Australia’s Adam Elliot continues his celebration of heroic misfits with stop-motion tragicomedy Memoir Of A Snail. Screen talks to the Oscar-nominated filmmaker.
The day Screen International meets Australian animator Adam Elliot, midway through October’s BFI London Film Festival, he has come hotfoot from a trip to Aardman Animations in Bristol. “Every time I come, I do a mandatory visit to my fellow claymakers, mainly because there’s so few of us,” says the filmmaker. “We talk about eyeballs and the global shortage of plasticine. We get all our clay from America, and the company we use has stopped making the clay we love altogether. They say there’s just not a demand for it — and we’re like, ‘Well, we’re the demand!’”
Such are the bugbears when you devote your life to stop-motion animation, a uniquely time-consuming occupation Elliot has now been pursuing for the past 30 years. That his latest film Memoir Of A Snail is only the second full-length feature he has completed within that period is a suitable illustration of its intrinsically snail-like nature.
“It wasn’t meant to turn out this way,” says the writer/director of an oeuvre that currently amounts to three shorts, a pair of extended shorts and his two features: 2009’s Mary And Max, and now Memoir Of A Snail. “I thought they would be quicker! And they seem to be getting slower and slower to make, even though the technology is getting better and better. What’s slowing us down is actually not the making, but the financing.”
Filmed at Elliot’s studio in Melbourne’s Docklands district, Memoir Of A Snail tells the story of twins — Grace, a girl born with a cleft palate, and Gilbert, a pyromaniac — who are separated at a young age when their father, an alcoholic with paraplegia, dies. The film goes on to depict the twins’ experiences with their respective foster parents, Grace’s toxic relationship with a closeted fat fetishist, and the friendship she develops with an ageing eccentric called Pinky.
“One of my favourite films is Harold And Maude and I have always loved the dynamics between the older and the younger generation,” says Elliot. “There is a perception that young people learn and get wisdom from older people, but I see it as a two-way street.” Succession’s Sarah Snook voices Grace in the film, while Jacki Weaver voices Pinky.
That Grace is also a compulsive hoarder with a craving for snail-related ephemera only adds to Memoir’s unusual collection of elements. Snails are a recurring motif in Elliot’s animation, having previously appeared in his 1996 short Uncle, his 2000 short Brother and the aforementioned Mary And Max. “I have always found snails fascinating; they’re very alien-like,” muses the director. “But they’re also metaphorical and symbolic of Grace’s mental state. When you touch a snail’s antennas they retract, and that is what Grace is doing — she’s retracting from the world and all its pain and trauma. The other thing is a snail is very easy to animate; you can just push it along.”
The Covid-19 pandemic played a part in Memoir’s lengthy gestation, an eight-year journey that got assistance en route from Screen Australia and Victoria’s VicScreen agency. “I’m a product of government funding. I wouldn’t have a career as an auteur without it,” says Elliot. “Having said that, it has always been a tumultuous relationship, particularly now that the government has stopped funding shorts. I’ve made five shorts” — among them Harvie Krumpet, which won the Academy Award for best animated short in 2004 — “and without shorts you don’t get features. So there are pros and cons with government funding — but I’ve got to be careful not to bite the hand that feeds me.”
Other production investment came from London-based Anton and Paris-based Charades, with further financing from Soundfirm, Mind The Gap Film Finance and Melbourne International Film Festival’s Premiere Fund. “I’m constantly bewildered why no-one ever comes with a big cheque and says, ‘Here!’” the filmmaker chuckles. “I’ve been waiting 30 years to be rescued by an entity or a studio or a philanthropist.”
Having premiered at Annecy in June, Memoir Of A Snail won the animation festival’s Cristal award for best feature. At the BFI London Film Festival, Memoir become the first stop-motion animation to be named best film by its official competition jury, and it went on to earn a Golden Globe nomination for best animated picture and an Oscar nomination for animated feature film.
Awards trajectory
A visit to the Oscars is therefore on the cards for an animator whose 2004 competition included short films from Disney, Pixar and the now-shuttered Blue Sky Studios. “It would be like being struck by lightning twice,” Elliot says of the prospect, before the nominations were announced, describing his win for Harvie Krumpet — another story of an oddball beset by bad luck that had Geoffrey Rush as its narrator — as a “golden crowbar”.
“It opens doors a little bit, and it’s certainly opened doors to finance in Australia,” he says. “But because I have never jumped ship and gone and directed somebody else’s work, it’s not really helped. If I was clever, I’d be doing Shrek 6 or something like that, and earning a lot of money. But I’m just not that type of person. I would be disappointed, they’d be disappointed, and it would be a lose/lose situation.”
The completion of Memoir Of A Snail — which was released by IFC Films in October in the US, and is set for a UK release in February via Modern Films — leaves Elliot only one long short and a feature film away from completing his declared mission of “a trilogy of trilogies”, with notions for the latter already percolating.
“I don’t want to do any more characters locked in houses in suburbia,” he says. “Now I want to do a road film. Australia is such a vast country that a road film makes sense. The challenge is to tell an Australian story without it being full of clichés, stereotypes or iconic imagery that’s hackneyed.”
Born in Victoria in 1972, this son of a hairdresser and an acrobatic clown was raised in the South Australian outback on a prawn farm that would eventually go bankrupt. His memories of that time and the colourful relatives he grew up with have had an indelible impact on his self-dubbed “clayographies”, in which misfit underdogs are invariably harried by mishaps, setbacks and misfortune.
“I drag my protagonists through the mud and am quite cruel to them,” he admits. “But I also try and reward them for their suffering, so the audience hopefully leaves the cinema uplifted. My films are adult and challenging at times, but they’re also meant to be funny and entertaining. Ultimately the films are trying to find a balance between comedy and tragedy. The tricky part is getting the balance right.”
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