Director Dean Fleischer-Camp on the tiny cinema hero of the hour, the Paddington crossover we’d love to see and the films that charm and calm him in the way that Marcel the Shell with Shoes On delights others.
“I literally have several books about the fear of success on my shelf behind me,” Dean Fleischer-Camp gestures, explaining his cautious reaction to the news that Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is already the third highest-rated film of the year so far on Letterboxd.
The feature-length comedy is the newest star in the Marcel universe, which includes several books, the original short film that Fleischer-Camp and his co-creator, actress Jenny Slate, ed to YouTube in late 2010, and two further short sequels. Slate furnishes Marcel with a crackly voice full of self-love and wonder, while Fleischer-Camp plays a version of himself in the feature film—a documentary maker who is renting the Airbnb house that Marcel and his Nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini) happily live in.
In a spontaneous-seeming hybrid of stop motion and live action, Dean sets about filming Marcel’s daily goings-on as a way to distract from his own recent heartbreak. The documentary device, with its shallow lens (courtesy of Bianca Cline) and attention to minutiae—a hot dog bun sofa, a muselet refashioned as a walker—brings charming domestic details into hyper-focus. But beneath the cheerful shell’s optimistic exterior, Marcel is harboring heartbreak, too, and soon everyone on the Internet is roped in to help.
Tucked into the comic sweetness of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On are commentaries on documentary objectivity, the futility of excitable online communities, how to accept help, and the power of poetry (specifically, Philip Larkin’s The Trees). So what is there to fear about a piece of intellectual property becoming so beloved that fans of your one-inch-tall, googly-eyed, shoe-wearing hermit shell write things like “A salve for the soul”, “Peak wholesome”, “It is happiness incarnate (Paddington better watch his back)” and “I hope this movie makes a billion dollars”?
“I don’t try to make things to be unanimously loved. That’s a recipe for disaster,” Fleisher-Camp laughs wryly. “So when something you make is unanimously loved, it’s scary. It’s like, ‘Wait, did I make a piece of shit?!’” The Letterboxd reviews suggest otherwise, I tell him. Not to mention the data: the film’s average rating has climbed from 4.2 stars out of five after its festival outings (including Telluride and SXSW) to 4.3 as it rolls out into more cinemas.
“I’m so happy,” he its. “I think my goal this entire time has been, ‘I want to make a film that feels so real and intimate in its documentary portrayal of this character, that people feel like they are meeting him and actually know Marcel’.”
In the lead-up to this interview, a distant memory bubbles up: the first place I met Marcel was not in this new A24 film, but on a big screen at a Bellhouse comedy gig in Brooklyn, back in 2010 when Fleischer-Camp was doing his first rounds of friends’ comedy nights with the original short. While I only vaguely the crowd’s general warmth towards the spectacle of a tiny shell speaking with Jenny Slate’s voice, I do viscerally what I felt: a brief lifting of the heavy fog of a recent bereavement.
This is a common theme in a lot of Letterboxd reviews: Marcel bringing pure joy into the room, people openly weeping, calling their grandmothers after the credits roll. In these troubled times, who would have thought that the hero of the hour would be a wee, one-eyed, stop motion mollusc? Well, Dean Fleischer-Camp for one.
When I saw your first Marcel short at that comedy gig, it took me right out of myself. I felt as if I was levitating with delight for the first time in months.
Dean Fleischer-Camp: People always ask me if I knew that the video was going to go viral or whatever. This sounds crazy but I kind of did, because I had played it at that one show before I put it on the Internet, and you know what Brooklyn was like back at that time. It was like—
—a bunch of ironic hipsters pretending not to have feelings?
That’s exactly it, yeah, too cool for feelings! So in that room, when it just melted everyone’s hearts, instantly, I was like, ‘This has a power. People are really connecting to this character’. So when I put it online, I was like, ‘This might completely explode tomorrow,’ and it did. I don’t know if that’s retrospect bias or what, but I do feeling that way.
You do get a feeling about these things—but what I love about the feature-length film is how you play with that idea of virality and what going viral means and the come-down of that.
Yeah. I think on the one hand, it’s a challenge for a filmmaker to do a “going viral” scene now because it’s in every single movie. I mean, even though that phenomenon hasn’t been around that long, we’ve exhausted every way of doing it—and this is the case anytime we were writing parts of this movie and got stuck.
What felt true to the film was to show what was true to us about it, which was: we did have this experience of this character that was very dear to us going viral. At first, it’s all excitement and completely positive. And then the thing you realize is, actually, what people are obsessing over or flipping out about are the things that are the most superficial. They’re blinded by Marcel’s cuteness or whatever, when really there’s also a ton of complexity to him.
He’s pretty melancholic and he’s full of surprises but the overwhelming impression is like, “Oh, look at this cute little thing. I want to hug him,” or, “I want to step on him”. So that’s where we took it in the film because that felt so true to our actual experience.
Let’s talk about your animation team. I love stop motion animators. They are so delightful in the way they fall deeply in love with their maquettes, the tiny facial expressions, all the little body parts. Because you used to animate Marcel all by yourself, what do you love about working with stop motion animators?
That’s right. Yeah. I very crudely animated those shorts. Because a feature requires so much more from a character and from the puppet and the animation, that’s why I worked with the Kirsten [Lepore] to the animation and worked with all these incredibly talented animators.
Actually, I’m so bad at animation. I’m so clumsy just with my fingers... I mean, stop motion, you really have to be steady and you have to have really nimble hands and I’m so bad at that, that there was a rule on set that I could no longer touch the puppets because I would try to move just a smidge and just touch the eye, the pupil or something, and then the whole thing would fall apart.
What I love about working with stop motion animators is that first of all, they’ve dedicated themselves to the most tightly focused, patient art imaginable. I don’t know if it’s by training or by nature but a lot of them have a very Zen quality to them. Especially having come from mostly live action work, it’s like meeting a sloth or something, like, people who are really okay with sitting in silence. Their motor is real slow and steady, and they have to be because of the kind of work that they do.
A feature film crew is like, “We’ve got to make the minutes today,” and animators are like, “Mm. We’ve got to make the seconds—”
Yeah, exactly. I’m used to just doing take after take after take. On a stop motion stage with animators, it’s very uncomfortable and rare to do more than maybe two takes. But mostly, everyone’s crossing their fingers and holding their breath that they got it on that first one. When you see the shot and you say, “Mmm. Sorry, we got to go again,” a pall comes over the animation stage. It’s like someone’s child has died. It really is a bummer because that person spent three days on that shot, or just that brief segment.
Wild. I love it though.
Oh yeah. I love it too. The other thing that I love about them is they don’t even know how much they know about physics, about how movement works, about gravity, about all these things. Not only have they studied in an academic context, they also are incredibly good at breaking it down into its most granular building blocks, which is an incredible way to look at life once you hang out with them for a little while.
And then, to take that and add in the live action factor and then the “spontaneous documentary” factor, it’s a satisfying feat of writing and directing, so kudos to you.
Thank you.
That’s what’s coming through in the Letterboxd reviews, which I am now going to use as a way of finding out some of your favorite films. Bert writes—and I really felt this because I watched Marcel on the day of the Roe v. Wade decision, with my six-year-old, who fell off the couch laughing by the way—
—Not at the decision, I hope?
No, not at the decision, oh my god! At Marcel, at the tennis ball scenes particularly.
Okay!
So, Bert writes, “For about an hour and a half, I totally forgot how fucked up everything is.” What films get you through the bad days or the terrible Supreme Court decisions?
I saw that [review]. That’s a really good one. I’m going to say half of the Miyazaki movies that I revisit over and over again I feel that way about. Where it feels timeless, but the pace of it is also such that it’ll wash away whatever bad day or whatever chaos is on Twitter at the moment. I think my go-to right now is Kiki’s Delivery Service. It’s a delight just to watch.
The reason he gets away with, like, the Ozu movie, it’s a shot of clothes drying and then there’s a shot of a train and then there’s a shot of a cloud and it’s just the breathing space between scenes—I don’t know why they were called pillow shots but Miyazaki does a lot of that. It’s a pillow shot on steroids because you’re watching not just the grass blowing, you’re also watching his incredible stylization of nature through his animation, which is just so peaceful and so fluid and beautiful.
Lucy, whose review is similar to many, many other Letterboxd reviews, writes: “I’m very happy it exists and will be rewatching it one million more times when I’m sad and that’s all I know for sure." A) Did you know that you were not actually making a movie, you were making therapy, and B) what film is like therapy for you?
Good one! My parents are both mental health professionals. My dad is a psychiatrist so he’ll be very proud. They’ll both be very proud to hear you said that. I’ve always treated movies like therapy a little bit. If shit gets really bad, my go-to thing is to go to a movie by myself and it doesn’t really matter [what the movie is]. Some of my favorite moviegoing experiences were awful movies. It’s just that I got it at the right moment and… I don’t what I was so pissed off about. You the movie, you don’t what you were pissed off about.
I went and saw ParaNorman when it was in theaters whenever that was, 2011 or something. I had the shittiest day and then... I think I was walking past a movie theater, ParaNorman’s playing, I was like, “I’ll go see that,” and it holds this very special place in my heart because of it.
Jawsh writes, “What I love so much about the film is how easy it invites us into its world where a creature like Marcel isn’t only possible but 100% real. There’s so much attention to detail and creativity executed in the tiniest of details. It’s the fun of I Spy books and stories like [The Secret World of] Arrietty, The Mouse and the Motorcycle and Corduroy on the big screen. Offbeat, weird, and wonderful.” Tell me about your favorite weird and wonderful movies.
Gosh. Weird and wonderful movies. Well, Arrietty is a great one. The Borrowers were a bit of an influence just in Marcel’s way that he re-appropriates or appropriates human garbage. Gosh, there’s so many great, weird and wonderful [films].
Holy Motors I really love. That’s a very bizarre movie and the fact that it gets away with having such a completely unspooling crazy plot—he’s a master of that, Leos Carax. I don’t know how he gets away with it but I don’t think anyone can make a movie that’s that free-wheeling and it [still] feels cohesive. I think it’s a real magic trick that he’s doing.
I also really love... He made Katsuhito Ishii, is that his name?
Yeah. Katsuhito Ishii.
Yeah. So that movie is crazy, all of his movies are crazy. Funky Forest is the other truly bonkers one that he made. They’re so out there and they work so well that you walk out of the theater, you’re just brimming with ideas and feeling like anything’s possible.
I’m a huge fan of Nobuhiko Kobayashi. Everyone celebrates him for House, the horror movie that got re-released, which is incredible, [but] Chizuko's Younger Sister is, I think, probably the closest thing to a live action Studio Ghibli movie. It’s bonkers. It is so incredible and I’ve always wanted to remake it. I highly recommend it.
We’re fast running out of time, so I need to jump to a most important question, because of how many times it comes up in Letterboxd reviews: what do we have to do to get Marcel a cameo in Paddington in Peru?
The comparisons to Paddington are so flattering. If you knew me, you’d know that was such a favorite of mine. I don’t even know how many times I’ve watched it now. Paddington 2 especially rules and is true greatness. There are some fans on the Internet. Someone already photoshopped Paddington into Marcel.
Oh yeah. I love that guy.
I hope there’s a crossover.
Here’s a Letterboxd question we ask every filmmaker: what’s the film that made you want to be a filmmaker?
Geez. These are great questions. I’ll tell you, honestly, the thing that made me want to be a filmmaker was not a movie but a Pepsi Super Bowl commercial in, I want to say, 1994... I didn’t grow up in the industry. I grew up in Virginia and no one in my family is in the entertainment industry and so I didn’t even really know that filmmaking was a job or directing was a job. I randomly walked into an audition for what turned out to be a Super Bowl commercial and didn’t get cast in the commercial but was cast as an extra, and as a lighting stand-in for the main kid.
I was, truly, just in awe of how it seemed people were doing a nine-to-five that they loved, with a crew that they loved, that had such a summer camp vibe to it. Everyone knew each other and had inside jokes and they all just seemed like they were at summer camp but they were getting paid to work with this big equipment and make this cool, cinematic commercial. And then, seeing it all come together felt totally magical. And so, I was just like, “Yeah. Cool. Sign me up for whatever that is. How do I go to that summer camp?”
Thanks, Pepsi! Okay. Finally, Andre writes (and your parents will appreciate this): “Forgot how much I’ve missed openly sobbing in a theater, even more so when you can hear other people doing the exact same thing—like a tiny little orchestra playing to the tune of Kleenex tissues being opened all at once, sniffles completely in sync. Oh, how I’ve terribly missed this feeling.”
Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s poetic.
So Dean, what is the last film that made you sob in a cinema">The Rescue at Telluride. I mean, the movie’s great too, but I was crying more because I missed being in a theater with people and just experiencing something in a group.
Especially for comedies, it is a totally different experience to watch a comedy at home. I’ve watched comedies that are some of my favorites, they are the funniest things in the world, and if I’m watching it by myself, I don’t necessarily laugh. But when you’re watching it with a group of people, the laughter is contagious, the emotional response is contagious.
I think we’ve trained the movie-going public to think that you should save theater-going for big spectacle movies, like the Top Guns of the world, which are great. But I actually think that does a huge disservice to the movies that are real community movies, because those are such a beautiful, wonderful, huge experience when you are in a packed theater, experiencing it with a group. So I miss that a lot.
The last movie that made me cry, that was truly like I was crying because the film has made me cry, was this doc-hybrid called The Company of Strangers. That’s an under-seen gem and it’s so beautiful and I highly recommend everyone to seek it out. The cover looks a little boring so even though people recommended it, I didn’t watch it for ages and it’s gorgeous.
Dean, thank you so much and please say hi to Marcel for us.
Of course I will. Thank you so much for talking to me and thank you for watching the film.
‘Marcel the Shell with Shoes On’ is in US theaters now via A24.
