Shaun Tan - interview

Shaun Tan is going to the Oscars next month where his adaptation of his own picture book, The Lost Thing, is nominated for Best Short Animation. TheVine caught up with the dutifully understated illustrator at his home after a day wandering Melbourne in search of a tuxedo – no comment on designer, just classic black with a colourful handkerchief if you’re wondering. It’s a long way from his beginnings in suburban Fremantle, Western Australia, and yet an unsurprising pitstop along what has been an acclaimed and award-laden career thus far.  

At just 36-year’s old, Tan’s work from The Rabbits to The Lost Thing to The Arrival, is now a permanent fixture in schools up and down the country, ensuring him an audience for years to come. And while his work reflects that of eccentric peers such as Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton, the man himself confesses to being anything but an eccentric mad visionary, visionary though he may be. Consequently, Tan is quite content when journalists find him more likely to complete their tax returns than transport them to other worlds. Nevertheless, a conduit to the fantastic he remains.  

Your first major awards was L. Ron Hubbard Illustrators of the Future Contest in 1992, now you’re off to Hollywood with an Academy Award nomination, it’s like your career has come full circle…
[laughs] That’s right actually, because the company that runs that award if based well and truly in Hollywood and they’ve already been in touch with me because they heard I was coming out to LA and wanted to catch up. It’s got nothing to do with Scientology for the record. I’ve had lots of people ask me about that.

Have you seen some of the other films in competition?
I’ve seen three of them and fragments of the other two. Well, I’ve seen four of them if you include our own of course and there’s a film called Let’s Pollute, which I haven’t seen. They’re all really good so it’s anybody’s guess.

The awards are just a couple of weeks away now, how do you feel
Yeah, I haven’t had much time to relax and think about it because there’s been quite a bit to do in terms of work and organising the trip, talking to my producer, sorting out all these details like tickets because they are not that easy to get additional tickets. It’s only now that I’m starting to think, wow, how awesome is this? What a rare opportunity.

The Lost Thing has been on an incredible run of wins at film festivals around the world – what has that experience been like and how much material has it provided you with for future stories?
You know, I never know until I sit down to write or draw. One of my problems as a person is I tend not to be aware so much at the moment something happens. It’s all recollection in tranquility. It’s in there somewhere, particularly this trip, I’m sure there will be elements that will resonant with me and find their way into an illustration or a story, or in some other way, even if it’s just abstract sensibility about something. It’s the funny thing about writing and drawing for me, it unlocks my memory and I feel I’m able to express an emotional reaction to things that I may not have even felt properly at the time.

I can relate to that myself as a writer. I’m a compulsive note-taker, I’ve never really kept a journal, I’ve just fill books and books with notes.
That’s me as well. I don’t religiously keep a journal; I just have a little notebook that is full of random observations.

You wrote The Lost Thing in 1999, are you able to trace those notes back to a particular geneses moment for the story?
I’ve never had a story emerge from a specific point of inspiration, but what it has been is a convergence of threads. I will have three different interests at a time and they are just there hovering on the verge of meaning until something else comes along and unlocks it. In the case of The Lost Thing it was a cover of a nature magazine with a photograph of a tiny little soldier crab or a pebble crab. It lives in mangroves, is blue and its claws hang downwards. This was a real macro photograph so it was very big and I thought: ‘what a beautiful, unusual, alien-looking creature’. I started drawing it and at the time I was doing a lot of artificial illustration, so I began replacing its body parts with mechanical elements just for fun.

At some point I started writing some story about beachcombing and pulled out an old sketch and thought maybe it looks like that, which introduced the concept that it was really big. There was a really quick doodle in my notebook of this big mechanical crab thing and a tiny little guy and the guy is having an almost philosophical conversation with the creature. They are talking to each other as civilised beings rather than one being terrified by the other. I thought that was interesting, the idea this character is not at all surprised by this thing. Now that I think about it that was, in fact, the genesis of the story.



Do you personally share that nonchalance towards the bizarre and the absurd?
I think so. The main character in the story behaves how I’d like to behave. I’m a pretty average person in terms of my behaviour and how I approach things. People often expect me to be weird, or kookie or eccentric or dressed in a funny way, but then I’ve had other interviews where journalists have written afterwards that I look like an accountant, and I do.

I‘m quite conservative in nature and if I saw a Lost Thing as it appears in the book or film I would probably avoid it. At the same time I’d be longing to have a closer look. So the character in this story is a more curious version of myself or less fearful – like everyone else in the city he’s immune to excitement.

Sophie Byrne (producer) and Andrew Ruhermann (co-director) first approached you in 2001, how did they convince you they were the people to turn the book into a film?
Basically by sending me a show reel of their work and I was particularly impressed by then young director Tim Hope, he’d done a few music videos and some personal projects that were animated. What fascinated me about Passion Pictures was their versatility, they were doing everything from claymation to digital in all different styles. The work of Tim Hope interested me because it was digital and he wasn’t trying to hide its digital nature, he was using the medium in an intelligent and unusual way. I could imagine The Lost Thing being adapted in a way that wasn’t too literal, crafted so thing didn’t look real.

Would The Lost Thing been your first choice of your own work to translate for the big screen?
Yeah, it would have been. I was really glad, sceptical but glad, that was the one they approached me about. I’d been asked earlier about adapting another book called The Rabbits – which I think could work, it’s very interesting, conceptual book – and at the time I was actually in the middle of illustrating The Lost Thing and said to them they may be more interested in this book because I saw it as having a stronger narrative, three-act structure, and it was textured and composed very cinematically. The Rabbits is just big landscapes with lots of things happening at once whereas The Lost Thing is almost like a comic strip, so easily adaptable. In fact it’s more suited to a film than a book because of all its ideas about atmosphere, sounds and movements.

It’s an enchanting story, why do you think it has captured people’s affections and what about it resonates so strongly?
At its core it’s about a relationship with something that is somewhat dependent on you. The Lost Thing can be a metaphor for all sorts of things. It could be a pet, which I think is the first response a lot of people have, but also children and I’ve heard a lot of people interpreting the story as being about disability and whether people actually show compassion to the disabled or disadvantaged. I think it’s a very simple, emotional concept at its core and what I’ve done in the film is elaborate on that a little more to consider a spectrum of reactions to such a character, from this curious, compassionate boy who discovers it through to the faceless government bureaucracy that utterly rejects it.

What was involved in co-directing from your side of things and how difficult was it making that transition from solo illustrator to film collaborator?
It wasn’t too difficult because when I started illustrating I was illustrating other writer’s stories, so my earliest jobs were collaborative. The book The Lost Thing marks my earliest departure from that, where I really wanted to write, illustrate and control everything. To then take that particular story and re-enter the world of collaboration, I guess I was a little hesitant about it but I also realised there was a lot other people could bring to this.

One of the qualities of my stories, and this is true of all my work, is they tend not to be very dramatic. I’m very interested in stories that almost approximate the tempo of real life, in that on a typical day things don’t really happen. There’s not some big emotional arc leading to some kind of greater revelation.

As a book that really works because reading is a silent act and a solitary experience, but film is very social and dynamic. The other thing about film is people become very bored if a scene lingers for a second too long. It was good to work with Andrew because he was more experienced in the kinetic qualities of film and in the editing. I had some understanding of it as a viewer and as someone who has worked in an equivalent medium such as picture books and comics. As the project progressed my involvement became deeper and deeper and towards the end of the project I was pretty much directing the whole thing and was just consulting with Andrew from time-to-time.

You were in production for three and half years during which one of the jobs you took on was creating a first draft soundtrack using household objects – how hard has it been to stay engaged with the project for the full duration?
Well, the full period of working on the film was 2001-2010; those three and half years were when the film was in actual production. Prior to that was pre-production, a lot of storyboarding and I was doing the sound effects stuff in that period. To answer your question, my interest did wain several times, particularly when we couldn’t settle on a length and I ended up storyboarding the same scenes over and over again. Once we settled on 15 minutes, that got things moving.

With the sound effects, there’s something about adding the soundtrack to the storyboard that’s really addictive. You start by think you’re just going to do a few pointers so the sound designer has a idea of what needs to go where and it’s important for rhythm and plot points to know whether you’re getting a laugh from something. But the more you work on it the more you think it would be great if we could hear the crunch of the door, or the footsteps, or things rattling around in a box. Before you knew it I was running around with a microphone collecting sounds and editing them into the film. It was great for the sound designer because it gave him my brief, I didn’t have to write out extensive notes about anything. I was able to just provide examples of what I thought it should sound like in the crudest possible form. He was quite impressed with my feeble attempts [laughs].

It sounds like research is perhaps one of the biggest parts of your artistic process, and like the boy in The Lost Thing I imagine you’ve been a collector of things all your life…
Yeah, the boy is a bottletop collector and I used to collect seashells as a kid. It’s probably one reason why the story begins on the beach, but also why the Lost Thing has shapes of the body that work for me from my childhood study of shells. I also have quite an extensive collection of photographs of mechanical objects, which I just find really appealing. To me machines are very similar to nature in that their design emerges from functional concerns but it can be beautiful at the same time – being able to see the beauty embedded in the object.

I try to avoid collecting actual stuff because if that happens what little room we have in the house would just be gone. My wife recently switched careers from graphic designer to jewellery-maker, her sensibility and way of thinking is similar to mine, so a lot of her work revolves around found objects. So she’s the one collecting lots of stuff and her range is much broader, sometimes I’m cautioning her against picking stuff up of the street. One thing she brought home was a piece of a truck and I’m like, ‘what are you going to do with that, turn it into a broach’?

The thought of you collecting all these items, files of ideas, works in progress, cut outs you find visually interesting, it leads on to a question I wanted to ask about one of you obvious influences, Tim Burton. I’m presuming living in Melbourne you saw the exhibition at ACMI, there must have been a lot you could relate to, particularly in the first half…
You’re absolutely right, the first half of the exhibition interested me the most, particularly the stuff he was doing as a kid and as a young guy – that period as an artist is where you’re trying to figure out where you fit. It’s the most experimental period you’re likely to have in your life because you’ve got no commercial pressures and you’re anxious about finding a ‘Voice’ and trying all this crazy stuff. I really related to all that and the stuff he was doing as a school student – you can see there’s some talent and ideas there but at the same time it looks really naff and silly and awkward. Very similar to the stuff I was doing at the same age…

Your father was an architect, how much of an influence was he on your artistic style?
It wasn’t something I was conscious of until after I left home and set up my own studio and thought: ‘shit, this looks just like my dad’s – same drawing table and everything’. When I was a kid you can really see it because I used to draw all these enormous spaceships on the backs of his architectural plans and the spaceships basically looked like housing plans wrapped around a spaceship as if the machinery had been turned inside out. I was inspired by films like Star Wars, where they designed spaceships where you could almost see their working parts on the surface.

From my dad I also learned this meticulous approach to constructing things, more so from his building of furniture and things like that than from his actual drawing. The idea that it has to be ‘spot on’: if it’s a millimetre out it’s not there, if it’s 90 per cent complete it’s naught per cent complete. Not that he was hard about that, it was just something I observed. It would drive my mum crazy but then 10 years later you’re still using his objects and you realise they are the best things in the whole house. You learn appreciation of the longevity of a patient production, which relates to this film.

There’s a quote from you out there where you said: “drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie – the key is in the incidental details.” Quite apart from what this means now you’re a filmmaker (the biggest fibbers of all) is one thing, it seems detail is the cornerstone of your philosophy regarding your artistic process and storytelling…
And it’s not just surface details; it’s conceptual detail too. If I’m creating a universe populated by people, I spend quite a lot of time thinking about what those people do and what their lives might be like off screen or page.

In the case of The Lost Thing I thought quite a bit about how the society actually functioned, politically what it might be like. I decided it would look like a totalitarian state but not actually be one. I always imagine it’s a democratic place but the reason it looks so drab and boring is the fault of the people, it’s not imposed upon them but comes from within, some kind of apathy within all of us. Whether or not these ideas are relevant to the story they certainly help construct it like scaffolding.

So you build all that hidden conceptual detail and think of it as the bit of the iceberg that’s under the water, then on the other end you do all the details which are the ones you add when you’re telling a lie, or a joke to make it a little bit more convincing. And that is the incidental stuff like a stain on a concrete wall. It creates the illusion of some palpable, convincing and real so we don’t have to be constantly distracted by questioning the environment, we just accept that stain on the wall is part of the wall. Even those details are conceptually relevant. If I’m taking about a stain it’s because the world isn’t that well maintained because people have lost their vision and are merely going through the motions of keeping the city operating.

The joy of discovery and observing the world with childlike wonderment are big parts of this story. How carefully and jealously do you guard that in yourself?
It is challenging because as an adult it gets tougher all the time to be playful. There are so many responsible and pragmatic things we need to pay attention to and be conscious of. For me what has helped the most is I’ve been able to structure my life quite early on so I’m able to be an artist as a profession, not as a hobby. I think if I had another job and then had to do artwork in my free time it would be very difficult to achieve the kind of things I’ve achieved so far. It really takes time to play and make mistakes. All the things that are the opposite of being a functional adult.

But I don’t see it as necessarily being opposite, I do believe you can juxtapose the two levels together; you can be a playful adult. And that’s partly what the story is about, it’s not really about one thing or another as it is represented in that universe of the film. As a viewer you are engaging with it, there’s opportunity to live in both worlds. The ideal state for me is to have the ability to look at things as a child but with the wisdom of an adult. If you can achieve that, well, that’s like a perfect state of enlightenment.

You and Sophie Byrne were in talks with another producer about turning The Arrival into a feature film – is that any further along?
It’s looking good but it’s purely discussion on that front at the moment. We will be having a meeting with the producer who is interested while we’re in Los Angeles and I’m really looking forward to that because I’m a fan of other films he’s produced. A question for us is finding a good writer because I’m a writer but I think with this particularly story it would benefit from the input of a more experienced screening writer who I would work alongside. Again it’s a similar problem, The Arrival works well as a graphic novel because of its pace but the moment you imagine it as a film it totally changes the texture of it and the need for that narrative suspense that keeps you watching. The last thing you want is to just be watching two hours of beautiful imagery – that works for exhibition of paintings but in film it is death.

The second question is style. Is it going to be animated? Is it going to be live action or elements of both. I think of the later where the film would have elements of both live action and animation.

That’ll involve some experimenting with rotoscope presumably?
That’s right. The thing is I’m not a big fan of rotoscope or motion capture because I feel my approach to art has always been not simulation but representation – it’s one reason The Lost Thing doesn’t look very realistic, it’s got a whiff of realism but it’s a metaphoric universe and The Arrival is the same.

The risk is always you create a universe that feels too real: the universe needs to transcend reality, like a dream we watch and think about our own lives as a parallel. Not quite sure how that’s going to be achieved… that’s normal though with a project. The moment know exactly how something is going to look, that’s the moment you’re making a terrible mistake. Almost every project for me starts out as this anxious tangle.

I read this quote from you where you said “no idea comes from a big room,” I think that’s a sentiment a lot of artists can relate to…
I first heard it from Robert Hughes on the history of art. I think he was standing in one of the halls in Versailles and the actually quote is: “No great thought came from a big room.” Big thoughts have come from big rooms, but rather [it means] that committees don’t create great, edgy ideas. It’s almost not possible because there has to be consensus, for an idea to be really brilliant it needs to avoid consensus.

This is why my relationship with film isn’t 100 per cent enthusiasm because I’m very wary of committees. As a freelance illustrator it has caused me so many problems. Film is collaborative, it’s not possible to do one by yourself and it is the most collaborative art form outside of theatre or architecture. In order to get something on the screen it has to go through a lot of people and there needs to be consensus.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was just an Idea Stork, like the Baby Stork, who just came and delivered you ideas…
Yeah, that would be ideal! Because unfortunately you don’t always recognise good ideas when they come along, I’ve probably dumped heaps of good ideas cause I thought they just so stupid. So if someone just delivered them that would be perfect.

The Lost Thing is now available on DVD from Madman Home Entertainment