Ssuffering abounds in Adam Elliot’s dark, deadpan films. The Melbourne animator’s characters overdose and lose testicles or drink a series of poisons; they are attacked by blows and lightning. These beloved underdogs, says the Oscar-winning filmmaker, are studies in human imperfection: “I realized that my films are about perceived flaws that are often not really flaws.”
Elliot won his Oscar for the 2003 short film Harvie Krumpet, introducing the world to his surprisingly whimsical style. Global attention followed, and her first feature, 2009’s Mary and Max, starred Toni Collette, voicing a girl who begins a pen pal with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Max, a New Yorker with Asperger’s.
Elliot’s new film, Memoirs of a Snail – all shot in 1970s brown tones and set in Melbourne, Perth and Canberra – arrives 15 years after its cinema debut. It has a typically high body count. “I’m really fascinated by peculiar deaths,” he says. “I mean, I shouldn’t laugh, but I love funny deaths.”
Its latest heroine, Grace Pudel, an ornamental snail collector traumatized by her mother’s untimely death, is voiced by Succession star Sarah Snook. Grace’s clay figurine is dismantled, hidden in Elliot’s studio, here in a former boxing gym in Melbourne’s Docklands. Next to Grace are dozens of characters, each in their own cardboard “coffin”.
The studio is under the gaze of the huge but now defunct Melbourne Star observation wheel – like a morbid detail in an Elliot story. Her celluloid death toll began with her first film, the 1996 student short Uncle, in which an aunt is quickly dispatched by drinking ant poison. Later, in Harvie Krumpet, the eponymous character is blissfully unaware of his Tourette’s syndrome, his cancerous testicle, and his eventual Alzheimer’s disease, while his friend Wilma overdoses on morphine.
“When I did Uncle, people said, ‘Your stories are so depressing and dark,’ and I couldn’t understand that,” he says. “Someone wrote on IMDb, ‘Adam Elliot’s movies are all the same,’” he laughs. “I thought, ‘Well, they’re all the same’; they tend to have sad and tragic endings, characters tend to die. But why does everything have to be Disney? Why do they have to have these perfect endings?”
Memoirs of a Snail is typically meandering. Snook’s character, in a meta touch, is a stop-motion animator who makes her own film. Alongside her is Kodi Smit-McPhee as her protective, gay twin brother Gilbert. There’s Grace’s father Percy (French star Dominique Pinon) – an “alcoholic, paraplegic and mouth juggler” – and a cameo from Nick Cave, although it’s Jacki Weaver who comes closest to stealing the show as Grace’s only true friend. Grace: the elderly, toothless Pinky, a former exotic dancer who played ping pong with Fidel Castro and had sex with the late country singer John Denver in a helicopter. “I hope we don’t get sued,” says Elliot.
In Elliot’s hands, unforeseen death becomes an almost comic relief. Those same hands, he shows me now, shake with a hereditary physiological tremor. The condition, he says, fuels his “unstable” aesthetic and requires other animators to do most of the studio work – seven in the case of this latest film.
He is also asthmatic, and steroids make his tremor more problematic, while anti-epileptic drugs prescribed at one point left him “cloudy and dizzy” – all for the empathy mill, he agrees now, for his stories, based in part on weaknesses . from loved ones, as well as things he hears while listening on public transport.
Making Memoirs of a Snail was a decade-long soul-searching process. “I went through a period of discouragement and then depression,” says Elliot, “because it was so difficult for Mary and Max… to finance it and get it done.” That film cost $8 million but lost money at the box office; in the following years, Elliot made a short film, the 2015 work Ernie Biscuit, about a deaf Parisian taxidermist.
In 2017, he sold the house he shared with his partner Dan Doherty — the same “boyfriend Dan” he thanked years ago in his Oscar speech, after just two months of dating. Downsizing to move to the city, Elliot began to reflect on his family’s “light” accumulation. Elliot’s father, a former circus acrobat and owner of a storage company, died around this time and had “three warehouses full of stuff”; her mother, now 82, kept ballpoint pens and tea bags in Ziploc bags. And there was Elliot’s own collection of “trinkets, taxidermy, old antiques and trinkets.”
Taxidermy? “I had a piranha, a squirrel, a chicken, an antelope”, he laughs. He deliberately looked for bad taxidermy: “I found a lot of it only in second-hand stores. You know, $5 deformed chickens. I had a tiny, deformed parakeet.”
After his father’s death, Elliot began writing Memoir of a Snail’s main character, Grace, as a person who collected excessively. As research, he began watching “exploitative” documentaries about hoarders: “I quickly realized that many of these extreme hoarders had suffered trauma and often had lost a family member or child at a very early age.”
Elliot continues to cross boundaries and challenge the audience. “I said to someone the other day, ‘Look, if I don’t get a death threat, I’ll be surprised,’ because we satirize fundamentalist Christians [in the film],” he says. “There’s a whole sequence… about gay conversion therapy.” Elliot, who came out as gay at age 24 “after a backpacking trip to Europe opened my eyes to everyone,” wittily cast gay actress and comedian Magda Szubanski as the voice of Ruth Appleby, the leader of gay conversion therapy. .
Has he himself undergone such therapy? “I wasn’t,” he says. “[But] I have a friend I can’t name [whose] my mother sent him to a psychiatrist to be ‘fixed,’ and that was only 20 years ago.” He recalls his United Church Sunday school teachers and remembers them as “dishonest”; he has friends, he says, “who were seriously abused in the Catholic Church – who doesn’t?”
Later, Elliot was educated at a boys’ Christian school. “We would have religious studies in the sixth period, where we were told that God created the universe, and in the seventh period we would have science. I have always been fascinated by these contradictions. I read the Bible consecutively.” When he left school, Elliot became a “confirmed atheist”.
“We burned a crucifix in this movie, so that’s going to upset people,” Elliot reflects. “But I think that’s the job of a writer and a director: to push the boundaries.
“One of our professors at film school said, ‘If an artist doesn’t push the boundaries, then the art form becomes boring, and when the art form becomes boring, the art form dies.’”
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