Interview (Written): Angela Robinson
Writer-director of the movie ‘Professor Marston and the Wonder Women”.
Writer-director of the movie ‘Professor Marston and the Wonder Women”.
Angela Robinson’s writing credits include the movie D.E.B.S. and episodes of the TV series The L Word, Hung, True Blood, and How to Get Away With Murder. Her newest movie is Professor Marston and the Wonder Women.
IMDb plot summary: The story of psychologist William Moulton Marston, the polyamorous relationship between his wife and his mistress, the creation of his beloved comic book character Wonder Woman, and the controversy the comic generated.
An excerpt from an interview with Robinson via The Verge:
Wonder Woman is an inroad to this story, and a framing device, but she isn’t the primary focus here. As you were writing it, how did you approach balancing your story between the origins of this popular, familiar character, and the relationship and people behind it?
For me, it always was fundamentally a love story. That is what I set out to tell. And then how this really unconventional love story ended up reflected in the pages of the Wonder Woman comic, and the character we came to know. So for me, it was always about the relationship between William and Elizabeth, and how Elizabeth and Olive inspired him to create Wonder Woman, and how he put their lives into the comics pages. And I wanted to discuss his philosophies about women, sex, and gender, and how his psychological philosophies emerged from his life, very literally.
Elizabeth and Olive haven’t gone on the record much about their personal lives and what their relationship looked like from the inside. How did you approach how you wanted to characterize them?
It was really important to me. There are certain facts in the Marstons’ life that are indisputable, that everybody agrees with. And then there are certain facts that are open to interpretation. And so this film is definitely my interpretation of all of my research, basically. I do things you do in all historical biopics, where I condense time and locations, and there are some composite characters and stuff like that. But I had a story that I interpreted all of the facts around. I started out just trying to tell a very organic love story. The biggest thing that hit me very early on is that Olive and Elizabeth lived together for 38 years after Marston died. That fact just blew my mind. I was very compelled by how much love there was in there. Elizabeth named her only daughter after Olive. They formed a family and lived together in this way.
The movie’s trailer:
For the rest of the interview, go here.