SSuffering abounds in Adam Elliot’s dark, deadpan films. The Melbourne animator’s clay figures overdose and lose testicles or imbibe a range of poisons; they are assailed with blows and thunderbolts. These beloved underdogs, says the Oscar-winning filmmaker, are studies in human imperfection: “I realized that my films are about perceived flaws that often aren’t actually flaws. »
Elliot won his Oscar for the short film Harvie Krumpet in 2003, introducing the world to his surprisingly whimsical style. Worldwide attention followed, and her first feature film, Mary and Max (2009), starred Toni Collette, playing a little girl who begins a corresponding friendship with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Max, a New Yorker with dementia. ‘Asperger’s.
Elliot’s new film Memory of a Snail – all shot in the brown tones of the 1970s and set in Melbourne, Perth and Canberra – arrives 15 years after his first feature film. The body count is generally high. “I’m really fascinated by peculiar deaths,” he says. “I mean, I shouldn’t laugh, but I like funny dead people.”
Its latest heroine, Grace Pudel, an ornamental snail collector traumatized by her mother’s untimely death, is voiced by Succession star Sarah Snook. The clay figure of Grace is disassembled, stored in Elliot’s studio here, in a former boxing gym in Melbourne’s Docklands. Next to Grace are dozens of figures, each in their own cardboard “coffin.”
The studio sits under the eye of the now-defunct Melbourne Star’s enormous observation wheel – like a morbid detail in an Elliot story. His celluloid record began with his first film, the 1996 student short, Uncle, in which an aunt is promptly disposed of by drinking ant poison. Later, in Harvie Krumpet, the eponymous character blithely ignores his Tourette syndrome, his cancerous testicle and his possible Alzheimer’s disease, while his friend Wilma overdoses on morphine.
“When I made Uncle, people said, ‘Your stories are so depressing and dark,’ and I didn’t understand that,” he says. “Someone wrote on IMDb: ‘The Adam Elliot films are all the same,’” he laughs. “I thought, ‘Well, they’re all the same’; they tend to have sad, tragic endings, characters tend to die. But why does everything have to be Disney? Why do they have to have these perfect endings?
A snail’s memory is generally tortuous. The character of Snook, in a meta twist, is a stop-motion animator who directs her own film. Alongside him is Kodi Smit-McPhee as his protective gay twin brother Gilbert. There’s Grace’s father, Percy (French star Dominique Pinon) – an “alcoholic, paraplegic, mouth juggler” – and a cameo from Nick Cave, although it’s Jacki Weaver who comes close to stealing the show as as Grace’s only real friend: old toothless Pinky. , a former exotic dancer who played ping pong with Fidel Castro and had sex with the late country crooner John Denver in a helicopter. “I hope we don’t get sued,” Elliot said.
In Elliot’s hands, the unexpected death becomes almost comic relief. These same hands, he shows me now, tremble with a hereditary physiological tremor. This condition, he says, fuels his “wacky” aesthetic and forces other animators to do most of the work in the studio – seven in the case of this latest film.
He’s also asthmatic, and steroids make his tremors more problematic, while anti-epileptic drugs prescribed at one point left him “foggy and dizzy” – all grist for the mill of empathy, he admits. he now, for his stories, based partly on weaknesses. of his loved ones as well as the things he hears while listening to public transport.
Making Memory of a Snail was a decade-long process of introspection. “I went through a period of discouragement and then depression,” says Elliot, “because Mary and Max were so difficult…to finance and make.” This film cost $8 million but lost money at the box office; in the years that followed, 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 all those years ago in his Oscar speech after just two months of dating. While downsizing to move to the city, Elliot began to think about his family’s “slight” hoarding. Elliot’s father, a former circus acrobat and storage company owner, died around this time and had “three sheds full of stuff”; his mother, now 82, kept ballpoint pens and tea bags in Ziploc bags. And there was Elliot’s own collection of “knick-knacks, taxidermy, old antiques and bric-a-brac.”
Stuffing? “I had a piranha, a squirrel, a chicken, an antelope,” he laughs. He deliberately sought out bad taxidermy: “I only found a lot of it at flea markets. You know, $5 worth of deformed chickens. I had a deformed little parakeet.
After his father’s death, Elliot began writing Memoir of a Snail’s main character, Grace, as someone who collected excessively. As part of his research, he began watching “exploitative” documentaries about hoarders: “I quickly realized that many of these extreme hoarders had suffered trauma and usually had lost a family member or a child very early. »
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’re ridiculing fundamental Christians (in the film),” he says. “There’s a whole segment… about gay conversion therapy.” Elliot, who revealed his homosexuality at the age of 24 “after a hiking trip in Europe opened my eyes to everyone”, humorously chose gay actress and comedian Magda Szubanski to play the voice by Ruth Appleby, the leader in gay conversion therapy. .
Did he undergo such therapy himself? “I wasn’t,” he said. “(But) I have a friend who I can’t name (whose) mother sent him to a psychiatrist to be ‘fixed,’ and that was only 20 years ago.” He looks back on his Uniting Church Sunday school teachers and calls them “questionable”; he has friends, he says, “who have been seriously mistreated in the Catholic Church – who doesn’t?”
Elliot was later educated at a Christian school for boys. “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 back to back.” By the time he left school, Elliot had become a “convinced atheist”.
“We’re burning a crucifix in this movie, so that’s going to upset people,” muses Elliot. “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.”