How Hollywood’s ‘Mollusc Man’ tracked down 1,500 snails for Ben Affleck in Deep Water

Deep Water, starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as a dysfunctional, slightly murder-y couple, is a story of passion, betrayal and snails.

Affleck’s Vic, a mysterious, “rich as f***” tech whizz, who is repeatedly cuckolded by his wife Melinda (de Armas), has a mollusc obsession. Throughout the film, Vic’s snail palace in the garage of his New Orleans home provides an oasis for the character as suspicion from his affluent suburban acquaintances mounts.

That snails are so integral to Deep Water’s plot is down to the author of the book from which the film is adapted. Patricia Highsmith, also known for her novels The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train, had a serious penchant for molluscs. She was known to smuggle them into parties under her breasts, according to The Guardian, and kept hundreds as pets.

Frankly, there are a lot of them in this movie, so The Independent tracked down Deep Water’s adviser for all things gastropoda, the self-styled Mollusc Man of Hollywood, and surprisingly, he came out of his, ahem, shell. Max Anton majored in film production but says he’s always had a passion for nature since volunteering at the Houston Museum of Natural Science as a teenager.

He could scarcely believe it when, one day, an email – call it snail mail, perhaps – landed in his inbox from a Hollywood prop master asking if he could source 1,000 snails for a feature film.

First of all, what are your credentials, sir? How did you get into what you’re doing?

Well, if you're referring to snail wrangling, that was sort of an unexpected little gig, it kind of fell into my lap. I've always sort of lived in the crossroads between art and nature. [One day] I get an email from a guy who says he's a prop master with a Hollywood film and he needs a thousand snails on set. I thought it was a scam. Like someone is tailoring a scam just for me? That's flattering. But it turns out it was legit and amazing. And that was Deep Water.

I read on your website you managed to source 1,500 snails from four different states. How did you do that and were you looking for certain species in particular?

[The director, Adrian Lyne] wanted big snails, like massive, unrealistically big snails, and they exist but to get them we'd have to go overseas or shell out a lot of money and that wasn't feasible at the time. There are also illegal means, but we didn't want to go down that route either. So we settled for domestic species that we could get in the United States fairly quickly.

I flew to California and ended up in San Diego and Los Angeles, probably collected 600-700 of the brown garden snails that trip. I even collected some from the hill where the Hollywood sign is only to take them all the way back to New Orleans.

Hollywood snails? I imagine they were trickier to work with.

They had very specific demands.

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So you have 700 snails on your person and need to fly them back to New Orleans — how does that work?

It sounds like a lot, but they just fit in four little jars I got from a dollar store. To the best of my knowledge, it is not illegal to transport snails that are already established domestically inside the United States. I also know from experience that the TSA gives people trouble about stuff like that. So, I got creative and was able to get them through the x-ray machines without detection... The specific methods I will keep proprietary.

I will tell you that snails are not nearly the worst animal I’ve been able to get through security.

What was?

Five black widow spiders.

Holy...

I was determined not to make it a Snakes on a Plane scenario. The problem is when I got the spiders home, the babies hatched and I forgot the babies were smaller than the air holes in their box. And so I walk back into my room and things are dropping on me. I look up and my ceiling is swarming with baby widows.

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Moving on, I read in another interview you said Ben Affleck was ‘fantastic’ with the snails. How so?

If you haven't handled snails before, sometimes it's easy to make a mistake and pick them up wrong, or squeeze in the wrong spot and the shell can crack or something like that. Ben [Affleck] could take instructions. He listens. He was patient, even though I don’t know if he liked the snails or not; I don’t think he was a fan of the slime. He took it very slow and was very gentle and I really appreciated that about him.

But Ana de Armas wasn’t such a fan, right?

I actually felt bad for her because [the director] was like, “Get your hand all the way in that pile of snails,” and she was like, “No!” I was kind of mean to her. I snuck a couple of extra snails inside the wallet that she had to pick up. So when the wallet fell open snails were just tumbling out.

What happened to all the snails once filming wrapped?

Some I kept until the end of their natural lives, when I got them they were already older snails. Others I took handfuls of and I put them in spots where I hoped that they would proliferate a little bit.

I guess what I was hoping for out of this production was ... Snails are one of those things that people tend to overlook. They've never really taken time to take a close look at such a small, boring animal and really appreciate all the little intricacies, all the textures, all the idiosyncrasies that make them come to life. And I guess I was just hoping that by seeing these snails up close and in cinematic quality people would get curious about what else is out there and see what they're missing in the microcosm.

‘Deep Water’ is out now on Amazon Prime Video