Living Forward: Adam Elliot on "Memoir of a Snail"

If you notice any aesthetic blemishes on the miniatures in director Adam Elliot's stop-motion film "Memoir of a Snail," just know they were left in intentionally. Elliot's film is all about the importance of embracing imperfections and understanding how life's tragedies may shape us, but don't have to define us. This thesis is extended to the film's gorgeously realized creative process. There are between five thousand and seven thousand snail-related items created for the film (that's not to mention all of the other miniatures and models), and for all of them, Elliot implemented a "no airbrushing rule," ensuring that the fingerprints, rubs, and bumps that come with the territory of animating a film like this, were preserved.

Told nonlinearly, "Memoir of a Snail" centers on Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook), who lives in Melbourne. Her friend, Pinky (Jacki Weaver) has passed and Grace begins to recount her own forlorn life story to her favorite pet snail, Sylvia, after burying Pinky. She recounts how she and her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) were sent to different foster homes after their parents passed. While Grace was sent to a well-meaning, but often absent swinger couple, Gilbert was sent to a Christian fundamentalist community, whose malice and abuse towards him only heightens when they learn of his queerness. Equally heartwarming as it is heart-wrenching, the film traces Grace and Gilbert's respective journeys as they try to find their way back to each other.

"Memoir of a Snail" takes you through a rollercoaster of emotions, an intentional design that Elliot said was part of the reason why the film took so long to make (he wrote sixteen drafts of the script over eight years). "I want them [the audience] to feel exhausted and to have cried but also I want them to leave a little more buoyant and more positive about life in some capacity," Elliot shared. He spoke with RogerEbert.com over Zoom and discussed embracing the "happy accidents" and serendipitous moments of stop-motion animation, how he balances humor and gloom in his scripts, and the nightmare of animating fire.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The film is this interesting culmination of many stories, from that of your mother, who was a hoarder, to your friend with a cleft palate and who also lived a lot of Pinky's life, and your own story which we see in the character of Gilbert. How did you harmonize all these together into the final script?

This one is probably not as factual as "Mary and Max," which was about my real-life pen pal. With this film, there's certainly embellishment, and as you said, they're based on real people, but it was easy to find a home for them in this story because I wanted the characters of this story to be different. Grace, Gilbert, and Pinky are different from each other, not just in terms of age but life experiences. It's a film about cages, and I used that to link all these characters together. Grace's hoarding is her cage, Gilbert's homosexuality … even though all these characters' cages are different, they're united in that they all have to learn how to cope on their own. They all suffer different degrees of trauma and all go through distinct periods of isolation. At the end of the film, they have to learn what it means to stand on their two feet.

That's why from a narrative standpoint, it was important to have Grace become a complete person and learn to be content with herself before Gilbert came back. Gilbert coming back was sort of a reward for all of her trauma and suffering. I didn't want to give this message that Gilbert was the missing link or the missing part of her that she needed to make her whole again. She can love her twin and mourn his loss but doesn't need him to be a complete person. Even getting into that tension though … as you can imagine, these were very difficult characters to write. It took me many years to write and particularly after "Mary and Max" I needed a break. I wish I could make my film more quickly (laughs).

You worked on this for eight years and there were about sixteen drafts of this script, right? I'm curious what the notable changes were from say draft seven to draft fifteen. Or were you more so you were fine-tuning the process of finding the nuance of your characters?

The first draft of this screenplay was "Memoir of a Ladybird." Grace originally was going to connect ladybirds/ladybugs. There was a draft where Gilbert didn't come back as well. I haven't gone back and looked at all the drafts. In my case, the difference between each draft, narratively, is pretty minimal. What I'm doing is polishing the dialogue, and the voiceovers, and getting the chronology. In my first draft of this script, the story was very linear, and then as I worked on more iterations, I decided to shake things up and play with the different tenses. That's why there's this shift from starting in the present, then going back to the past, and then the past catches up to the present then we finally go to the future. My films are all very similar in that they're all comedy tragedies. In each draft, I'm trying to balance those two emotions, the light and the dark, as much as possible. I'm trying to make sure the film isn't too bleak but also that it's not too vacuous and full of gags. I'm always trying to get that lovely balance.

I was going to say: Grace and Gilbert go through a lot in this film and yet, at least to me, it didn't feel like poverty porn or manipulative, which is an easy trap to fall into. I'm curious about how "scientific" for lack of a better term the process is of incorporating hope in a film that is so bleak … is it like "Okay we've had XYZ amount of heavy scenes so now it's time for some levity?"

Sometimes it is like that. It's learning to pull back and a lot of that is just my intuition and gut instinct. I had to learn to trust myself. A point where this came up was with Gilbert's gay conversion sequence. Everyone else was worried about it, which is understandable, but I wasn't because I knew if I trusted my instincts and knew when to pull back, I could depict it in a way that was realistic and not cartoony. It is a communal process though; I spoke with my animators, producer, and script editor to nail the tone properly … it could have easily veered to being too over the top so it diluted its potency. I think the beauty of animation, too, is that there's a longer gestation period and we can think more deeply about every aspect of the film. Having that research and prep time, helps me sit with a scene for much longer so in the moment, I can think about when to dial up the comedy or the tragedy.

There's a quote I love that says "Without the dark, light has no meaning." You need to take audiences to a dark place so that way when the comedy comes, it works better and there's this release of tension. I want the audience to leave uplifted, I certainly don't want them traumatized even if I want them to be an emotional wreck. It's that balance gain. I want them to feel exhausted and to have cried but also I want them to leave a little more buoyant and positive about life in some capacity. It is tricky to write films that are a mix of light and darkness … it would be so much easier if I just wrote a comedy.

There's a Japanese art form that you feature in the film, kintsugi, that I think underscores that theme quite powerfully. [Author note: kintsugi is a technique of repairing ceramics with a gold lacquer that beautifies and highlights the cracks of objects]

Yes, the kintsugi is all about the celebration of imperfection. In all of my films, that's a theme I'm talking about, particularly with "Mary and Max" and this one, is the importance of learning to embrace your flaws and other people's flaws.  We are all broken in some way and we've got to stop pursuing this perfection in terms of thinking we'll ever truly arrive at where we want to be; it's not just in terms of cosmetic perfection and defying age and all that sort of stuff. I've got so many things I wish I didn't have about myself, my body, my brain, or my psyche, but now at the age of 52, I'm like, "You know what? That's just how I am. I'll try and fix some of them." I've learned to love my bad bits, "warts and all", as Max would say to Mary.

I loved how this embrace of imperfection carried through to the production and filmmaking. I read that you had a "no airbrushing" rule on set and that as you worked on the models and miniatures, you wanted to keep the fingerprints, rubs, and bumps that might have otherwise been smoothed over.

Yes, aesthetically and psychologically, the characters are imperfect. We wanted them to look imperfect and celebrate the brush strokes and the process of creation. We weren't as finicky about the little errors on the skin or the hair of the models. We thought "Ah that's 90% fine … that'll do" (laughs).

To your point about stop motion being a handcrafted process, since you're quite literally setting up every single shot and you're making everything one frame at a time, I wonder if there's room for improvisation at the moment even if you have your shot list decided and everything's been storyboarded.

I think there's a little bit of room, at least compared to CGI. I always say to the animator, "Look, you are the actors and if you can bring something new to the performance that we never thought about while you're animating, feel free to do it." Even when they're animating, sometimes they have to improvise even if they don't want to or mean to. Sometimes an armature on a model won't work properly because there's a stiffness in the elbow. So instead of a character being able to wave their hand now they have to have it stay outstretched. That changes the dynamic of a scene in real time and that's something we always have to be attentive to. That wouldn't happen if this was CGI'd; we're forced to improvise. Sometimes pieces fall off; I remember one day the ear of a model fell off (laughs). We had to quickly turn the camera away from that character.

I call them serendipitous moments or "happy accidents" as the painter, Bob Ross, would say. These times force the animator's hand to take a different direction and pivot. Sometimes it doesn't always work and we have to abandon the scene or revisit it, but more often than not they're able to succeed and they're able to come up with something better. It keeps all of us on our toes. So even though the story is very prescribed and planned, there's certain room for change within the breath of a shot.

A friend told me that he could feel "the fleshiness" of this film. It's interesting to note this sense that you sort of have to compromise with the elements you're working with; it's more of a relationship as opposed to you being able to force the paper, clay, wire, and paint to do whatever you want.

Exactly. Also, because of our limited budget compared to previous films, I was trying to do a lot more with less. Forget about airbrushing … we're not even going to bother with fabric. It's much too finicky to work with. These boundaries were limited because we didn't have to obsess about the incorporation of fancy elements for the look of the film; we just stuck to the basic ingredients. What we could obsess over, was getting the nuances of the characters, voiceover, and music right.

Everyone's vocal performances were stellar and Elena Kats-Chernin's score manifests as its own character oftentimes. I want to go back to a sequence that I'm sure involved a lot of the thoughtfulness and care you just highlighted: the gay conversion sequence. This is probably the first time I've seen glossolalia / speaking in tongues being put to screen (laughs).

Yeah, I grew up in a religious environment. I went to Sunday school and I went to a private boys school where we sang hymns and had religious studies once a week. I used to find it funny that in high school, the first glass of the day would be those religious studies classes and the second class would be science … sometimes it felt like everything I was learning in science was contradicting what I just learned. I still did get a lot of positive things out of religion. I think what I was trying to underscore in this film though, was the problem with organized religion. I think the family Gilbert is sent to is a cult and there's a hypocrisy that's at the heart of what they do: they preach about piety and love but the irony about them is that they're cruel and exploitative.

That tension between realism and the divine is also present here. I think of the role that fire plays in this film or how we have several shots where Grace transforms into a snail-human hybrid. It's interesting that you're using this medium to tell a grounded story but also harness its full power when you create those scenes that speak to something beyond the confines of realism too.

Fire and water are in the film quite a lot. The fire is symbolic of Gilbert's rage and he burns the church down with it. But it's also the fact that he wants to be a fire-breather… it ties into how he is very angry and justifiably so. Having that be a part of his character felt like a great representation of who he was. It's also something that ties him to his sister early on since they both get burn marks on their arms. I will say though. Fire is an absolute nightmare to animate.

I was going to ask about that. And there's a lot of it in this film!

We used yellow cellophane and chose to not do any CGI. We wanted to do all the fire in-camera. When we were burning the church down, on that day we thought "Gosh, why aren't we doing CGI." But we stuck to our guns and made the film without it. We certainly did rig removal and clean-up in post but there are no CGI additions. All the clouds are hand-painted too. We used green screen for sure but everything was real. The claim the team and I are making is that everything you see on the big screen is something you can hold in your hand, including the fire.

Yeah, you give a great preview of all the items with that "Citizen Kane"-esque opening sequence.

Oh for sure. I love "Citizen Kane" … I rewatched it while I was writing so that's where the potato reference is from. 

I'd love to ask about the Søren Kierkegaard quote that has become a thesis of the film in so many ways: "Life can only be understood backward, but must be lived forwards." What's your relationship to this line and/or Kierkegaard's writing as a whole?

I love that quote. When I first heard it 28 years ago, I put it in my first film, "Uncle." I've always wanted to reuse it and I thought "Well how can I use it in a film that's a bit more meaningful?" It made sense with this film because it ties into the snail theme; snails can't reverse, they can only move forward, etc. "Memoir of a Snail" is all about getting over regret and trauma and the reality that we can't change the past. I was worried about reusing something and I wonder if I should have mentioned that it was a Kierkegaard quote in the credits. It is quite well known, but then there are a lot of young people who are discovering it for the first time which is lovely. I just love it so much.