Clay Motion
When I sit down with Adam Elliot and Melanie Coombs, director and producer of Sundance’s ingenious opening film Mary and Max, I want to talk about their cinematographer Gerald Thompson. Which is handy, because they do too. (Note the vignetting in the photo at right).
Much has been deservedly made of the film’s detailed claymation animation and of its dark, taboo-pushing story of two unlikely and lonely pen pals. Elliot had previously won an Academy Award (Harvie Krumpet) and found acclaim as a storyteller and animator, but for him something was missing cinematically. That something arrived in the unlikely form of motion control expert Thompson. Like Prometheus brought fire, Thompson brought camera moves.
Elliot and Coombs begin to relate their experience with Thompson trading adjectives: shy, self-deprecating, reserved, savant. “He built his own rig with bits off ebay,� one of them says. “He got a hard drive off the side of the road,� the other remembers.
Elliot sums up his eyes both shining and wandering as if he’s now conjuring the memory of a complicated and slightly unbelievable journey. “There were many key creatives, but I don’t think we’d be here without Gerald.�
Not that it was easy. Thompson had “no sense of time or deadlines� which Elliot says generously, but I can feel Coombs’ flinch just a bit—a producer’s flinch. Later she will gesture candidly, pushing her palms down describing her reaction when Thompson would take an expectation and then exceed it, sometimes past the point of comfort for the person in charge of the deadlines.
Nor was it always fun for the animator. “We would all talk about the shot and then Gerald would go into a room for 3-4 hours and you weren’t allowed to go in,” Elliot remembers, “and then he would have it, these really graceful, fluid moves—sometimes grand and operatic–if I said “sweepingâ€? I got sweeping. The performance had to follow. The animator would curse the cinematographer, the cinematographer would curse the animator…it was like Sophie’s Choice—who do I go with?â€? Six months in, Elliot says, they all hit their marks and the collaboration started to transcend, pushing past the square, predictable shots Elliot knew to do as a camera amateur and into the dark and poignant places he really wanted to go.
“We started to play off each other and we follow each other into the dark corners—’go Caravaggio’ I would say and Gerald knew.” Thompson’s light had the blackness and vignetting Elliot saw but didn’t know how to make, the fuzzy backgrounds that pitched focus onto the plight of the character, the close-ups that dove into their eyeballs.
“People had been critical of our production values,â€? Coombs, says, “never of our story.â€? “The story of Harvey Krumpet got us across the line,â€? Elliot offers, “but if you turn down the volume it was not very cinematic. It was time for me to move on. This [Mary and Max] had to be more grand, have more dramatic tension and poignancy,” he says as Coombs concludes: “We started to feel we could tell people: this is going to be cinema.”
