Hope, love and bondage in Wonder Woman’s real-life origin story
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Angela Robinson was already a longtime fangirl of Wonder Woman when she first read about the superhero’s real-life origins.
“I just couldn’t believe the story! It wassoincredible,andIwaslike,‘Why don’t I know about this? Why doesn’t everybodyknowaboutthis?’”saidthe writer-director of “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women,” which openedintheatersFriday.
The timing of the new movie’s release, so soon after “Wonder Woman” became a summer blockbuster, is fortuitous but not planned. Ms. Robinson, a television writer-producer of “The L Word,” “True Blood” and “How to Get Away With Murder,” has been working on the movie for eight years, four in the writing and four getting the indie project made.
The film stars Luke Evans as Wonder Woman creator William Marston, a psychologist and feminist with a kinky side. With his wife, Elizabeth, and student Olive Byrne, he developed an early lie detector test that evolved into the polygraph and later morphed into Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth.
The Marstons and Byrne also lived as a threesome, with each woman a mother to two children and each an inspiration for the superhero who debuted in 1941. Marston died in 1947, and Elizabeth and Olive spent the rest of their lives together.
The movie depicts their relationships as a dance of intellect, love and sexual exploration, including the bondage that found its way onto the comic pages. It also shows Olive and Elizabeth as lovers, although that is not part of their known history.
“There are a lot of facts in the Marstons’ lives that everybody agrees upon, and then there’s a lot open to interpretation,” Ms. Robinson said. “I learned all that I could, and the film is how I chose to tell their story.”
The filmmaker has offered to screen the movie for members of the Marston family and is armed and a lot are problematic, and they butt up against each other,” Ms. Robinson said. “I kind of think that’s why Wonder Woman is so exciting, but a lot of writing the film was me wrestling with all the contradictions in Marston’s work and in his characters.”
Bringing her script to the screen at last is her dream team of actors, starting with Mr. Evans. She pursued the “Beauty and the Beast” actor until he was available for the 25day shoot.
“I needed somebody with a really palpable masculinity, almost with an old movie-star quality. He has that kind of Cary Grant quality to him, and I had somebody in between Cary Grant and Harrison Ford in ‘Raiders One’ in my head,” she said.
Rebecca Hall, who plays Elizabeth Marston, had considered adapting the story herself before Ms. Robinson made her pitch.
“We had this fantastic mind meld,” the director said. “She is so brilliant in the movie, I still can’t get over it.”
The toughest casting was for Olive Byrne, niece to birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger and a catalyst whose silver bracelets inspired Wonder Woman’s bullet-deflecting cuffs. The Marstons at first underestimate the ingenue.
“But she ends up being the strongest character in the film,” Ms. Robinson said. “She needed to hold the symbolic weight of WonderWoman.”
Enter Bella Heathcote, of “The Man in the High Castle,” as Olive Byrne. The three actors arrived in Boston having never met and with no time for rehearsal.
“The process of directing the movie was like me watching them all fall in love with each other,” Ms. Robinson said.
She believes audiences will fall in love with them, too, while finding new ties to the Wonder Woman themes of truth, peace and hope that never go out of style.