‘Memoir of a Snail’ Director Adam Elliot on the ‘Frustration’ That Led to His Latest Stop-Motion Marvel

It’s been 15 years since Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot’s last stop-motion marvel, “Mary and Max.” And his latest, “Memoir of a Snail,” couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

The new movie, like Elliot’s previous film, liberally mixes tragedy and comedy, following the life of Grace Pudel (voiced by “Succession” star Sarah Snook) as she endures countless missteps, including the estrangement of her twin brother (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and a disappointing love life. (The title comes from Grace’s proclivity to see herself as a snail due to her introverted nature and cleft lip. She has a pet snail named Sylvia and later collects snails in her adult life, becoming a hoarder.) But “Memoir of a Snail” isn’t oppressively sad — it mixes pathos with humor and ends on an oddly uplifting note.

“Like all of my other films, they start with more frustration or annoyance with something,” Elliot said. “Usually, some person close to me is annoying me.” In this case, it was the death of his father, who left behind three garages full of stuff that Elliot and his siblings had to sort through. It left Elliot with a fascination with hoarding. “Why, as human beings, do we fill our homes with things that we don’t need?” Elliot remembered asking himself. He spoke with psychiatrists and read books, discovering that “extreme hoarders have usually suffered a degree of trauma or loss, and that the hoarding becomes this sort of coping mechanism to deal with that pain.”

At the same time as he was researching hoarding, he reread some notes that he’d written about a close friend of his who was born with a cleft palate. “As a little girl, she had many operations on her mouth and was bullied and teased a lot at school, yet grew up to be a very well-adjusted, confident person,” Elliot said. “I was very fascinated by how she did that. These two ideas merged.”

It took three years and 16 drafts of the screenplay, but “Memoir of a Snail” is now here, painstakingly brought to life via stop-motion animation. Elliot and the animators found ways around their modest budget, including using magnets: The arms of the characters had magnets attached to them, as did their eyes. “When you have a low budget, you’re often forced to think laterally, and you often come up with techniques that no one else has come up with. And I think it’s quite healthy,” Elliot said. “The other challenge was trying to make it in such a short period. We shot the film in 33 weeks, which sounds like a long time, but in stop-motion animation, that’s really fast.” They found workarounds, including doing as little animation as possible in which the characters are speaking, mostly relying on Snook’s heartbreaking narration.

Discussing Snook’s performance, Elliot said, “She knew what I was after. And that was a very authentic performance. She’s naturally a shy person, which really helped with that authenticity.” Elliot said that he brought in one of the Sylvia props and said to her, “I just want you to talk to Sylvia for an hour and a half.”

The film has received numerous awards since premiering at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, including taking home best film at the BFI London Film Festival. “I had just gotten off the plane and arrived in America, and my producer said to me, ‘Did you hear we just won the London Film Festival?’” Elliot said. “I said, ‘I didn’t know they had an animation category.’ And she said, ‘No, we’ve won the whole thing.’ I think it was at that point it started to sink in that maybe we had a film that was going to do something.”

This story first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap magazine. Read more from the Awards Preview issue here.

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