Adam Elliot Finds a Lifetime of Treasures in “Memoir of a Snail”
A Q&A with the Oscar-winning animator about his first feature-length film since 2009’s Mary and Max
Snails. Why’d it have to be snails? It’s what Indiana Jones would have asked if he were a gastropod-fearing protagonist in a big-budget, live-action version of Adam Elliot’s latest movie, Memoir of a Snail. But since our hero is little Grace Pudel, a grief-stricken, introverted dreamer voiced by Sarah Snook and rendered in stop-motion clay animation, her entire world is populated by snails — as knickknacks, mementos and actual confidantes in a jar — and as a metaphor for her insular life.
But look throughout Elliot’s work, including his 1996 debut short film Uncle, Oscar-winning 2003 short Harvie Krumpet and acclaimed 2009 feature Mary and Max, and you will find snails alongside figures looking out of windows, snippets of detail from his own biography and the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard — that life can only be understood backward, but must be lived forward. “I love revisiting visual motifs in all my films,” Elliot says during our interview at the Golden Age Cinema and Bar in Surry Hills, NSW. “There’s snails, there’s so many things I repeat. And I love repetition. Sometimes I worry and think, ‘Oh, well maybe I’ve overdone the snails.’ You know, I love shots of characters looking through windows, looking out and themes of imprisonment and agoraphobia, and I love films like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and I love the framing of a rectangle within a rectangle. That sort of metaverse is in this film.”
You can find my main story about Memoir of a Snail in this week’s issue of TV Week (on newsstands starting October 15 with Kitty Flanagan on the cover for the season 3 return of Fisk). In the piece, Elliot talks about the casting of Snook, Jacki Weaver and Tony Armstrong as voices for his characters, and what he would love audiences to experience with his film. My time with Melbourne-based Elliot was so illuminating, however, that I wanted to include more of our chat online. Perhaps you may want to read this interview after you see the 94-minute film, in cinemas across Australia starting October 17, but here is more of our discussion on the making of his latest clayography.
Your themes are universal, but there are Chiko rolls and digs at Canberra in Memoir of a Snail. Are those particular nods things you love to give to your Australian audiences?
With all my films, I like it to have an Australian flavour in there. But ultimately I’m making the film for people in Sweden and Japan and Iran and America. It’s tricky ’cause you don’t wanna stick in kangaroos jumping down the street. So I go for things like food, and places like Luna Park. This time around, we had a lot of fun with Melbourne and choosing things that you wouldn’t normally put in a film, like the housing commissions in Collingwood and Brunswick Street. So yeah, we had a lot of fun. And it’s interesting how many people — we’ve shown the film in Spain and France — how they really relate to the suburban-ness. Even though I thought, “Oh, maybe they won’t understand Canberra,” they [say], “Oh no, we have places just like Canberra!”
The little details, like your love of books, come through in the things that the characters read, which reflect moments narratively in the story.
Reading is my first love. I prefer reading to watching films, and I don’t watch many animated films. I watch a lot of documentary and I love live-action feature films. But reading certainly is my first love and I love the classics. A lot of them I read as a teenager and I’ve always been fascinated by, “How does a classic become a classic? What are the ingredients? What is it in the zeitgeist that makes that work?” Also, maybe it was important that for Gilbert and Grace, their father, Percy, instilled in them the importance of reading and how reading can be a sanctuary from the everyday world and your troubles. And so that was important. But then, you know, I also wanted Grace to go through a period where she’s reading bad literature!
It must have been great fun to come up with book titles like The Fiddling Scotsman. Where did they come from and how did you enjoy peppering the film with those?
Yeah. I had fun coming up with all those book titles, and I designed a lot of the production design of the film in [COVID] lockdown. So I spent a lot of time having the luxury of just spending a whole day thinking of wacky book titles. And actually, I think The Ginger Chested Pirate, that one I found on the internet somewhere. So I think I can’t claim that one! But you know, I think that with my films, I’m trying to create as much visual humour as possible so you almost have have to watch the film a second or third time to see all those jokes.
Is that part — being able to get into that minutiae — also the joy of world-building?
Oh, absolutely. As an animation director and writer, I could never do live action films because we get to play god in stop-motion. We have that creative freedom and control to create any world we want. Our characters can look however we want them, and we can go into the minutiae and we can add all these little gems all the way through the film. And look, I love drawing, and so I had a great time. I drew, I think, 5,000 character designs, props and set designs. I drew the entire storyboard. Drawing is probably my second love after reading. You can get carried away, though. You have to learn to know when to stop and move on.
You had to create the thousands of snail objects that Grace collects. So in her hoard, what’s happened to that hoard?
Yes. That hoard is now on display in Melbourne at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Fed Square. Not all of it survived; a lot of the sets disintegrated, but we’ve kept the good stuff. And it’s on display for two years.
That’s another layer to this story, which is the idea of people surround themselves with objects both to relive nostalgia or to contain their grief. Was that explored to the way that you had wanted fully once you saw the movie?
Great question. Because that’s what it is. It’s a process of distillation. I’ve actually just gone through a process of decluttering my life. I’m quite a minimalist now. We did this with my mum, and when we were going through my mother and father’s semi-hoard — they’re mild hoarders, Dad’s passed away now, but he had three sheds full of stuff — we’d literally pick up every item and say to them, “Do you need it?” Or, “Do you want it?” And, you know, “What degree of sentimental value does this have?” For example, my mum had 92 champagne glasses. Yet she doesn’t drink and never had a dinner party. So it’s like, “Oh, but my great auntie gave me those.” And I said, “Well, let’s keep one and donate the others to charity.” So it’s that sort of thing. And that’s what Grace does. She gets to the point where she keeps hold of things, including her hat. There’s that moment where she goes to burn that hat, and she says, “No, this is really important. So let’s keep that, and I’ll keep the picture frame of my brother, and my mother’s ornamental snails and the ashes jars.” I think what I’m trying to say with all of us, is that we’re bowerbirds. We collect all this stuff and surround us. We live in a consumer society and a capitalist world, but really, particularly just for the environment’s sake, we’ve all gotta declutter and reduce, reuse, recycle.
Memoir of a Snail is in Australian cinemas October 17. For more information, go to https://www.madman.com.au/memoir-of-a-snail/
