Harvie Krumpet a balance of comedy and tragedy

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Adam Elliot, the Australian who made this year's winner of the Oscar for best animated short, tells MICHAEL DALY he hopes the film, Harvie Krumpet, will eventually make a profit.

Australian Adam Elliot made a short film about a hard luck character who was, among other challenges, born with Tourette's Syndrome, has a testicle removed, and adopts a daughter affected by thalidomide.

But despite the depressing list of hardships, the 22-minute film is "a balance between the comedy and the tragedy", Elliot said during a recent visit to New Zealand to present the film in Auckland.

"Even though these are blobs we're watching on the screen, with fingerprints all over them, I'm trying to create characters people can empathise with," he said.

"Harvie has a lot more bad luck than the rest of us do, but of course he has moments of joy and happiness. He's always struggling to find out, like we all are, what life's all about and is there any meaning, and what's the best way to tackle everyday situations."

Harvie was an archetypal loser and people could relate to him.

The film was being shown on Qantas flights and apparently it was "one of those films where everyone's got their headphones on but they're all laughing out loud together", Elliot said.

Harvie is Elliot's fourth film, following a trilogy started at the Victorian College of Arts in 1996 with a film called Uncle, followed by Cousin and Brother.

With Uncle the only ambition had been to get into the St Kilda, Melbourne film festival, and he had not expected it to travel well, he said.

The only certainty he had with Harvie was that it would be broadcast on the SBS television service in Australia.

"We had no Oscars in the back of our heads, we just hoped audiences would take to it," Elliot said.

"It did take us 18 months to raise the finance because a half hour claymation hadn't been made in Australia before, and an adult claymation dealing with adult themes hadn't been done.

"All my films have been 100 per cent funded by government agencies ... Each film is a battle to finance," he said.

"Since the Oscars, of course, the funding bodies have been very grateful, the amount of publicity we've given them. It's been great because it's given confidence to other film makers."

Fully-funded short films universally did not make a profit.

"We hope that somewhere down the track Harvie will break even and make a profit," Elliot said.

More than 20,000 copies of the DVD had been sold in Australia and this country, which was "unheard" of, and it was just about to be released in the United States and Europe.

"I always start with a detail and work backwards. With Harvie I knew I wanted to write about a character who has a lot of bad luck."

Harvie is bought up in a Polish forest by his mother, who suffers lead poisoning, and his father. When he is 18 his parents are found frozen to death on their bicycles, just as the Germans invade. Harvie flees to Australia where he works in a rubbish dump.

He goes in and out of hospital, for such things as having a testicle removed and being struck by lightning.

But Harvie does marry and he and his wife adopt a little girl, Ruby, and many happy years follow until Harvie's 65th birthday when his wife suddenly dies.

Diagnosed with alzheimer's disease, Harvie is shifted to a nursing home where his life does look up again.

"A lot of kids come up to me and say 'why do all these people die in your films?'. I say 'because in real life people die'," Elliot said.

"People say my films are autobiographical and I say 'well, sort of'. It's not until years after I've made them that I look back and think 'what was going on in my head when I wrote that scene'.

"There's a lot of myself in there and my writing is quite intuitive and instinctive," he said.

"I'm not going to deviate from dealing with characters who are afflicted or different ... At the end of the day what I think I'm trying to do with all my films is create real people, to make the films believable."

Elliot grew up on a prawn farm in the Australian outback with his parents and siblings, until the farm went bust and the family moved to Melbourne, where his parents set up a hardware business.

He was born with a physiological tremor, but would still spend hours in his bedroom as a child drawing and creating objects out of pipe cleaners and egg cartons.

His condition fed into his style with his models about the size of a wine bottle because of his shake, he said.

Despite the unorthodox approach he used to get actor Geoffrey Rush to narrate Harvie, he said he was not a confident person.

He relied on Melanie Coombs, the head of Melodrama Pictures, which produced Harvie, to encourage, push and instill confidence in him, Elliot said.

Rush's involvement was the aspect of Harvie that Elliot was most often asked about.

"We did something which we shouldn't have which was approach him directly with a brown paper bag (containing a letter of introduction and a tape of Elliot's other work)," Elliot said.

"We knew he would be a very hard person to approach, but he lives in Melbourne and was talking at a film event, and we knew he was an artist first and not that concerned about money, and we knew we didn't have any (money).

"We just thought we'll give it a go ... so we went along to this film event and via a friend who was running the night we managed to get this brown parcel to him and, I think it was a couple of days later, he emailed me and said he was very interested in reading the script. He read it and loved it," he said.

He had wanted Rush because of the "beautiful quality to his voice".

After all the demands on his time following the Oscar win, it had just been in the past month or so that he had been able to "knuckle down" and "write madly", Elliot said.

He was working on a script now that "definitely feels like a feature", and was about to film a story that was "shortish".

"Of course, I can't tell you about either of them."

In the past few months he had thought about making a feature-length claymation movie, but realistically a feature was still years away.

"We're thinking we're not quite ready to launch into a feature because of practical considerations ... We don't feel ready yet," Elliot said.

"What we want to do is make another short and ramp ourselves up to a feature."

* Harvie Krumpet will screen in Wellington on Thursday and Sunday, in Dunedin on July 31 and August 1, and in Christchurch on August 7 and 9.

- NZPA