Markiplier on breathing life into ‘Iron Lung’

In 2018, Markiplier made a short film. It was called Wilford ‘MOTHERLOVING’ Warfstache, and followed the pink-mustached titular character–a fan-favorite alter-ego of himself that Markiplier introduced in 2012–on a special journey.

That is, the special journey of getting arrested for all his (alleged!) crimes.

Like most of what Markiplier (aka Mark Fischbach) has made about Warfstache, the majority of this 20-minute piece bends toward comedy. There’s a disco dance sequence! Warfstache is wearing pink sateen the whole time! And when Abe Lincoln, the scorned detective who hunted Warfstache down, starts getting a little too hard-boiled noir with his internal monologuing, Warfstache inexplicably listens in on his thoughts and wonders, “Did we date at some point?”

But then, around 15 minutes in, things change. Abe breaks down, wondering if he’s thrown his life away chasing Warfstache. “Am I crazy?” he despairs.

This is when Fischbach whips out his burgeoning acting chops. Warfstache gets earnest, swaying close to Abe and growing suddenly warm and reassuring, his eyes dark and serious. “No. No no no. My friend,” he murmurs. “You are not crazy. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you’re crazy.”

This is the moment that convinced me Fischbach could do Iron Lung.

Here at Tubefilter, I’ve written plenty about how digital video creators are redefining modern entertainment. Over the past few years, creators have both challenged and collaborated with legacy entertainment. Some creators, like RackaRacka, took deals with Hollywood studios like A24 and Neon. Others have brought their shows to streamers like Netflix.

And then there’s people like Fischbach, Inoxtag, Sam & Colby, and the team behind Creator Camp, who are self-producing entire passion projects with small teams and distributing those projects by arranging their own deals with theater chains like Regal.

Fischbach’s adaptation of Iron Lung arrives at a funny moment.

Creator Camp’s praised (and Kickstarter-partnered) premiere Two Sleepy People is also in theaters, often in the same locations as Iron Lung, making this the first time two self-funded movies from internet-born storytellers are on the big screen right next to each other.

At the same time, you have traditional studios pumping out yet another disastrous video game adaptation with Return to Silent Hill, which has a whopping 19% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

If you look at Hollywood’s previous attempts, turning a video game into a film or TV series has almost never worked out well. (A nod here for rare exceptions like Arcane and The Last of Us‘s first season.) Projects shooting for translation end up with clumsy transformation at best and unrecognizable, hollow transmogrification at worst. With Return and other fumbled adaptations, you can see the teams behind the films don’t really get the games.

That isn’t an issue with Iron Lung.

Fischbach, who is terrified of the ocean, first played Iron Lung, an indie game about a convict welded into a submarine and forced to explore an ocean of blood, on his YouTube channel in 2022, shortly after its debut. Developed by David Szymanski, Iron Lung in its original form was lean and mean, clocking in at around 50 minutes of gameplay.

The impression it left on Fischbach lasted far longer than its runtime.

Part of its charm was the bare-bones lore. We don’t know the convict’s name or who sent him down below. We don’t know what they hope to find. All we know comes from an opening screen that tells us decades ago, every known star and habitable planet disappeared, thinning humanity’s population to those who were on space stations or starships. This was called The Quiet Rapture, and our convict survived it.

Szymanski later added lore, but Fischbach knew if he wanted to make Iron Lung into a feature-length film, he would have to do some fleshing himself.

And man did he want to make Iron Lung into a feature-length film.

So he DM’d Szymanski for permission. The developer was immediately on board.

“We worked very closely together from the beginning,” Fischbach tells me. “I would come to him with ideas, and it was based on a lore update he put out before we were fully underway. There were also leftovers from an earlier attempt. We’d go back and forth constantly. I’d write the script, pitch ideas, and send them to him, and he’d respond. ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘That’s drifting away from what I imagined,’ or ‘That’s cool–let’s lean into that.’ It was very collaborative.”

At that point, Fischbach had already made the choose-your-own-adventure film In Space with Markiplier, which he wrote and directed, but was a YouTube Original, with YouTube production power behind it. He’d also been starring in the podcast The Edge of Sleep, which was later made into a six-episode miniseries co-starring himself and Lio Tipton. That project, distributed on Amazon Prime Video and then Tubi, was arguably his largest to date in terms of screen time, but he didn’t write or direct.

For Iron Lung, Fischbach was signing up to write, direct, star, edit, produce, and finance, supported by a team of family, friends, and fellow creatives.

In the film, his main character is also supported by a team (though I use “support” loosely here…). While staying spoiler-lite, I’ll say one of the key ways Fischbach expanded the Iron Lung world and kept the plot compelling was to add other characters. Unlike in the game, where you are utterly alone, moviegoers encounter the people who welded the convict into his ship. We hear their motivations, their conflictions, and–most importantly–their promises to wipe his criminal record clean if he fulfills his mission.

Very early in the film, we get to meet them through the sub’s porthole. Fischbach adds a weighty moment where our convict is pulled to the surface and thinks he’ll be set free–a twist from the game, where players spend the entire time underblood, in a crushing state of hopelessness and fear, but never know what could happen if they did manage to escape the ocean.

“What I wanted was for the movie to feel like playing the game from the inside,” Fischbach says. “That feeling of desperation and desire to escape was essential. It was important to show that there is a world he could be part of–but he can’t access it.

“When tying everything together,” he adds, “the question became, with so little time, what situation could push everyone’s motivations forward? It is a drastic thing for him to come back up–but if it’s only to be sent back down, and that moment is crushing, then it’s worth it. He gets a taste of freedom and then loses it. That makes it even worse. There is still no escape. Now he just knows what he’s missing.”

To illustrate the separation between the convict and what’s left of the world, Fischbach mirrored the game’s single set and filmed the entire movie inside a life-size version of the Iron Lung. He had it custom-made and loaded onto a rig that would shake it like a soda can–with Fischbach inside–to replicate the horrors of the deep.

“Originally I thought about using real metal, but the weight would’ve been impossible,” Fischbach sighs. “Iman [Corbani, Production Deisgner] and Travis [Eisenberg, Art Director] designed and built it, and they transformed wood and paint into something that genuinely looks like rusted metal.”

Again, spoiler-lite, but Corbani and Eisenberg also warp the ship as Iron Lung goes on: struts bow, new elements appear, and the walls seep with mysterious liquid. It and Fischbach’s convict both bear significant scars by the end.

With the 35-day shoot wrapped, Fischbach dove into editing. He led a team that included his longtime YouTube editor Lixian, but final decisions on everything from camera angle to color-grading were his.

“Editing is one of the things I really love,” he says. “I think more directors should get their hands dirty in the edit. It’s where everything comes together.”

Fischbach has years of experience editing for YouTube, but bringing those skills to a production this size was “a lot of trial and error,” he says.

“I didn’t have formal training. It’s kind of like being a musician who can’t read sheet music, but still knows how to play,” he explains. “I did things that probably won’t translate well on paper, but they worked onscreen. It was incredibly time-consuming, but also really exciting. I can’t wait to do a full breakdown someday and show some of the tricks I used that people will never consciously notice.”

He does ask that people try to see Iron Lung on the big screen, not for box office purposes, but because the sound capabilities are so much better there than on TVs and phones.

Having seen it on TV and in theaters, the difference is stark: During moments where the movie plunges into darkness, the theater track highlights how the convict’s ragged breathing meshes with the overwhelming sound of blood sucking and shifting around his vessel, while faint warning beeps and grinding metal make the Lung feel a millisecond from implosion. There are spoilery bits in the latter third that almost deem it necessary to listen in surround-sound.

“I really hope people see it in theaters. The Atmos mix is transformative,” he says. “This was always meant to be an audio-driven movie. Almost everything outside the sub is communicated through sound. I had a clear picture in my head of what was happening, but I didn’t want to spell it out. It’s scarier without concrete answers.”

Fischbach wants to keep quiet about how much he spent to bring Iron Lung to life, but tells me it does qualify as “low-budget” by Hollywood standards. (That puts it in the $2-5 million range.) He adds that while it was a SAG-AFTRA movie, he insisted on paying the cast and crew more than the union required, a decision that proved befuddling for onsite reps who were used to liaising with Hollywood executives.

And, ultimately, a big part of the budget went to craft services. “I’m Korean! I wanted people to be fed,” Fischbach laughs. “I wanted good catering, real meals, breakfast and lunch every day. People were working hard, and I wanted them to feel taken care of. That meant making sacrifices elsewhere, like editing the film myself instead of hiring someone. But that was worth it to me.”

Iron Lung is currently showing on over 3,200 screens in the U.S., Canada, U.K., E.U., Australia, and New Zealand. Box office for opening night brought in $3.5 million, with an expected overall run of $10 million.