Over a decade after creating Marcel the Shell with Jenny Slate, director Dean Fleishcer-Camp now brings the character into a feature-length animation with Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Filmmaker Dean (Fleischer-Camp) moves into an Airbnb where he finds a tiny talking shell named Marcel (Slate). Marcel lives in the home with his grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini) and has created whimsical and resourceful ways of dealing with problems in his everyday life. Dean begins filming Marcel’s antics and uploads the videos to YouTube, leading to Marcel becoming a cultural phenomenon that attracts the attention of 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl. To make sure he didn’t lose the charm of his original animated shorts, Fleischer-Camp stuck to a documentary-style approach to filming.

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DEADLINE: Where did the original idea for the short films come from?

DEAN FLEISCHER-CAMP: It was a very long time ago in 2011. Jenny Slate, who does the voice of Marcel, and I were getting ready for another friend’s wedding. We were packed into this tiny room, and Jenny started doing this teeny, tiny voice to sort of express how cramped she felt in there. We joked about it all weekend at this wedding, and then when I got back afterwards, I had agreed to make this video for a friend’s comedy show. So, I was like, “Jenny, let me interview you in this character.” And then we very hastily put together Marcel, and bought a shell, little shoes and some googly eyes – basically like everything you could grab at a craft store – and we made him and then I interviewed Jenny and cut it together and animated it. I think it was like 48 hours, that first short was very fast.

DEADLINE: What was the process of bringing that into a feature-length film?

FLEISCHER-CAMP: It was a very long process but I’m also glad that we took our time. It was very clear that some studios were more interested in making Marcel into a franchise kind of movie like they’re familiar with. Whereas, I wanted to make a really personal movie that I knew wasn’t gonna be like one of those films. So, we found the right partners and financers and really took the time to find the right type of story and journey that we wanted to see Marcel go on. I think it was such a gift in disguise to get to build this character out slowly and not really pressure ourselves to make a TV show immediately after it went viral, because then we don’t really get to know the character.

DEADLINE: Where did the idea for the 60 Minutes special come from?

FLEISCHER-CAMP: We were joking around about how Marcel and Connie don’t have a television and they must just have to watch whatever is on a neighbor’s TV that they can see from their windowsills. So, we were just joking around about their next-door neighbors maybe being an older couple and the only show they’ve ever seen is 60 minutes. And then that came back as we were writing the story and we thought maybe the reverence for Lesley Stahl in 60 Minutes could actually be folded into the story and the plot.

DEADLINE: What was the process of actually getting Lesley Stahl?

FLEISCHER-CAMP: You know, this project has been so blessed in so many different ways. We got pretty lucky that Liz Holm, one of our incredible producers, had a friend whose mom worked at 60 Minutes and so we had a pretty easy time getting a very early animatic in front of Lesley Stahl. And she was down to get out of her comfort zone and play with us weirdos. We got super lucky that she was so enthusiastic and really threw herself into it. In directing those scenes, I wanted to try to make it as realistic as possible. So, there’s much more than just Lesley appearing in it. Shari Finkelstein, the 60 Minutes producer who we talked to on the phone, she’s a real 60 Minutes producer who works with Lesley a lot. They were really great collaborators, even down to what cameras they use and how they would light a subject and all those things.

DEADLINE: Where did a lot of Marcel’s inventions come from? I love how he walks on the wall. 

FLEISCHER-CAMP: We started with the script and then we recorded the audio first, and so the next phase was storyboarding. So, Kirsten Lepore, our animation director, and I just sat down for basically a year together and drew every frame in the movie. But when you’re doing that and you’re working from just audio, you’re suddenly in the shoes of Marcel because you’re like, ‘Oh wait, that scene takes place in the kitchen, and then the very next scene takes place in the yard. How’s he gonna get there?’ We actually had to put ourselves in his position and think about how we are getting to the kitchen. So, a lot of those ideas came from storyboarding with me and Kirsten or having to make up an actual ad hoc solution within making the film. It was a really fun part of making the movie.

DEADLINE: What were the biggest challenges for you on this project?

FLEISCHER-CAMP: The challenge that was the hardest is that the original short was made for no money in a few days. There’s a danger with increased budget and working with a bigger team, that you kind of sand off all the things that made it special to begin with. A sort of polish kind of just happens naturally from increasing the budget and from having incredible animators. Like, I’m a bad animator, which is why the shorts look the way they do, but that’s kinda charming. So, how do you ensure that once you hire incredible animators, that it doesn’t get too polished and look too smooth and sleek?

That was always at the front of my mind and I was always trying to find ways to bake in spontaneity, authenticity and mistakes, for lack of a better word, into the process. I tried to challenge us with documentary constraints wherever possible, and I think that Marcel the movie benefits greatly from a process that is probably as close to a documentary film as you can get – a non-fiction approach with a fictional character.

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