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A Coffee With … Geoff Marslett
This story originally appeared in the Statesman on September 3, 2009.
Geoff Marslett, an Austin filmmaker and film lecturer at the University of Texas, knows how hard it is to make a movie, and he wants his students to know, too. That’s why, on the first page of the syllabus for his fall class, Marslett puts down a litany of reasons one shouldn’t try to make films, a short dissertation of discouragement taken from personal experience.
“Filmmaking is frustrating because you’re never going to be able to make the film you thought you were going to make,” Marslett explains over a frozen limeade at Dominican Joe Coffee Shop. “It’s fraught with disappointment and you’re going to put all your money and hard work into it and it’s not going to work out as you hoped.
“So Page One of my syllabus is reasons why they should just drop the class,” he says with a laugh.
But if students flip to the second page, they will discover glimmers of hope. There, Marslett details why he loves making films and why it’s an art worth pursuing.
“While there’s a lot of terrible stuff in trying to make a film, you have to remember why you’re doing it in spite of that,” he says.
Right now, Marslett knows why he’s doing it. He’s close to wrapping his first feature-length film, the animated science-fiction romantic-comedy “Mars,” and in July he was declared one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine.
“This year’s crop of 25 New Faces consists, as always, of new film artists whose work we feel passionately about but also, in this year of change, people who are redefining the notion of a career in film,” wrote the magazine’s editor Scott Macaulay.
Marslett isn’t sure how he was selected as one of the 25, but he says it shows that doing what you love and doing it well has it rewards.
“Any kind of honor feels great, because you go through long periods of misery,” Marslett, 35, says. “I’m loving my film (‘Mars’), but there are still those days when you wonder why you even thought you’d try to make it. Then you get something like this and you think that someone might actually appreciate your movie.”
Since the article appeared, film festivals and agents have contacted Marslett, asking when they can see “Mars.” Marslett doesn’t have an answer quite yet, but he says he’s hoping to get the completed film into the Sundance and South by Southwest film festivals early next year.
A native of Garland (“It’s where LeAnn Rimes is from, not much else,” he laughs), Marslett can be brutally frank about filmmaking, but he’s far from dour. He wears a perma-smile and exudes joviality and optimism. He’s boyish and lanky, with a luxuriant Wolverine beard. Marslett wrote “Mars” in the summer of 2007 and shot it entirely at Austin Studios that September. He describes it as a sci-fi adventure with heart. “It’s a romantic comedy about astronauts falling in love on their way to Mars. I wanted to show what it would be like to be locked in a little metal box and spending those nine months with just two other people.” Marslett and his crew shot with actors, including Mark Duplass, Paul Gordon and Zoe Simpson, in an all-green screen environment that required the performers to imagine everything around them. They would have to gaze out of non-existent windows at a non-existent Mars, for example, all of it a blazing neon green.
“Afterward, you really hate the color green. It burns into your retinas,” Marslett says. Marslett and nine other animators then took the footage and painted over it with 3-D computer animation - similar to the process Richard Linklater used in “Waking Life” and Robert Rodriguez used in “Sin City” - to create environments and landscapes.
“When I first wrote ‘Mars’ I thought I’d try to make something really cheap and fast and easy,” recalls Marslett, who has made several short films, including the acclaimed “Monkey vs. Robot.” “For some reason I wrote a sci-fi movie about flying to Mars. That’s not cheap! What was I thinking? Suddenly it involved space ships and robots and aliens.”
After flirting with film studies at the University of Southern California, Marslett earned twin bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and mathematics from St. John’s College in New Mexico. He earned a master’s degree in film at UT and started teaching there in 2001. All his studies came into play making “Mars.”
“In a lot of my work, from ‘Monkey vs. Robot’ onward, I deal with that conflict between science and philosophy and what we do as people,” he says. “What is love? What is life? are some of the questions in the movie. And how love and life are reflected in relationships between anything.”
It’s been an arduous journey from shooting two years ago to applying the final touches in post-production, all for less than $1 million. Marslett, who is used to making short films, didn’t expect making a 90-minute feature to be as demanding as it’s been, and he says he might not have written that first chilling page of his class syllabus if he hadn’t made “Mars.” Yet it’s been worth it. “There’s a huge amount of satisfaction,” Marslett says. “I’m so happy I made this film. Finishing a movie like this makes you not want to give up.”
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