Mars
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Mars

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It’s the closest confirmed planet yet to another Earth and a fitting conversation starter for our chat with Marslett: not just because Mars is a tale of interplanetary discovery, but because Marslett himself minored in science history as an undergraduate. The course found him and his classmates charting the trajectories of the heavens using ancient astronomer’s tools known as Ptolemy sticks. All things celestial have fascinated him ever since. “[Making Mars] was a chance for me to take something I already liked learning about and explore it more,” he enthuses. “Filmmaking lets you take an idea – in this case, travelling to Mars and exploration – and really dive into it for a while and learn all you can absorb about it.”

Mars follows the unlikely romance that flowers between a pair of astronauts on the first peopled mission to the Red Planet. In keeping with the tradition of independent American science-fiction cinema – think Dark Star, American Astronaut, or The Flaming Lips’ backyard space odyssey, Christmas On Mars – it’s a gleefully eccentric affair, absurd and satirical in equal measure. The U.S. President, for instance, is a louche, cigar-puffing cowboy played by Texan singer-songwriter cum politician Kinky Friedman and snot – yes, snot, meaning nasal effluent – plays a pivotal part in the story. Other cast members include mumblecore stalwart Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Humpday) as the story’s sartorially-fixated would-be hero and relative newcomer Zoe Simpson as a Kiwi-born astronaut who’s harboured dreams of Martian adventure since childhood.

Marslett says that while he’s long been a sci-fi aficionado – “The first movie I ever saw was Star Wars. I think I was probably hooked from there” – he was equally inspired by the peculiar worldviews of the American filmmakers who pioneered that country’s independent film movement in the ’80s. “I’ve always been drawn to the strangeness of something like a Jim Jarmusch film,” Marslett explains, adding David Byrne’s True Stories and “some of Hal Hartley’s early work” to his list of personal touchstones. “They’re these movies that are ostensibly about something – David Byrne’s film is ostensibly about Texas, but when you watch it, it’s a lot more about David Byrne. I’ve always really liked that: seeing these worlds that people had that freedom to make.”

Given the idiosyncrasy of its vision, it’s surprising to learn that Mars wasn’t always intended as the animated science-fiction rom-com mĂ©lange that’s spent 2011 playing at film festivals world-wide. The film’s comic-book slash webtoon aesthetic has been so painstakingly achieved, and its wry, affable sensibility so finely-tuned, that it’s easy to presume the film has been a passion project of Marslett’s for years. This isn’t quite the case. Mars was born out of the collapse of an entirely separate project. When its funding fell through, Marslett turned to his producer Robert Howell and said, “We don’t have any [third party] funding now: we just have our funding. I have this idea for a film. I’ll write it up. It’s much cheaper. We can do it fast and inexpensively – are you still in?”

Howell of course said yes, a decision Marslett partly attributes to their already having rented studio space for a film shoot. “I really wanted to write this idea I’d had which was essentially equating exploration and romance,” he elaborates. “I’d had ideas for writing that to be a live-action film, where the characters either travel to Europe, or went out west. But I’d just finished writing the [animation software] that would allow me to do the animation process we ultimately used on Mars. I went back to that idea and said, ‘What would be a greater first date than a trip to Mars?’ I actually wrote the script very quickly then, over about a six week period. But it was based on ideas I’d been wanting to make a film on for at least two or three years.”

The animation was achieved by a crew of just six animators, for the most part, who incorporated various techniques, including the rotoscoping method used by Richard Linklater for A Scanner Darkly. This involves the shooting of real footage with actual actors against green screens. The methods by which Marslett and co. then transformed this footage into the arresting aesthetic desired for Mars is lengthy and complicated, but needless to say, their efforts have been well rewarded.

By Marslett’s calculations, Mars was produced for literally one millionth of the advertised production budget of The Adventures OfTintin. “We get compared to other quote unquote ‘independent’ animated films [like] A Scanner Darkly, or Waking Life, or Triplets Of Belleville. [But] I always have to remind people that these are films that were made on literally hundreds of times our budget. They’re not ten times our budget; they’re literally 250 times our budget.”

The production was entirely self-financed: Howell cashed in his retirement plan and Marslett maxed out his credit cards. “We should be getting compared to mumblecore films!” he asserts. “Even some of those films are more expensive [than Mars]. We were on the level of these movies which are often two people in an apartment, just talking to each other.”