Mary and Max‘s writer and director, Adam Elliot, had a fantastic festival run last year with his latest feature, Memoir of a Snail. This delightful stop-motion, which fans and critics love, is also prominently present during this year’s award season. It already won multiple awards and is in the running in the Best Animated Feature Film category at this year’s Academy Awards.
Memoir of Snail centres Grace (voiced by Sarah Snook), whose life has been an immense rollercoaster. After being born with a cleft palate and being bullied, she lost her mother at a young age. While she still has her brother Gilbert (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee) as her biggest support, he’s being now placed in a foster family on the other side of Australia after the passing of their father, leaving her all alone. There are highs but immense lows as Memoir of a Snail is filled with emotions, details and stunning animation.
Geek Vibes Nation spoke to writer/director Elliot about the writing process, his love for snails, and creating an independent animation feature.
Geek Vibes Nation: Hi Elliot, congratulations on the film. You directed and wrote the feature. When did you decide to direct? What is before, during, or after the writing process?
Adam Elliot: Usually, when you’re writing, you’ve got some money, but not all of it. So a part of your brain always thinks,”This may never end up as a film. It may just stay a screenplay.” It was by the 16 drafts of the script that we got the money, so I knew what the movie would be. Being a writer-director, you always hope it would become a reality. I’ve got friends who write novels, and when they finish a book, they send it to the publisher, and that’s it. When I finish a script, I have to make it into a film, which takes another three or four years.
GVN: What are the main differences between your first draft and the 16th one?
AE: I always say the first draft of everything is crap, and that’s a common philosophy. The first draft is just getting out all your ideas. It’s a mess. Then, it’s a process of keep on writing. There’s a wonderful quote, “The best writing is rewriting”, and I think that’s true. You keep going and refining and polishing. It’s like you’re digging a big hole and don’t quite know what will be down there. You keep digging, digging, digging, and finally, you realise, “Oh, the film’s about this”. I write in a very back-to-front way. I start with the details, go through all my journals and notebooks, and find the ingredients and things I want for the film.
With this feature, I knew I wanted guinea pigs and an elderly woman who tap-dances. I go through everything and then think about how I am going to string all it together. I don’t worry about the plot or story much; I want to create very layered, dimensional characters first. After that, I worked out what they would do in the film. It’s back-to-front because many other writers start with a structure or plot points, but my films are character-driven. Some of my short films have no plots; they’re just descriptions of an interesting person. I like plots, but I don’t obsess about them too much.
GVN: Where do you get inspiration from for these people and their stories?
AE: They’re just anyone. I always think about my family and friends first. For example, Mary and Max is about my pen pal who lives in New York, and I wanted to make a film about him. My mother is in this film [Memoir of a Snail] a lot, but there’s also a lot of me. There are a lot of autobiographical elements to the characters. I see a lot of myself in Grace, Gilbert, Pinky. I am a very curious person, and I’m always listening to conversations, even on the tube this morning. I’m a human sponge absorbing everything I see. I collect names, smells, and colours; my journals are full of all these ingredients.
GVN: While there’s a lot of sadness in this feature, there are also some fun elements. How do you balance those two sides in the best way possible in this film?
AE: That’s tricky. It’s tough to get the comedy, the tragedy, the light, the dark, humour, and pathos all right. When writing, I’m conscious of not making the film too dark but not comedic. It’s so hard to do. It would be much easier if I just wrote a straight comedy with gags and jokes. I also don’t want to make a film that’s too dark and too depressing. This film gets very close to being depressing, but because of the ending, it didn’t become a very bleak film. I wanted the film’s ending to be uplifting, and that life has come full circle. This is also why I love snails. The swirl on a snail’s shell symbolises life going full circle. So it’s tricky to get the balance right.
GVN: You already talked a bit about the snails and their shape. What else is about the snails you live because they’re a recurring theme in your films?
AE: I love snails. They have been in a lot of my films. The first thing I animated at film school contained a snail, and I collected them as a child. However, this first draft of the film was initially called A Memoir of a Ladybird, and the film was going to be about ladybirds. However, it was all getting a bit cutesy, and I thought, “Oh, I need a better animal”, so I thought of ducks, pigs and frogs.
But again, they didn’t feel right, and I thought, “I need an animal that’s metaphorical and symbolic of what Grace is going through in her life”. And I thought, “Well, actually, a snail, you touch their antennas, and the snail retracts into its shell, and a snail’s like an introvert, and Grace is an introvert, and she’s retracting from the world, and her shell is her horde, and her shield, and her buffer.” I like that element. I love the snail’s shell as a symbol and that sort of image and motif.
After that, I discovered that snails can’t go backwards, they can only move forwards, and I thought, “Oh, that links well with the quote I want to use by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, that life can only be understood backwards, but we have to live it forwards.” I keep finding all these links to snails; they’re elegant, graceful and slow creatures. People think they’re slimy and horrible, but they’re quite beautiful and graceful.
GVN: Memoir of a Snail is a stop-motion animation. What is it about that kind of animation that you love so much?
AE: When I was at film school in 1996, all my friends were keen to become 2D animators and then computer animators. I knew I wasn’t the type of person who could sit in front of a computer screen all day. I love using my hands, drawing, and using tactile things and not sitting down all day. So, stop-motion has this magical quality that other forms of animation don’t have. When the audience sees the fingerprints on the clay, they know what they’re looking at is real and not computer-generated. Stop-motion is making a real comeback at the moment. Things made by hand, like a handmade basket, are always going to be much more appreciated than something made by a machine. That’s why I love it. And the people I employ are the same; they love making things.
GVN: Can you tell us more about the people you worked with on this film, how many people you hired, and how long it took?
AE: We had over 150 people. We had sculptors, set makers, prop makers and people who painted the clouds in the sky. We also had seven animators, and each animator did between three and five seconds per day, which was very slow. It took 33 weeks to shoot the animation and four months to make all the bits and pieces, so we had 200 characters, 200 sets, and between 5,000 and 7,000 props. So, there is no CGI; it is all 100% handmade. It was a small crew. Companies like Aardman or Leica they have 35 animators and hundreds and hundreds of people. We’re a low-budget, independent, small movie.
GVN: Do you see the low budget as an advantage instead of a disadvantage?
AE: It can be an advantage, yes. It’s an advantage because I have total freedom and creative control, so I don’t have a studio telling me how to end the film or executive producers bossing me around. Yes, the investors always give notes and feedback, but I have a lot of freedom. It’s tough being independent, though. It’s tough raising the money, and you never have enough. The budget’s never enough to do what you’d like, so you feel like you’re compromising sometimes. But I think the payoff is that you get to make a film that’s yours, and you can make it feel very personal, and what I love about being an auteur, a writer, a director, is that I can make very personal films.
GVN: And does that make seeing all the positive feedback you get on the film even more special?
AE: Yeah, it’s a big relief because you invested so much of your life, eight years, making the film, and if it didn’t work, it would have been a waste of eight years. It’s also a big relief because there’s a good chance the artists who I employed and myself will get to do it again. The best part of any successful film is that you can make another one, because you’re only as good as your last film, particularly in Australia.
A film has to do well critically and commercially; if it doesn’t do one or both of those, it is very hard to make another one. In Australia, 85% of feature filmmakers never make another film, so you’ve got to get into that 15% who make a second, third, or fourth film. I’m very lucky. Accolades and awards are lovely, but they just make it easier for the next project.
GVN: Does the rise of more independent animation films and studios make it easier for you too to get more work and interest from financiers?
AE: Oh, absolutely. It’s wonderful to see the rise of independent animations because it just means there’s more exposure, and the big studios are a little bit in trouble because they know that many of their films aren’t working. The exception is Inside Out 2, worth $1.8 billion, but there have been many flops recently, and they’re all scratching their heads. They’re looking offshore now, and that’s great for people like me.
Thank you so much for this interview!
Memoir of a Snail is out now in UK cinemas courtesy of IFC Films.
Subtitle translator by day. Film journalist by night.
