Film "Memoirs of a Snail" | A life behind a protective shield

As in "Mary & Max – or: Do Sheep Shrink When It Rains?", in which a little girl and an autistic man become pen pals, you sensitively focus on characters on the fringes of society. How personal is "Memoirs of a Snail"?

In every film I make, there are always one or two family members on whom I base a character. Grace is partly based on my mother, who loved collecting things. A friend of mine was born with a cleft palate like her, so a lot of her traumatic childhood is in there. There are a lot of embellishments and things that are completely made up and imagined. "Mary & Max" is based on my pen pal in New York, who passed away last year. Even today, I get messages from young people who identify with Max in "Mary & Max"—especially if they're on the autism spectrum. I hope it will be similar with "Memoirs of a Snail."

Grace is separated from her twin brother as a child. She collects snails of all kinds and later befriends an elderly lady (Pinky). I've taken a deep liking to her. What's the secret behind this?

It all comes down to the cinematic idea that we all have to let go in order to believe the actors. It's no different with animation. The added challenge with stop-motion is that the audience knows they're essentially just lumps of clay. From the very first second, you have to convince them they're real, that they have a soul and a heartbeat. That's not easy. I spent two and a half years writing and making many, many drafts to make these characters as authentic as possible.

How do you manage to make people enjoy following the stop-motion figures so much?

You have to be able to put yourself in the character's shoes and resonate with them. We've all had bad luck in our lives, for example. Grace has a lot of bad luck. We all know the feeling of not belonging and of being lonely. It's similar with Pinky, who reminds us of our eccentric aunt or people in our lives who have an exuberant zest for life. A friend of mine once played table tennis with Fidel Castro. At first I didn't believe her, but then I did. She's Pinky to me. Pinky is sassy, rebellious, and doesn't care what others think of her. She's someone we aspire to be when we get older, whereas Grace is a character I think we already are.

I think it's also a lot about striking the right tone to touch people...

Sarah Snook did a wonderful job with this. We spent a lot of time together in the recording studio to achieve this intimacy. I brought one of the Sylvia snails, sat her next to Sarah, and then asked Sarah to just talk to Sylvia for the next few hours and dimmed the lights. I wanted it to feel like she was in a bar at 2 a.m., telling her life story to a person—or in this case, a snail. We quickly forgot that it was an animated film.

What is important when someone speaks one of your characters?

We strive for realism as much as possible. The problem with actors in animated films is that they tend to exaggerate their voices into cartoonish details. That's exactly what we didn't want! We wanted real, authentic voices, not fake accents. That's why I hired Dominique Pinon to play Gilbert and Grace's father. The father was once a street performer in Paris. Since Pinon is French-speaking, he's a perfect fit.

Why “Memoirs of a Snail” and not Memoirs of another animal?

I see snails as the introverts of the animal kingdom. If you touch their antennae, they retreat into their shell. Grace has been doing this her whole life. She retreats from pain and trauma and uses hoarding as a kind of buffer and shield against further pain. I also like the elegant swirl on a snail shell. The swirl is a beautiful symbol for life going in circles. I've also discovered that snails can only move forward. This fits very well with the quote by Søren Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards, but only lived forwards." I get a lot of emails and messages, especially from young people who find this quote very profound. They think it's from me.

Stop motion is quite complex. What numbers are we talking about?

Hundreds of people worked on the film. 200 sets were built, and about the same number of clay figures were made, which took four months. Each figure took up to five or six weeks to make and cost approximately $10,000 to $15,000. We never counted, but we estimate there were between 5,000 and 7,000 props, including the entire horde of snails. The film cost seven million Australian dollars to make; the clay figures were the cheaper part.

The film is called "Memoirs of a Snail," and the production company is "Snails Pace Films." How long did it take to make the film?

Seven animators each worked on about five to ten seconds a day. It took a total of 32 weeks to animate the claymation figures. The music was composed from scratch. After recording, it took six months to rework the entire orchestra. Overall, we completed the film in less than seven years. By comparison, "Avatar" films take forever to make. I'm already working on my next feature film—an Australian road movie. I don't want to tell any more stories about people stuck in their suburban bedrooms.

"Memoirs of a Snail": Australia 2024, directed and written by Adam Elliot. 95 minutes, opening: July 24.