Grace Pudel is a lonely misfit with an affinity for collecting ornamental snails and an intense love for books. At a young age, when Grace is separated from her fire-breathing twin brother Gilbert, she falls into a spiral of anxiety and angst. Despite a continued series of hardships, inspiration and hope emerge when she strikes up an enduring friendship with an elderly eccentric woman named Pinky, who is full of grit and lust for life. MEMOIR OF A SNAIL is a poignant, heartfelt and hilarious chronicle of the life of an outsider finding her confidence and silver linings amongst the clutter of everyday life.
As Memoir of a Snail releases in Australian cinemas on October 17, Nick L’Barrow spoke with the film’s writer and director, Adam Elliot, about the evolution of stop motion animation throughout his career, finding humour in the darker aspects of life, and how he creates rich characters in the worlds of his films.
Nick: I saw the film last night at the Palace Barracks session, and I’m not just saying this to get the conversation rolling, but this is genuinely one of my favourite movies of this year! It was beautiful, and the crowd loved it!
Adam Elliot: Thank you, Nick!
Nick: I’d love to take it back a little bit, and I’m curious to know, as someone who has been making stop-motion films for decades now, what has the evolution of this filmmaking style looked like throughout your career?
Adam Elliot: Well, you know, I think everything film I make, when I finish it, I often say, “Well, that’s it! I’m not making any more!” They’re slow, they’re expensive, they’re difficult to finance. You never have enough money! You’re always asking people favours. I’ve got a friend who’s had six children, and she always said, “I’m never getting pregnant again!” And then six months later…
I think often, even on the plane on the way home today – I’m pretty exhausted after four days of Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and Brisbane – the audience will never appreciate the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into any film, not just stop motion.
And I think as creators, we have to get over that and remind ourselves that we’re lucky to even be making films. It’s such a privilege to make a feature film in Australia. And I feel even luckier to be an auteur. I mean, how many directors get to write and direct their own work? There are so few of us, and sadly, it’s getting fewer and fewer. Then to have your film have a theatrical release and not have to go straight to a streamer, I mean, that is such a special thing.
It is certainly worth all the effort, and I have to remind myself too that animation has a long shelf life, and a longevity, and doesn’t date as quick as live-action films can. So, the films continue to have an impact. Mary & Max is 15 years old now, and I still get emails every week from people who’ve discovered it for the first time or watched it for the 200th time. That’s why we do it, you know? To nourish the audience. And that sounds a bit dewy, but I love that word – nourishing. It’s not just entertaining.
Nick: When you said it’s a privilege to make films yourself, I genuinely believe it’s a privilege for us as audiences to experience them too, especially in a cinema! I’d love to breakdown your writing process, because I love that your films and stories mirror this episodic nature of life that we all experience. But you also have such rich characters and a world that surrounds them. I’m curious to know, do the characters you create inform the decisions you make about the story? Or does the journey naturally make the decisions for the characters as they go on?
Adam Elliot: Yeah, good question! They sort of do feed into each other. But I would certainly say that my films, when I’m writing them, are character driven, and even more so, detail driven. I start with the detail, and I go through my notebooks and find all the ingredients I want in the film, and then try and work out a way to string them all together.
I don’t obsess about structure or the plot or the three-act structure too early. I sort of let that evolve intuitively. Whereas with a lot of other writers, it’s the other way around. They get the plot points, the tent poles, and then they develop characters and the story.
But I’m trying to create very dimensional characters that are having congruities and contradictions. That’s how you try and achieve authenticity, and believable characters, you make them feel real. And that’s really hard to do, because they’re obviously blobs of clay.
What’s strange is, when I’m writing, I don’t have them in my head as animated characters. They’re very real. So, I even see, even right now, in my head, Grace as a human being, not a character. It just happens that my medium is stop motion. These scripts could be made as live action, but I don’t think they’d work.
I’m also striving to find that balance between light and dark, and getting that contrast, and really taking the audience on a zigzag. The highs, the lows, and really making the film as dense as possible. I do cram as much as I can in there. But I do go through a process with my editor where we pare back, particularly the dialogue and the voice over where we don’t need it. It’s the rule of show it, don’t say it.
They’re very highly constructed films. They’re incredibly planned and prescribed. Ever moment is discussed and debated and thought about. I think that’s one of the advantages of animation, not just stop motion. We have more time to think about every little nuance and little detail.
Nick: You mentioned the density of your films, and the light and dark moments that come in life. This is something that really struck me during your film last night – do you try and find humour in the mundane and morbid? Or do you like adding the darkness to the more comedic elements?
Adam Elliot: [laughs] Yeah, look, my two biggest inspirations are the cartoonist and philosopher, Michael Leunig, who is in Melbourne. His cartoons are often very dark, but also very comedic. And I love that duality.
I learned very on, I think really during my second film, Cousin… there’s a moment in Cousin where you find out his parents have just been killed in a car accident. And at that very same moment, you see him wearing a t-shirt that says, “I Yodel For Jesus”. So, you’re laughing, but you’re hearing something very traumatic at the same time, and your brain has this conniption.
I love playing with the audience. I love bombarding them with stuff that they don’t know quite how to deal with. Following something extremely funny with something extremely tragic. I think it’s because I want to keep the audience guessing. I don’t want them to predict what’s about to happen.
Sometimes, it can backfire. But it’s a bit of both. It’s like it someone laughs at a funeral, there’s people who find it incredibly inappropriate. But for some people, it becomes infectious, and more people laugh along. And I’m not out to offend. It’s just what we do is incredibly manipulative.
Someone actually put on Letterboxd the other day, “Adam is very manipulative.” And I thought, of course! All cinema is manipulative! We’re forcing the audience to suspend their disbelief, and in animation we have to do that right from the get go. You have to pretend. You tell yourself that these people aren’t real, these blobs of clay.
Look, it’s very difficult to get that balance. I think this film probably gets the balance just right. Mary & Max was probably a little too dark at times. It wasn’t tempered with enough comedy.
Nick: Well, based on the audiences reactions last night, I can attest to the fact that the balance was perfect. I’d love to ask about that incredible opening one-shot scene. What to you is the narrative decision behind opening the film with a huge shot like that? And what are the technicalities behind pulling a shot like this off?
Adam Elliot: I love the films of Jean Pierre Jeunet – surprise, surprise [laughs]! He’s become a friend over the years, and I always loved his opening montage of Delicatessen. He hasn’t seen the film yet, but I’ve told him that I’m ripping him off!
Because the films about a hoarder, I was thinking of wats to really overwhelm the audience right from the get go, and do that with a hoarder. My animation supervisor tried to talk me out of even doing it! He wanted to go for a much more simplistic, 2D sort of montage. He agrees now, but at the time, we were running out of time and money, and this is a shot that is a minute and a half without a single edit. It’s my Goodfellas shot!
I think it took us three weeks to set up and a week to test it. And it was way too ambitious! There were times my producer was thinking of abandoning this with the amount it was costing us. Even the lens we were using was a very sophisticated snorkel lens on the end of a big robotic arm that was initially used to make cars. We had an engineer to move this robot. The snorkel lens was $2000 for three days, or something. It cost a fortune.
But I think it works beautifully with the music too. The music was composed specifically for that shot. Originally, we were going to start the film in Pinky’s mouth and come out. But we decided to go into the shell of the snail, then come out of Pinky’s mouth. And initially, Pinky’s mouth was supposed to look like a… cat’s bottom [laughs]. We wanted people to think we were coming out of an anus! I mean, it got ridiculous.
Thank you so much to Adam for his time, and to Madman Films and NixCo PR for organising the interview. Memoir of a Snail is in cinemas October 17.
