ORIGIN STORY
The kinky, controversial beginnings of Wonder Woman...
When writer-director angela Robinson started writing Professor Marston And The Wonder Women, there was a good reason. “I was so frustrated there wasn’t a Wonder Woman movie,” she tells Red Alert. “There had been tons of Batman reboots and tons of Superman reboots. Even Ant-Man got a movie before Wonder Woman! How many times do we need to see Bruce Wayne’s parents die in an alley? I remember watching Gotham going, ‘Again!?’ And still there was no Wonder Woman.”
In the decade since Robinson first stumbled on the story of William Moulton Marston, the man behind DC Comics’ female superhero, that changed. Though even with the arrival of Gal Gadot, studio executives were uncertain. “There was a lot of naysaying,” says Robinson (The L Word, True Blood). “There was a lot of fear.” Fortunately, Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman was 2017’s biggest hit. “She got Wonder Woman so right – a hard feat to accomplish.”
Given this, the arrival of Robinson’s movie’s is uncanny. “Everybody is really complimenting me on my exquisite timing,” she laughs. While it’s more likely down to sheer luck, Professor Marston… is the perfect companion piece to Jenkins’ film. A psychologist and inventor of an early lie detector test, Marston (Luke Evans) also had an unusual private life, living with wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) and former student Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote) in a ménage-a-trois. “It’s just this incredible story,” Robinson adds. “Nobody knows about this.”
Much of his life fed into the creation of Wonder Woman, from Byrne’s love of silver bracelets to Marston’s lie detector work inspiring the superhero’s lasso of truth. The trio’s kinky proclivities – bondage, S&M – also found their way into the stories, a fact that engulfed the comic in scandal when Marston was accused of perverting the nation. Despite this, Robinson never wanted to sensationalise. “I wanted to tell a conventional story about unconventional people.”
Professor Marston And The Wonder Women opens on 10 November.