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The great Australian animation writer/director Adam Elliot established himself as one of the few auteurs of independent stop-motion animation over the course of several short films, most notably 2003’s Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet, with narration voice work by Geoffrey Rush. But it was his his first feature, 2009’s Mary and Max (with glorious vocal performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette, that solidified Elliot’s reputation as not only a gift animator and storyteller—it also made him the king of the tragic-comic tone in adult-oriented animated works, basing many of his characters on family, friends, and especially himself.
His latest work is the bittersweet Memoir of a Snail, about Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook), a lonely misfit with an affinity for collecting ornamental snails, who is separated from her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and falls into a deep well of anxiety and angst. She suffers many hardships on the road to being reunited with her brother, but also makes some friends along the way, including ones voiced by the likes of Jacki Weaver and musician Nick Cave. The film is heartfelt and hopeful, but it also tackles a variety of exceedingly real-world issues, such as suicide, sex, and even gay-conversion therapy. It’s a terrific chronicle of the life of an outsider whose confidence is hard won but well worth the effort.
I got a chance to sit down with Elliot when he was in town recently for the Chicago International Film Festival to talk about the long-gestation process that went into the screenplay and animation work on Memoir of a Snail, as well as the community he’s formed with folks at other stop-motion animation houses like Aardman and Laika. Please enjoy our talk.
The film is now playing in theaters around Chicago, including the Music Box Theatre.
It’s been 15 years since your last feature, and I realize stop-motion animation takes a long time to complete, but it doesn’t usually take 15 years. What was the thing that kept this from getting done faster?
There were lots of delays. I just came from visiting friends at Laika yesterday, and they’ve been shooting their next film, Wildwood, for four years, and their budgets are unlimited because Travis Knight is the heir to the Nike fortune. So compared to them, we’re pretty quick. We actually shot this in 33 weeks, which is fast for stop-motion. But in that 15 years, I made a short because I knew I had to get my budgets down. If I wanted to remain adult, niche, boutique, I knew I had to get my budgets down, and I made the short as a way of testing new types of clay and cardboard—it sounds trivial, but it really has an impact and got the budget down. So eight years to make, three years to finance, three years to write because I’m a very slow writer, and really it was only about two-and-a-half years to make.
Were the more adult themes on this one an issue when it came to financing?
Yeah. With every film I’ve made, when I’ve finished writing it and show it to my producers, they go “Ugh.” It’s always hard, but we’re very lucky in Australia because we have government funding. Without that, we wouldn’t have a film industry. Everyone is propped up by this 40 percent tax rebate, so I get a lot of creative freedom. But it is getting harder to finance now because you have to get international sales agents and all of these other things ticked off first. When I’m writing, it’s just story, story, story; I never worry about how much it’s going to cost or who I might upset. It’s just a good story, well told. I did 6-8 drafts of this script before I was ready.
What does clay offer you in terms of creative expression that other mediums don’t, including live action?
Firstly, I always get asked, “When are you going to move into live action?” But no one ever says to a live-action director, when are you going to move into clay?” But that might change now with what Guillermo del Toro did or Wes Anderson. It’s all about creative control and freedom, but I love clay because it’s a wonderful tool for exaggeration—you can stretch your characters’ faces and you can heighten an emotion and poignancy, comedy. You can do all the things that Warner Bros. did in cartoons, take those tricks, and make it three dimensional. You can also heighten the drama, but you can be succinct too. You can remove unnecessary things like ears or legs, simplify everything. I’ve had characters in the past that don’t even have mouths. The flexibility and range of control…all animators admit that they are control freaks and meglomaniacs; we do feel like we get to play God. It all goes back to our childhoods, when we played with our Barbie dolls and Lego and we could creative these universes.
I’ve interviewed people from Aardman, Laika, Wes Anderson, all of the stop-motion houses, and they all talk about the artist’s fingerprints on the work, literally in some cases. Is that part of the appeal?
Absolutely, it’s really important because it says to the audience several things, like “This is not CGI.” And now it says, “This is not AI,” although AI can replicate all that. There’s that extra level of appreciation you get from audiences when they see a stop-motion film because they know that some maniac has been in the dark, moving things one frame at a time. They say “I can’t believe someone went to all that effort.”
CGI animators don’t get that, but their work is just as slow, if not slower. Stop-motion has a magical quality; the fingerprints remind the audience that it’s tactile, it’s tangible. With the suspension of disbelief, it’s absolute with stop-motion. You have to pretend this little blob of clay has a soul and heartbeat, and you have to give over for an hour and a half. I’ve got a friend who’s a doctor, and she can’t watch my films. She says, “My brain doesn’t let me see something animated as living.” She hates all animation .
With the two features you’ve done, the character designs are similar. How would you describe the designs of your films?
Well we have two words: Chonky Wonky. Seeing all my friends at Laika yesterday, and we were at Aardman just before that, and their puppets are beautiful, and ours are like mutant blobs. That’s my style and my aesthetic. Since I was born, my whole body shakes a little bit; my mother had that, my grandfather had it. So when I was drawing as a child, I couldn’t draw a straight line, so all my drawing are a bit chonky wonky looking. So instead of trying to refine things, I just decided to celebrate the lumps and bumps, and that can become my aesthetic.
You mentioned it took you a few years to write this. How personal a journey is Memoir of a Snail? I get the sense that both of your features are very personal. What parts of this did you pull from your life?
It always takes a few years for me to psychoanalyze what I’ve done. This one certainly features my mother, to a lesser degree my father, who were both “extreme collectors” or hoarders. And when my dad died, I became really interested in why humans collect things, so I watched all of those documentaries on hoarding and read all the books on the science behind it. More often than not, extreme hoarders have experienced a degree of trauma or loss, and usually it’s of a child or sibling. So I found that fascinating, and at the same time, I was going through my notes, and I came across some notes about a friend of mine who was born with a cleft palate, and years ago, I was going to make a short film about her life but I never got around to it.
So the two spheres of ideas merged, and I never quite know where I’m going when I start writing; I tend to write back to front—I start with the details and write backwards. Hopefully, by the third or fourth draft, a three-act structure magically appears. That’s how I did this one. I knew I wanted guinea pigs, tap-dancing old ladies, snails, and so it was just a matter of linking all of that together.
The part of this story that made me feel the most was the old lady, Pinky, because I’ve had older friends like that, not when I was a kid but in my 20s, certainly. Was that something drawn from life?
I have a friend named Pinky who lives in my building. She’s from San Francisco, and her family owned the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, and then there’s this other filmmaker I met at an animation festival, also from San Francisco, she played pingpong with Fidel Castro and was one of the founders of Burning Man Festival. She was a real free spirit, old hippie. I don’t know why I tend to have older friends, but they have led more interesting lives. I love that dynamic of the age difference between protagonists and characters. In Mary and Max, it was an eight-year-old girl and a 40-year-old man.
You seem to have your pick of Australian actors; they all seem to want to work with you. You have such a stellar cast here. Does anyone say no to you at this point?
I think with animation, it’s an easy gig for actors. There’s no costume or makeup. Having said that, I think they don’t mind doing stuff with me because they know it’s going to be adult and challenging. They know it’s going to get exposure, so it’s usually a quick yes. The only problem is we don’t have the money to pay them what they usually get if it were a Pixar. Having said that, I never seek out the big names. I always watch all my favorite films, shut my eyes, and listen to voices. I did listen to Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett, but something about Sarah’s voice I really liked, there’s a quietness. She’s a shy person, and she’s a local. All these actors live in Melbourne, except for Jacki, who lives in L.A. now. Nick Cave was in London.
His voice is so distinct. I recognized it right away. How did you get him?
He liked it for the novelty factor. He was excited about voicing…he kept calling his character a potato; I’m not sure what was going on that day. He thought it was quirky and cool. Ten years ago, stop-motion was not cool; now it is.
On Mary and Max, you got to work with Philip Seymour Hoffman. What do you remember about working with him, and how do you work with actors with that level of experience. How hands on are you?
Once I get over the fact that I’ve got this big-name actor, I have to remember that I’m the boss. You only get a couple of go’s with them, so they want you to be the boss. We have a bit of rehearsal time, but with him, he really knew what I was after—he was from New York, so there was no problem with the accent. He had friends who were on the spectrum, so he knew that monotone voice I wanted. We talked about things like that, but there was a lot of improvisation and getting him to deliver lines whichever way he wanted, slow, fast. So we did have a little bit of luxury, but we also had guns at our head in terms of time, limited money. For every hour you go over, the agent wants more money. But that was probably the highlight of my career, working with him, because he was such a special actor. Still to this day, people still comment on that performance as Max. It’s so authentic, visceral, and had that sadness and melancholy. He had so many layers to that delivery. It’s such a shame he’s gone.
In this film, you’re tackling sex, suicide, death, gay conversion. From a technical standpoint, are any of those subjects especially challenging to illustrate and animate in a way that is believable?
Well the orgy was a challenge. We went for cartoon effect there, just eyeballs in the dark. I must admit, the electrocution was tricky because we didn’t want to go too Warner Bros. cartoony, with eyeballs popping out. But at the same time, eyeballs popping out really did help accentuate the trauma. That was a challenging sequence, but we’ve had nothing but positive feedback on that from people, especially those who have gone through the gay-conversation therapy. I’ve had people contact me and tell me their parents forced them to go through that. It’s triggering for people who have had that, but my mantra has always been “Stop-motion is a not a genre, it’s a medium, and there are no rules.” So why can’t we deal with this subject in animation? And more and more animators are dealing with some of the more challenging topics. Even Pixar, with Inside Out 2, they have to because that’s what audiences want.
Do you also worry that if you don’t branch out from the more family-friendly materials, it gets boring?
Yeah, and I think that’s what’s happening in Hollywood. They have to start taking risks because audiences are maturing. Also, young people are being brought up on more adult animation. I was brought up on Warner Bros. and Disney, but there’s a whole generation brought up on South Park. It’s getting edgier, which is great.
What do you want people thinking about after seeing this film?
It’s early days with the film, but I always say, “If you’re not an emotional wreck by the end of one of my films, I’ve failed.” So I certainly want you to come out of the cinema emotionally exhausted, but also uplifted. I tried my hardest to make the end of the film uplifting and satisfying, although an earlier draft wasn’t that way. My dad was a Vaudevillian, and he used to say to me “Make them laugh, make them cry, make them laugh, make them cry.” There’s a duality there of comedy and tragedy, humor and pathos, dark and light. Without the dark, the light has no meaning. Comedy is a release of tension too, especially if something really dark has just happened. I’ve always said that my films are very manipulating, and that’s deliberate and that’s because I want to push every emotional button.
You mentioned Aardman and Laika, and the people that work there your heroes in many respects. It’s great that you are all friends and are paying attention to what the other is doing.
I was really lucky to spend time with Will Vinton at a film festival in France right around the time of the big takeover, and Nick Park , I catch up with him, and Peter Lord , I just saw him in England a few days ago. The difference with stop-motion directors—and that includes Henry Selick as well—is that we all have a kinship because we’ve always felt like outsiders, even within the film industry, because we’re the peculiar, weird ones. So when we catch up, there’s no rivalry. The fact that Laika and Aardman let me into their studios to show my film, even though we’ll be competing with each other. It’s a friendly rivalry. I know that live-action studios would never let that happen. And we also share secrets and tips on how to get the best eyeball to work.
Is that because you’re all craftspeople and artists at heart?
Yes. We’re not guarded at all, and we’re always thrilled when any of us gets a film up. I’m certainly at the low end of the spectrum, with my low-budget, independent films, but I think it’s also because when I graduated from film school, I was told I was entering a dying art-form and that stop-motion would be dead. I think the opposite is now true; we’re going through a bit of a golden period. A lot of that has to do with AI, but it’s alive and well, and every time one of us makes a feature, it validates the rest of us.
Do you have some sense of what you’re doing next? Maybe we won’t have to wait 15 years for it.
No no no, that was never meant to happen. But maybe three to five years. The next film is just in my head at the moment, but I want to do a road film. I think I’ve done enough films about characters stuck in their bedrooms in suburbia; I want to break free and do a clay version of Thelma & Louise.
Best of luck with this one, Adam. Thanks for talking.
Thanks so much. The audiences have been surprised with this one, but also we’ve been surprised because I think we have this fear in Australia, some of our films get subtitled, so we’re always worried that some things will get lost in translation or the humor is too colloquial. We’re just relieved now in America that no one is asking for subtitles. We get validated oversees because Australians have an inferiority complex. But great talking to you.
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