‘We never went down the Aardman route’: how the Brothers Quay rocked the animation world

The Brothers Quay, identical twins, make marvellous, mystifying films in which eerie stop-motion puppets outnumber the few live performers. These films might be set in a strange school for servants, or a lecture hall, or a labyrinth, but really they take place in a small desktop universe that runs according to its own alien rules. The brothers hate the idea of having actors voice the puppets and have done so only under duress, once or twice, because it feels so demeaning. Demeaning to the actors? No, they say. To the puppets.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is just their third feature in a 50-year career, after Institute Benjamenta and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. Mostly, they make short animations. They also design for the stage, make music videos and devise site-specific installations such as their Overworlds and Underworlds project in Leeds for the Cultural Olympiad. Film features cost money, take for ever and involve a gaggle of interested parties, which is another word for meddlers. And so they very much doubt they’ll do another. “We’re 77 years old,” they tell me. “No one’s going to fund two old men.”
I’m delighted that they managed to slip this one under the wire. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is unique and opaque, with its own spooky logic. Loosely inspired by the work of the Polish author Bruno Schulz, a perennial Quays touchstone, it’s about a young man, Jozef, who boards a steam train to visit his father at a TB hospital in the Carpathian mountains. So far, so straightforward – except that the film unfolds as seven disconnected scenarios which are reputedly the flashes retained by a detached retina. This detached retina, in turn, is stored inside a mechanical box and is due to be liquefied by the sun on the morning of 19 November. There are some thematic connections between these seven scenes, say the Quays. Naturally, though, they won’t be drawn on what they are.
We meet in a garden at the Venice film festival, near a clanging church bell that drives the Quays to distraction. Both have wild grey hair and wear billowing cotton blouses. Stephen is discursive and softly spoken; Timothy a shade more pithy and decisive. They insist that they work in perfect harmony. “We don’t really disagree on anything,” they say.
The Quays were raised in Norristown, outside Philadelphia, but never truly felt that they belonged. On their first day at art school, they spotted a display of hand-drawn Polish film posters on the wall and that was that. They were hooked. Eastern European culture has always called to them and the pungent, oblique writing of Bruno Schulz most of all, because it inhabits a space that animation can speak to. Schulz writes about the metaphysics of matter, explains Stephen. He writes about the humdrum everyday as a poetic form and illuminates the creeping otherness of what initially seems to be normal life. That’s what animation does too, when the form is playing to its natural strengths. “If you can win at the otherness, you’ve taken people to a different world.”
The brothers have lived in London for decades. Certainly I don’t see much of Philadelphia in their work. “No,” Stephen admits. “But Philadelphia has a very European element. There’s a Ukrainian section and a Polish section and an Italian section, where we lived as children, although we’re not Italian. Our great-grandmother was Silesian. She grew up on the border between Czechoslovakia, Poland and German Silesia. All the languages in one place.”
In any case, they rarely get back to Philadelphia these days. Their father died five years ago. They have a younger brother who is still around. He was vice president of a shipping company and steered a completely different course from them. “He got rich,” Stephen laughs. “We’re still struggling artists.”
On workdays, the Quays sit in their Hackney studio at an eight-by-five table. They build little universes and manipulate tiny figures. Puppets, they feel, are emissaries from the great beyond. They wear their uncanny nature as a badge of pride. “With puppets,” Stephen says, “you know instantly that the naturalistic rules don’t apply. You’re in a different articulated universe. It’s like when you watch a documentary about insects and think, ‘Where in God’s name is the narrative sense in that mass of creatures on the ant-hill, or that thing that’s eating another thing?’ You can’t penetrate the insect kingdom. Puppets have the same independence.”
But isn’t every film a conversation between the film-maker and the audience? At some point the Quays, as directors, have to open the door and let people inside. Timothy smiles. “Hmm,” he says. “Reluctantly.”
“I mean, it’s true,” Stephen adds. “We could do it like Aardman and attach famous voices to the puppets and Aardman are fantastic at that. But we never wanted to go down that route.” Timothy nods, still smiling. “You should always come out slightly irritated.”
The Quays’ breakthrough work – probably the one they’re still most identified with – was 1986’s Street of Crocodiles, the 21-minute tale of a liberated marionette (strings cut, roaming wild) that eventually discovers it is not as free as it thought. Also inspired by Schulz’s stories, it was the piece that established the brothers’ signature style and showcased the whirring gears of their imagination. Terry Gilliam hailed it as one of the 10 best animations ever made. Christopher Nolan stumbled over it on late-night TV and became a lifelong fan. In 2015, he paid for new prints of the films and curated a tour of the brothers’ work.
I ask them what Nolan especially responded to in their pictures and they say they haven’t a clue – they never thought to ask him. The Oppenheimer director’s work is so very different from theirs. “I mean, you never really get lost in one of his films,” Stephen says. “Maybe Tenet. But Nolan wants the public to go with him. There are always hand-rails. I think perhaps he likes getting lost in our films because he doesn’t give himself those liberties.” He gives the ghost of a smile. “He did this little documentary on us, too. And at the end he said, ‘What’s all this about?’ And we said to him, ‘Don’t ask these questions.’”
If they’re not prepared to tell Nolan, they’re not about to tell me. The only advice they will offer is to bend my knees. The way the Quays see it, we’re all viewing things from too high a vantage point. We need to stoop and drop our heads so that we can achieve the ideal puppet level. Only then can we enter their strange, disquieting world, wander the doll’s house and peer into the shadows. “There may be moments when it’s tedious,” Timothy warns ruefully. “But there are also moments of magic.”
The majority of film-makers are governed by the written word. Film was born out of books and theatre and thereby missed a trick, whereas the Brothers Quay work to music because they’ve found that invariably aids their puppetry. “So our films obey musical laws,” Stephen explains. “Of course, you can never tell people how they should watch a film. But the musical element provides a narrative of its own.”
It’s funny, say the brothers. People constantly demand stories to make sense of their lives. Stories provide a light in the darkness and explain the world around. But the trouble is that any narrative – films, books, journalism, whatever – can only take us so far. In the end, the dark always triumphs and after that you’re on your own.
Timothy leans in. His smile has turned quite wolfish. “This article,” he says, gesturing at my recorder. “Can we ask that it be written as a non-narrative interview?” I think he’s joking, but then again maybe not. With the Quays, it is sometimes hard to tell.