In Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s The Girl Who Cried Pearls, a boy who has nothing realizes that the tears of a girl he loves turn into pearls. When he begins selling them to a pawnbroker, he is forced to choose between untold riches and finding a way to stop her from crying altogether.
Awards Buzz spoke with Lavis and Szczerbowski about coming up with the premise for such a melancholy film: Lavis shared:
“Oh, I think the writing process is always pretty happy for us. It’s the grind of making the thing for the next four years that, yeah, the melancholy comes in. How did we come up with this idea? It started gestating well over a decade ago. We had this image of a girl crying pearls. We had another image, kind of a close up of her sweeping up these pearls. And then this image of a boy staring through a little hole in the wall. And our process of writing really comes from building these images, and then the story writing is really how we start stitching them together. “
Szczerbowski expanded:
“Often, we end up writing a story just for the mental hygiene of decontaminating from the work we’re actually doing at the moment. So, we’d be working all day on another film, and then go out for beers and to clear our head. Sometimes you have to, when you’re working in stop-motion animation, you can’t just stop the job and go home sometimes. The temporal lobe of your brain is affected. Time passes in a very surreal way when twenty-four frames equals one second.”
Watch the video above to hear more about the animation process and how the field has evolved since their last Oscar nomination back in 2007 for Madame Tutli-Putli.
The Girl Who Cried Pearls is on the Oscar shortlist for Best Animated Short.
