Mary and Max

First published on 1 Apr 2009. Updated on 2 Jul 2009.

When Adam Elliot tells you he needs a bit of time out from filmmaking, you believe him. Towards the end of a year's shooting on his feature-length debut, Mary and Max, he was working 90-hour weeks in such a delirium of exhaustion and exaltation that he later described the experience as "like making love and being stabbed to death at the same time".

"You'd have these moments of complete despair," the filmmaker confesses. "We lost a shot towards the end that had taken two weeks to animate. It got sent off to the computer and it vanished. We told the animator late on a Friday night, we all went out to the pub and got very drunk, and on Monday morning he came back in and spent another two weeks shooting it. And it came out better, fortunately - but when things like that happen a little part of you dies."

Mary & Max Gone are the days when Elliot worked solo in the sweltering heat of his father's shed, slowly bringing to life plasticine characters such as Harvie Krumpet, the Polish immigrant whose tragi-comic life stole hearts and awards around the world. Armed with an $8 million budget, Elliot commanded a crew of 50 to make Mary and Max, his claymation feature about a Melbourne girl's 20-year pen friendship with an overweight New Yorker who has Asperger's Syndrome.

Having fended off advances from Pixar and DreamWorks, Elliot opted to keep working in the style of his short films Uncle (1996), Cousin (1998), Brother (1999) and the Oscar-garlanded Harvie Krumpet (2003) - animations that found a receptive audience despite dealing in disability and tragedy.

Crisply narrated by Barry Humphries, Mary and Max begins in Mount Waverley, Victoria, in 1976. Eight-year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle (Bethany Whitmore), with "eyes the colour of muddy puddles and a birthmark the colour of poo," has a lonely existence with a distant father and a kleptomaniac mother whose cooking sherry requires "constant testing". Chancing upon a New York phone directory, she impulsively sends a letter and a Cherry Ripe to a random address. They reach the reclusive Max Horovitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is 32 years Mary's senior but happens to share her passion for chocolate and a Smurfish cartoon called The Noblets.

Elliot based Mary on his own memories of growing up in Mount Waverley. "It was a very brown place in the 70s," he says. "Things were very ugly; people had tyre swans in their front yards. I was quite bored and lonely, spent a lot of time in my room drawing; I was a mad Smurf collector. I'd always felt different."

The character of Max, who eats 'chocolate hotdogs', has eight identical tracksuits and trouble interpreting facial expressions, is based on the New York pen friend that Elliot has corresponded with since he was 17. "He found my name in a directory for people into comic books and wrote to me saying he wanted an Australian pen friend. It wasn't until several years later that he disclosed that he was autistic."

Given what happens in Mary and Max when the adult Mary (Toni Collette) betrays Max's trust, is Elliot worried how his friend will react to the movie? "He's gone from being indifferent to being very excited to see it. His brother's a lawyer and has read the script, so no one will be suing us, and in any case it's not about my pen friend but inspired by my pen friend. He understands what I'm trying to do with the film, which is to show how people with Asperger's see the world.

"Every day we come across people we find confronting or weird. And we often steer clear of them, cross the road, pretend they're not there. What I'm trying to do is make audiences realise these people have stories to tell. And they crave the same things we all crave: friendship and love."