Memoir of a Snail: Oscar winner Adam Elliot on the light and dark of suburban Australia

Oscar-winning Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot is nervous about screening his latest film, Memoir of a Snail, in Canberra.

It may be our nation’s capital but it has a distinctly sleepy feel about it. It’s also the setting for Memoir of a Snail, a melancholic drama about Grace, a young woman who copes with trauma by collecting snails and snail-related objects.

Grace lives in a modest house on a modest street in a modest neighbourhood that has a library and a community swimming pool.

Elliot loves suburban Australia but he’s still scared of how Canberrans will react to his rendering of their home.

“I’m terrified,” he told The Nightly. “All my relatives are in Canberra and they’re all coming to see the film, I’m terrified they’re going to hate me.”

But it comes from a place of love and familiarity. It’s why he had Grace say the line in voiceover, ‘Back then, Canberra wasn’t the exciting place it is today’.

Elliot was brought up in the suburbs as well as on a prawn farm in outback South Australia. He has fond memories of his time in Mount Waverley, which he used as the setting for his beloved 2009 feature, Mary and Max.

“I love the suburbs but I also hate them. It’s bittersweetness because as a kid in the 1970s, we were allowed to do whatever we liked. We would go off on these adventures as long as you were home by dark.

“It’s the reason you go to school and you see everybody with broken arms and eye patches because back then, there were no helicopter parents. It was so liberating.

“But the suburbs can be extremely depressing for people, and bland. It can be a lonely place, if you don’t find your tribe, the blocks are big and the neighbours are further away, it’s harder to connect with people.

“There is that dichotomy.”

Elliot, who in 2003 won his Oscar for his animated short Harvie Crumpet, which features suburban Australia. It’s that blend of light and dark that drives the emotional as well as the physical space of his stories.

His characters tend to be introverted, spend their time indoors and are isolated from most people.

That’s certainly true for Memoir of a Snail, a meticulous stop-motion animation that is still lovingly crafted by hand and most definitely not with 3D printers or computer-generated graphics.

Grace, voiced by Sarah Snook, feels much more real because you know her every feature and movement was touched by someone. That tangibility is essential to a character who is so pervasively sad.

But she’s not designed to be an object of sympathy or pity. “The thing I’m trying the hardest for is empathy. I want the audience to relate to the characters, and not just here in Australia but in Sweden, Japan and all around the world,” Elliot said.

“It’s because all of us have been through periods of loneliness, all of us have been through periods of feeling different or that we don’t fit in. As a teenager, I was trying so hard to fit in, and I was different to everybody else. Now as an adult, I’m trying to not fit in!”

Grace is a collector but depending on your perspective, she may well be a hoarder. That defining aspect of her character, and the film as a whole, was triggered by the death of Elliot’s father.

That’s when the fascination with hoarders and collectors kicked in. His dad had three sheds full of things that he was never going to use, and his parents took it with them every time they moved.

“They never decluttered and I thought, ‘Why are we all bower birds?’”

When he delved into the subject, Elliot discovered that more often than not, it’s loss that drives extreme hoarding. For Memoir of a Snail’s Grace, it’s being separated from her twin brother after the death of their parents.

“(The experts) don’t quite know the full psychology behind it, but it is that everything they collect is given a sentimental value, and that’s why they can’t bear throwing anything out because everything has a story. But also they’re protecting themselves from the outside world with all this stuff.”

Elliot had some mild collecting tendencies too. He had, for a time, a taxidermy collection, specifically, bad ones. But a combination of the practical problem of dust and cleaning for someone so fastidious and going through depression, spurred him to give it all away.

“I felt like I was drowning in stuff. I felt I needed to get rid of stuff, and it was incredibly cathartic and cleansing.”

At the same time, he started to write Grace.

“I’ve got a body of work and I look back and think, ‘Well, what have I been trying to say all these years?’ You start to psychoanalyse yourself.

“All my characters have some perceived imperfection or flaw. So what I’m trying to get the audience to do is say, ‘Well, OK, we’ve not only got to embrace your own flaws and imperfections but other people’s, and empathise and put yourself in the shoes of what it is like to be someone who’s seen as different or unusual or marginalised or misunderstood.

“Grace can be seen as ‘other’ but she’s also us as well.”

Elliot knows that his films can be challenging in the animation space. They’re made for adults who want nuance and, yes, a little sadness and provocation.

“If you’re not an emotional wreck by the end of one of my films, then I failed.”

They’re also hard to finance. He added, “They’re hard to pitch, ‘Oh, what’s your movie about? A lonely woman in Canberra in the 1970s who bought snails?’.”

But his name immediately brings cachet. People know what an Adam Elliot movie is going to be like. Some larger studios have tried to capitalise on that, and he has been approached with offers. He’s not interested in making the third sequel in some massive franchise.

He has thought about it but the answer was always no, even if he might kick himself. But if he had said yes, he would never have made Mary & Max or Memoir of a Snail.

“Would I like more money? Yes. We would all like more money.

“My life would be so much simpler if I just make comedies, or work for children. But I’ve stupidly chosen a career of making stop-motion adult films with challenging subject matters such as gay conversion and suicide.

“But it’s our job as filmmakers to do that. If we don’t talk about this subject matter in cinema and storytelling and art, where does it get talked about?”

Memoir of a Snail is in cinemas on Thursday, October 17