Synopsis
Grace Pudel is a lonely misfit with an affinity for collecting ornamental snails and an intense love for books. At a young age, when Grace is separated from her fire-breathing twin brother Gilbert, she falls into a spiral of anxiety and angst. Despite a continued series of hardships, inspiration and hope emerge when she strikes up an enduring friendship with an elderly eccentric woman named Pinky, who is full of grit and lust for life.

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Interview with Adam Elliot

Animationweek (AW): Where did the initial idea of the story come from?

Adam Elliot: With all my scripts, the weird thing is they all start with anger and a sense of injustice. My films tend to be about people who are underdogs, mistreated or misunderstood.

Eight years ago, my father passed away, and he was a great collector. He had many, many things in many, many rooms, as well as my mother. We had to start sorting through all his stuff and downsizing. We really had to start to work out what is it they should keep, what is it they should donate, and what should they throw away. It was a very slow and traumatic process, because my mother didn’t want to let go of anything. And I became fascinated as to why do human beings collect things, as a species. Very few other animals hoard and collect these unnecessary items that we attach sentimental value to.

Then, I began reading a lot of books on psychology. And I started to get angry because there’s the way extreme hoarders are treated as some sort of freaks, or they get laughed at. But there are really extreme hoarders who have a lot of psychological problems, and more often than not I discovered that they’ve suffered a high degree of trauma in their lives, and quite commonly had lost a child or a sibling at an early age in a tragic way.

So, I started to realise that extreme hoarders really are damaged people who we really need to understand better. That’s why I want to make a film about a hoarder, as I was really quite fascinated by that. It’s based a little bit on my mother and father, more so my mother, because she still has a problem collecting. When does your collection become a problem and interfere with your day-to-day living? A lot of hoarders tend to be very shameful of their hoard, which I was fascinated by as well. At the same time, I have a very close friend who’s born with a severe cleft palate and, as a child, had many operations on her lip to try and correct this abnormality she was born with. As a result, she was teased and bullied at school a lot. But then, as an adult, she became quite extroverted and flamboyant. And I thought, “How does the person who had such a traumatic childhood transform into this wonderful, happy, extroverted person?” I had these two simultaneous ideas and I somehow started to weave them together into Grace.

Then, I introduced the character of Pinky, who’s based on a lot of elderly, eccentric women in my life. At the same time, I’ve always been fascinated by twins and how twins have a very strong bond, and when twins are separated, there’s this incredible sense of loss. All my films deal with trauma and loss.

Those three spheres of ideas amalgamated into this one script. Then I spent many years writing, rewriting, and doing many drafts of the screenplay. Then the snails came along. Originally it was going to be ladybirds, but I thought ladybirds are too cute, and I thought the symbolism of the snail was much stronger, so I quickly switched to snails. I also love the motif of the swirl on a snail’s shell. It’s very cyclic and emblematic of life going full circle. I also love that when you touch a snail’s antenna, they retract. We all did that as children. And Grace is always retracting from life, retracting from society, and retracting from trauma. Snails are also such fascinating creatures, they’re so unusual compared to other small animals, creatures, and insects.

AW: What do you want to share with or deliver to the audience through this film the most?

Adam Elliot: I always start with the details with my scripts, and I never quite know where they’re going to go. I don’t obsess about plot or the three act structure, I’m really just focusing on the detail. The number one thing on my agenda when I create a film is to create characters that are empathetic, identifiable, and relatable, people that the audience can really relate to, no matter where you are in the world, or what age you are. I try to create empathetic characters in a very universal environment, so that people all around the world can understand where they are and what they’re doing. That’s my prime objective. I think “empathy” is the key word I use.

AW: This film has a sense of humour, and there is much sarcasm and many ironies on sexuality, violence, religion, and politics throughout the film. I felt they are a kind of an antithesis to the unfair and unreasonable things in human society. Also, I felt that they give good accents to the emotional rollercoaster of the film’s narrative. How did you come up with these ideas and have them best fit to the film’s narrative?

Adam Elliot: I love irony. Irony is a tricky thing to deal with for any film and sometimes it gets lost or confused or misconstrued. I love word play, I love creating sentences that evoke not just sight and audio, but also taste and smell. I try to tantalize all the senses.

I think with humor, what I’m trying to do there is getting a balance between the comedy and the tragedy, the humor and the pathos. I want there to be as much darkness as there is light. One of my favorite quotes is: “Without the dark, the light has no meaning.” So, I don’t want the film just to be a series of frivolous gags and comedic moments; I want there to be a balance, because ultimately, as I said earlier, I’m trying to create very real and believable characters that people can empathize with. All our lives are full of ups and downs, highs and lows. I’m trying to reflect life, and life isn’t just perfect for some. It’s a balance between the good moments and the bad moments. Even the wealthiest people in the world have bad days and suffer depression and melancholy. I think that’s the keys to create really believable characters that suffer just as much as we do in real life, but also have moments of joy.

AW: Each of the many characters in the film really stood out, with strong characterizations. Why have you decided on using characters with such extreme personalities, and what was the process behind creating them?

Adam Elliot: For some reason I’m surrounded by very colorful and eccentric people. I have many cousins and relatives, and eccentric uncles, aunts, nieces, and nephews. I don’t know why, but I just seem to attract eccentric people. I mean, eccentric is a word I use a lot. The thing about eccentric people is they quite often don’t know they’re eccentric. They think they’re quite normal. For example, my mother. We think she’s one of the funniest people in the world, but she has no idea she’s funny. She doesn’t even think she’s funny, but she’s actually quite funny.

So, I just based my characters on real people. I’m not very good at writing stories about people I’ve never met, or inventing a person from thin air. My films are certainly not documentaries. They’re works of fiction, but it is so much truth. My previous film, Mary and Max, is based on my real pen pal in New York, who’s still alive and a lot of his character traits are real.

AW: The audience goes on a long, 90-minute journey through the characters’ lives that is scattered with tragic moments, in their search of a light. How do you keep the audience invested into the film and characters?

Adam Elliot: Another objective I’ve had is to keep the storyline unpredictable, where the audience rarely have an idea of where we’re going and where we’re heading. Keep the audience guessing. When I go and see a film, I don’t want to predict what’s about to happen, as it becomes boring then. So, I really want to keep the audience on their toes.

I really love fast-paced films and snappy editing. I love classical music and I often see the film as a symphony that starts off slow, then builds, and new instruments come in, and at the three-quarter mark, you have the big crescendo, the big climax, and then things filter away. Often when I’m writing my scripts, I actually can hear the music as well. I can feel it building, and I ride in a very intuitive way. As I said earlier, I don’t obsess about the plot and the three act structure. I just focus on creating very real, believable environments and unpredictable stories.

AW: I would like to hear about the visuals. What did you take care in the most for designing the environment, setting the colour palettes, and creating the visual designs of the characters? What are your goals of each decision behind it?

Adam Elliot: I’m a bit of a control freak, so I did the entire storyboard myself on little bits of paper with a pencil, and that took six months. I hand drew every single object in the film: every couch, every table, every set, every character, and 200 sets. As well as thousands of little props, of course. I spent a year just designing the film as the production designer.

I knew I wanted a very minimal, specific color palette. I’m 52, and I was brought up in the 70s. I remember the 70s in Australia as a very brown period. Everyone seemed to paint their houses brown: The walls were cream, the carpet was sometimes orange, and there were yellow things. So, I wanted this autumnal, very minimal palette, because brown is often considered dull or boring. I wanted that to reflect Grace’s life, which was at times so dull and boring and monotonous. I banned the colour blue and I banned the colour green. There’s a little bit of pink here and there, but I’m not a fan of pink!

I was born with a hereditary shake that I inherited off my mother. I trembled just a little bit, and I have trouble drawing straight lines, so all my drawings as a child were wobbly. Instead of trying to hide that imperfection, I decided to celebrate it, and I embraced my tremor. That’s why all my characters look a bit deformed, wonky and asymmetrical. I think none of us are perfect, so why should a character look perfect? In animation, so often the characters are so symmetrical and refined. I told my artist I didn’t want that. I wanted them to sculpt and paint in a very organic and intuitive manner, in a way that’s imperfect. I suppose we strove for imperfection rather than perfection, and we use these two words: “chunky” and “wonky”, which we stuck up on signs and put all around the studio. So, those are the basic fundamentals of how we wanted the film to look.

We had a 3D printer, but it was used very sparingly. We just used it to make the apples, really. But everything is handmade. There’s no CGI. Everything you see has been handcrafted out of clay or paper. We had four basic ingredients: paper, clay, wire, and paint. And we tried to make the film look like it was made from those four basic elements. There’s no fabric in the film. Our armatures for the characters, which are the skeletons to the characters, are very, very basic.

AW: What aspects of stop-motion are wonderful for you as a visual storytelling medium? When using this technique to depict this film’s story, what strengths of stop-motion have you taken advantage of, and what challenges did you face?

Adam Elliot: We wanted to celebrate the clay. I prefer the word “claymation” more than “stop-motion”, because it is about the clay, and clay is something we all played with as children, whether it was Plasticine or Play-Doh. Everyone as a child used to love playing in the mud and making mud pies. There’s something primeval about clay. It’s a very tangible and tactile medium. I think the clay is the key, and it’s what people can really relate to.

The other wonderful thing about clay is that it’s very malleable and flexible. You can stretch it into whatever shape you like, and it’s wonderful for creating facial expressions. I love mouths and doing very long, wide mouths, and really accentuating, particularly with the eyes and brows. My brows are always on a diagonal, and the characters look like they’re frozen in endearment the whole time. They look like puppy dogs. I love the creative freedom you have with clay.

Live action films would be simpler, quicker, and cheaper. But I think with claymation, and animation in general, I love the creative control and creative freedom you get that you just wouldn’t get in live action. We can create our characters however we want them to look and whatever world we want.

AW: While watching this film, it made me feel that the music is leading the audience more strongly than when I watch regular films. The music stays in my memory on the same level as many visual scenes. I would like to hear about the music creation as much as possible. How did you choose the composer, and how did you communicate your thoughts with the composer? What did you take care in the most?

Adam Elliot: With the music, I worked with a wonderful composer, Elena Kats-Chernin, who I’m very good friends with, and she’s one of Australia’s most famous classical composers. She’s prolific and very intuitive.

I used a pre-recorded piece of her music, Russian Rag, on my previous film Mary & Max. I met her after we made the film, and Elena and I agreed that there was a real simpatico between her music and my storytelling, and that we’d love to make a film together.

Unfortunately, it took fifteen years before that happened, but she was one of the first people I rang when we got the finance. I remember saying to her, “Look, do you think you could do the whole film? I want you to do the whole film. I’ve never had the luxury of having fully composed music from scratch”, and she said yes immediately, even though she’s very in demand, and she has years’ worth of commissions. I was so thrilled because, for me, the music can drive and steer the film, and I see it as another layer of nourishment for the film. Her music is very quirky, but it’s can also be incredibly dark at times. It has this wonderful sense of warmth and humanity.

We created the music from scratch. It was all tailor-made and bespoke. Elena and I had such a wonderful time creating this universe, however we wanted.

She lives in Sydney and we live in Melbourne. She wanted to fly down from Sydney to Melbourne, and spend a week in our art department amongst all the noise and chaos, paint fumes, dust, and hammers. She wanted to immerse herself in the chaos of the art department. I was very skeptical, and I said that’s not going to work because it’s going to be too noisy. I thought that she wouldn’t be able to concentrate, and that she wouldn’t be able to compose classical music in this environment. But she did. She set up her piano right in the middle of the art department, where it was noisy, dusty and chaotic, and within one week, she composed all the basic rhythms and melodies. It was incredible to listen to, and to watch her create. I don’t use the word “genius” very often, but she’s amazing. She’s got this rare gift of perfect pitch.

Elena read the script, and she knew the characters and where the moments of pathos, sadness, and happiness were. She composed the whole score in this very organic manner. We never sat down together where I said, “it had to be this and that.” It was very fluid and she just trusted her emotions. I can’t imagine the film without her music. If this film didn’t have her music, it would be so different, and I really think the film would be very depleted and missing some sort of soul. I often say that her music is the heartbeat to the film and the true soul of the film, because it matches the characters’ personalities and emotions. Even now, I’m thinking, “Oh God, imagine what the film would be like without her music.”

AW: What was your impression and experience in Annecy in general this year?

Adam Elliot: I’ve only been to Annecy six times over thirty years, because I only get to go whenever I have a film, so unfortunately there’s always big gaps. Every time I go to Annecy, it’s very different and it’s bigger. And this year was the biggest festival ever. I think there were 17,000 accreditations.

For me, it’s also a chance to catch up with friends and other stop-motion animators, such as Henry Selick, Nick Park, and Peter Lord. It’s great catching up with them and talking about where the art form is heading, what’s new, what’s changed, and what are the things to worry about. Of course, AI was a big discussion and debate this year at Annecy. There was lots of people discussing where AI is going to take the film industry.

I watched a beautiful film on opening night, The Most Precious of Cargoes, about the Holocaust, which is a challenging subject matter and I really love how the director took on such a subject that has been explored many times before. But that was a very powerful film and I loved it. There were some really original moments. I love the poetry of that film.

I sadly didn’t get to see many films because I was busy doing lots of media, but that’s okay, I was there to work. I wasn’t really there to have fun. Maybe next year I’ll go without a film, and that’s when I’ll get to see some great stuff.

So, I didn’t get to see many films, but I got to see lots of good friends. Annecy is like this wonderful bubble where you forget the turmoil in the world, all the horrors that are happening right now, and all the wars. You go to Annecy and it’s so multicultural and it’s so full of respect and compassion for other countries. It’s all about the celebration of art, and that’s what we’re all there for. To tell our stories, and to learn about other countries. Then you leave Annecy and suddenly the real world kicks in, and you turn on the news and you think, “Oh God, the world’s a horrible place.” But for this one week of respite in Annecy, you get lots and lots of fond memories.