by Liam Ridolfi
How the Oscar winning filmmaker crafted his Claymation masterpiece Memoir of a Snail over eight years.
Adam Elliot cemented himself as an iconic auteur with cult classics Harvie Krumpet and Mary and Max. However, with the production of his latest feature Memoir of a Snail – starring Sarah Snook and Kodi Smit-McPhee – lasting a long eight years, he has successfully reminded us that his bittersweet stop motion bravura is just as poignant and profoundly moving as ever.
We saw Memoir of a Snail at Melbourne International Film Festival [MIFF] Opening Night. It was such an amazing experience. Considering you’ve been working on the film for eight years, and MIFF is such an iconic festival and really showcases the best our city has to offer in terms of filmmaking – what is it like to have a project come to fruition in such a beloved way at MIFF?
“Well, I was very lucky. Harvie Krumpet opened at MIFF 21 years ago, and that was a great experience and really helped us. But I think opening nights anywhere – I did opening night at Sundance and some other festivals over the years; sometimes the expectation is even higher. And so, people are even more critical. And it’s like, ‘oh, opening night. Oh, they must think they’re good’. The pressure’s even greater. But I think with MIFF, I get away with more because it’s stop motion. It immediately engages people and because the film was sort of not celebrating Melbourne, but included Melbourne, there was that interest. And also, all our actors were from here, so I think they were kinder to us than other opening night films and it was really great.”
I wanted to ask you about the whole eight-year process for this film, because I understand, obviously, with stop-motion in general, it takes a long time to make. As the writer and director, how do you stay inspired for the same story over such a long period? Or does it wane, and you find yourself having to reconnect to the material?
“It does wane. It’s like you bought a train and then you can’t get off it. You spend all this time raising the money, writing it, and then it finally gets greenlit, and you get on and you think, ‘oh, I dunno if I want to do this. This is really hard’. I was very rusty at the beginning. It had been so long since Mary and Max, and then I did this little experimental short – Ernie Biscuit, figuring out how to get my budgets down. I was very nervous starting again, learning how to collaborate, learning just the jargon, because I’m not very technical minded. My cinematographer had to remind me of lenses and Dragonframe, the software. I didn’t know how to use it, so I had to learn a lot myself. But I think what keeps you going is that our crew really fell in love with the characters and the story and the aesthetic. And in a way, they’re the ones who kept me going. And my animation supervisor, John Lewis, I give him a lot of the credit, because he is technically minded. I’m all about the story and the creative aspects, and he and my camera team are much more technical experts. And then in the edit, my editor Bill Murphy, who did Mary and Max and Harvie Krumpet, I would often throw in the towel and go, ‘we can’t fix this Bill. It’s unfixable. We need more shots. We don’t have enough footage’. And then I come back the next morning, and he’d been there since 4am fixing it. My dad used to say, ‘it’s hard to soar like an eagle when you’re surrounded by turkeys – make sure you surround yourself with people who are far more experienced’.”
Your style is so unique and distinctive. I was wondering if you could take me back to young Adam Elliot at Pinewood Primary making drawings and sculptures – and if you could define a time or a moment, or even just an era, where what we see on screen was formed.
“I had a great childhood before Pinewood. I was raised in the outback of South Australia on a prawn farm. My father was a retired acrobatic clown. I was surrounded by eccentric, interesting family and friends and relatives. And creativity was, it was not like it was encouraged, it was just that it was normal. My brother [Luke Elliot] became an actor. I had an Auntie Ethel, who was a big knitter, and she was always knitting me finger puppets. But there was no like, ‘oh, Adam’s going to be’, we didn’t even use the word creative. It was just the way things were. I was always drawing. And my parents used say, ‘oh, he’s obviously going to do something. He’s going to be a painter or something’. And then right through school, primary school, and then secondary school, I was into drama. And I was certainly drawn to the humanities and Art, Drama, English and English Literature. I was 25 before I discovered filmmaking and went to VCA.
“I was selling hand painted t-shirts down in St. Kilda for five years. My brother had been there doing the acting stream, and he said, ‘you should go do animation, you can draw’. And I said, ‘oh, okay’. I didn’t even want to be a stop motion animator. I wanted to do 2D animation. And then I applied, went for an interview and didn’t get in, and they put me on a waiting list. I loved photography, and I applied for the Centre for Adult Education, CAE. It was a picture frame making course. And I was like, ‘maybe I could learn how to frame my own photographs to sell them and sell those down at the craft market instead of t-shirts’. But then I got a phone call from the film school to say, ‘Adam, this is your lucky day. One of the eight students who did get in has decided to drop out, and we have a waiting list. And even though your interview didn’t go very well, we liked your t-shirts and we think you have potential. Do you still want to be an animator?’ And I said, ‘well, I never really wanted to be an animator, and I’ve just got into this picture frame making course, I should really do the picture frame making course’. And she said, ‘no, no, no. You should really do the film course. It’s very prestigious!’ So, I said, ‘oh, all right’. So, I did.”
Claymation is obviously a medium that you are married to in a sense, creatively – why is this medium the one that tells your stories the best? Why can we only experience Grace Pudel as a beautiful, big eyed clay character?
“There are several answers, I think at the moment, stop-motion’s going through a bit of a renaissance, a golden era with filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Guillermo Del Toro, Tim Burton and even Taika Waititi wanting to do a stop-motion film, so it’s going through a popularity boom. And I think that has to do with the fact that there’s so much CGI, and now we have AI as well. So, there’s a real appreciation for handcrafted art forms. The same reason that during COVID everyone started knitting and making bread. Art shops did really well during COVID. But I think too, stop-motion has an extra sort of element in that it has this magical quality. Because when the audience see the fingerprints on the clay, they know that this is handmade. They don’t quite know how it’s done, but it’s like it is real. It’s tangible, it’s tactile. And it reminds us of our childhoods when we played with Barbie dolls and Lego and your imagination ran wild. So, there’s something really sentimental about Claymation and stop-motion that people like. You just don’t get that with CGI. I mean. CGI is just as slow and expensive, and I’ve got a lot of friends who use CGI, and I’ve got to be careful not to slam them.
“But for me, it’s really simple. I love making things, and I don’t think I could sit in front of a computer screen all day. The artists I employ are similar, in that they just are hands-on people. They’ve all got sheds and they love making contraptions. We are all very like-minded. I often say that we are more like magicians than we are filmmakers because it’s all trickery and illusion. And it’s that suspension of disbelief with stop-motion, you have to give over immediately. You go into the cinema, the lights go down, you’re all staring at a brick wall, essentially. And then these blobs come on, they start moving and you have to let go and then they move you. On the very first frame, you have to say to yourself, ‘these characters have a soul, these characters have a heartbeat, and I’m going to pretend for the next hour and a half that they’re real’.”
As a Melbournian, I particularly get a kick out of seeing the red Australia Post box made out of clay or the Luna Park mouth, in your films. And I think that you have politely rejected Hollywood conformities. I’m curious if there are elements of our country and our culture that you find important to put up on the screen.
“When I write, I try and think in universal terms and create characters that are archetypes. So, all my protagonists are archetypal underdogs, people who are the other and perceived as different. That’s what links all my films together. I do think that I’m writing for audiences in Sweden and Japan and Iran and all these different countries, but at the same time trying to infuse the film with some Australian things that are very unique to us, like everything from a Chiko Roll to a koala in a tree and the obvious sort of stuff, but also our accent. Strangely, my films are more popular in France and Germany and Spain than they are here; they see us as quite exotic. It’s important to me as an Australian filmmaker to tell Australian stories, but in a way that makes them accessible.”
I wanted to ask you about legacy for a second. I watched Mary and Max at 12 and felt all these things. And then I’m feeling all the same things when I’m watching Memoir of a Snail at 26. I’m curious, how important is it to you to carry an audience member like me throughout your filmography regardless of age, regardless of time, period?
“I’ve never worried too much about demographics or audience, but you only become aware of it all when it’s too late and the film’s locked off, and then you start talking to the sales agents and distributors and they say, ‘Adam, so who did you make this for again?’ And I go ‘for me, my mum and my brother’. But you do have to be careful. You can’t be that naive that you forget your audience. It’s all about clarity. I always try to be very clear with my storytelling. And even though my films are very dense and cluttered and overwhelming at times, emotionally, I really go to a lot of effort to make sure that the story makes sense and is clear and nothing is confusing. So yes, every film has its own idiosyncrasies and complexities, and you just never know, particularly with comedy, you never know what jokes are going to work.
“And every country is different. They all have their own different senses of humour, but what seems to be universal is pathos, and the human condition. For example, I get a lot of emails from people in Iran, Argentina and others. You just wouldn’t expect a lot from Iran actually. And of course, what’s going on over there is dramatic. But you think, ‘oh God, why would someone in Iran get my films?’ And I think it just shows that we all feel lonely. We’ve all gone through periods of feeling like we don’t fit in, and my films are projections of myself. There’s plenty of myself, and not just the obvious characters like Gilbert, but also in Pinky and Grace. There’s that history. And Pinky has had a very dark early life, which we touch upon briefly. So, the characters obviously resonate with people, but I think they resonate because they can see themselves. And a word I use a lot is empathy. What I’m trying to do with all my films is get the audience to put themselves in my character’s shoes, see and feel what it’s like to be someone who’s born with a cleft palette or somebody who’s being bullied, or someone who has Asperger’s. What is it like to be seen as the odd one out?
“I think even the most confident people who are extroverts, deep down have felt lonely and misunderstood. And I think that’s what connects. I have a psychiatrist who I’ve been seeing for many years, and he and I go in for my sessions, and we are there to fix my problems, and we end up talking about my films. I think my films are my therapy; in ways I get out all my angst. And in this film particularly, obviously the gay conversion sequence is very confronting, but there’s a lot of my views and thoughts on that. And I burn down a church, so I’m a staunch atheist. So, there’s all my views on organised religion. So, I get out a lot of my things. I want to get them off my chest, but I do it in a more subtle, nuanced way.”
Your films have some repeated conflicts, motifs that I love, and one in particular that connects with me is you often have a protagonist that hits a boiling point, a low point in their life, and decides they don’t want to be around anymore. but then something small yet beautiful reminds them to stick around a bit longer and it’s an element that I adore about your work. I wonder if there was any experience in your life that inspired this love of finding hope in the little things?
“I love detail, and when I write my scripts, I start with the detail and work backwards. I don’t obsess too much about the three-act structure and plot. I have very detailed notebooks, and I write down smells. Even coming in here today, they’re pumping something in the air. I could smell it, and it triggered a memory. I thought, ‘what is that smell?’ So, I collect smells, I collect quotes, I collect names. I used to be a hoarder, but now I’m quite minimal. I love details. I stare at people a lot on public transport and airport lounges too. I’m obsessed with detail. But I love how, if you look at all my films, like you said, there are a lot of motifs and there’s always an object or two that has incredible sentimental value and something that triggers change, whether it’s a letter or an object. And in this film, it’s the biscuit tin. It’s because I think that often life is chaotic, and a lot of these things that change our directions in life are not often people, but just little things in the right place, in the right time and can be as simple as a smell or a taste.
“But to answer your question – yes, I do love things, and that’s why the film, in a way, became about a hoarder too. Grace’s problem is that all these snails that she collects, she places importance on every single one of them. And that’s her coping mechanism.”
My last question is completely personally motivated but – do you have a kernel of an idea for your next project?
“Oh yes! It’s going to be a road film. Because I am sick of telling stories about people locked in their bedrooms in the suburbs. I feel like I’ve done that to death. I might as well start planting the seed now, the wish is to either have Tilda Swinton as the lead or Glenn Close. I’ll probably get neither of them, but I just hope I get it financed before I die. I’ve already started collecting the ingredients. I’ve got probably three pages of things I want in the film so far. I’ve already got the twist. I’m going to America next week and meeting with my agents over there. I’m going to try and pitch it to them. The plan is to stay here in Melbourne and bring money here, because I really don’t want to abandon my team. So, that’s what is next!”
Memoir of a Snail is in cinemas 17 October 2024
