it specif­i­cal­ly? It’s almost like a work of Hol­ly­wood fiction.

Exact­ly, this sto­ry is so amaz­ing that it could so eas­i­ly be a work of fic­tion. The thing I was most tak­en by is the under­ly­ing theme of the heal­ing pow­er of art. Art helped our hero process this debil­i­ta­tion and this trau­ma. The oth­er thing is these elab­o­rate sto­ries that he played out in his mind, that were going on in the doll world. I thought, well wouldn’t it be inter­est­ing to see those – to see that imag­i­nary world pre­sent­ed on screen. So that’s where it becomes fic­tion­alised of course. And that’s where you’re right, it could eas­i­ly be fic­tion, and that part of the movie is total­ly fiction.

There’s an inter­est­ing thread in your fil­mog­ra­phy of sto­ries cen­tred on every­man char­ac­ters who build alter­nate real­i­ties around them­selves, some­times out of neces­si­ty as in Cast Away or For­rest Gump, some­times like The Walk and Wel­come to Marwen.

Look­ing back on it I can see a con­nec­tion there, but what attract­ed me to all those sto­ries was the jour­ney of the char­ac­ters. They’re at this cri­sis point in their life and they have to get to this point where they grow, and I guess at the end of the day they’re life-affirm­ing stories.

Was the real-life Mark involved at all?

Only in the sense of read­ing him the screen­play, show­ing him what the images were going to look like. But no I didn’t bur­den him with try­ing to unload a lot of his per­son­al life into what was going on here, I just kin­da took the most dra­mat­ic bits of his life and then sort of con­densed it into this story.

Per­for­mance cap­ture is such an impor­tant part of this film. As some­one who helped to bring this dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy into the main­stream, how do you think it might be used in the future?

Well, I don’t have any agen­da about the future, but I think that we’re very close to… or the world is very close to gen­er­at­ing a com­plete­ly syn­thet­ic actor.

What are your thoughts on that?

My thoughts are that, you know, I’m sure what’s going through your mind is ​‘you’re pre­dict­ing the end of actors’ but I’m not doing that at all. I think that we have to take a les­son from what we know about music – machines can gen­er­ate every sin­gle sound of an orches­tra to per­fec­tion, but you still need a human musi­cian to play a key­board. There will be two-dimen­sion­al actors, and then there will be these vir­tu­al act­ing spe­cial­ists, and you may not ever know what they look like in their human form. But they’ll be the dri­vers, or pup­peteers, if you will, of these act­ing avatars, which will or will not have a place in the world I don’t know, we’ll find out.

I was read­ing recent­ly about how VR is going to trans­form the com­mer­cial mod­el of main­stream movie-making.

I get asked about that all the time, but what I can’t fig­ure out is what kind of sto­ries will be told, and how it will actu­al­ly engage view­ers. Does some­one want to do that much work to have to fig­ure out where to look? To almost be part of the sto­ry? I don’t know how to crack that nut. That’s a whole dif­fer­ent art form. I guess if you’re being stalked by some­one and you have to escape them or if you’re look­ing for trea­sure – some­thing that’s active – then it might be com­pelling, but if you’re being told a sto­ry, don’t you just want to be told a story?

I recent­ly rewatched Back to the Future Part II and the alter­nate real­i­ty scene with Biff as the sort of Trumpian fig­ure real­ly jumped out at me. How much that was inspired by events at the time?

We basi­cal­ly mod­elled the gaudi­ness of Biff on Trump because he had these lav­ish casi­nos in Atlantic City and he had gold on every­thing. But I was just on a Parisian TV show and they actu­al­ly had Trump and Biff togeth­er and they were there sort of blam­ing Back to the Future 2 for get­ting Trump up there! I guess we were pre­dict­ing all these things that came true.

What do you love about movies?

What I love about movies is that you get to be tak­en on this jour­ney, and brought into this life and world of com­pelling char­ac­ters when they’ve real­ly done well and there’s noth­ing more inter­est­ing to expe­ri­ence than that.

Wel­come to Mar­wen is out now on Blu-ray and DVD.