Renowned director, filmmaker, animator and clayographer, Adam Elliot, is looking to head back home for the Bunjil Place screening of his latest project, Memoir of a Snail.
Scheduled for Sunday, 20 July, Elliot will also be hosting a Q&A session after the movie, and while having been in the limelight of questions for the better part of a decade, he remains eager to hear everyone’s thoughts.
“As a filmmaker, we’re happy for our films to be shown anywhere, and the film has also now been seen by millions of people around the world, but it’s also still being released in other parts of the world like China and Germany,” he said.
“Every audience is different, every screening of the film, the audience reacts differently, and I’m always curious as to how the people respond.
“It seems to be a pretty universal film, and like my other films, I’ve always had the very simple objective of making the audience laugh and cry; and I always say that if you’re not an emotional wreck by the end, then I’ve failed.”
Memoir of a Snail follows the story of Grace Pudel, described as a lonely misfit with an affinity for collecting ornamental snails and a love for books.
While still young, Grace is separated from her fire-breathing twin brother Gilbert, and as a result, falls into a spiral of anxiety and angst.
Despite ongoing hardships, inspiration and hope emerged when she struck up a friendship with an elderly eccentric woman named Pinky.
Reflecting on the writing process, Elliot said that he tends to write ‘back to front’, moving from a series of scattered ideas to a cohesive narrative.
From his perspective, it’s the same as either baking a cake or building a house, where “you have a rough plan in the beginning but as you start the journey, things change”.
“I love improvisation and I love spontaneity; animation by its very nature is a very prescribed art form, but I try to allow for organic moments, and I certainly have a whole lot of ingredients I try to cram into each film.
“Then it’s a process of distillation and culling, because you can’t have everything you want in there, it has to make sense, and there’s a balance between the dark and the light, the comedy, tragedy, and so I’m always adjusting things,” he said.
Born in Berwick, Elliot’s first short film was titled Uncle, and made in 1996, ran for six minutes.
It won a series of international awards, including an Australian Film Institute Award for Best Australian Animated Short, due to, but not limited by, traditional filming and stop-motion techniques that involved a now obsolete linear editing system called Steenbeck.
Two movies followed to form a trilogy, titled Cousin in 1998 and Brother in 1999, the former earning Elliot his second AFI Award for Best Australian animation and the latter winning the same, but with the added tick for the best Australian Short Screenplay.
Memoir of a Snail is Elliot’s second feature film, after his first, Mary and Max, in 2009 held its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
His latest piece premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2024, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
In true clayography fashion, Memoir of a Snail was shot in the traditional, and time consuming stop-motion animation form, where every single prop, set, and character is a unique handmade tangible object.
A team of artists spent almost a year making the 7000 objects that were needed to tell Grace Pudel’s tale, and with no single frame of CGI, took over 33 weeks to shoot, over 200 sets, and 135,000 photographs to bring it to life.
For him, seeing his piece back home is an ode to his origins, with Elliot saying that while he has lived in all parts of the world, “I’ve come back to this suburb on and off over my life”.
With friends and family in abundance in the City of Casey, he is looking forward to the Q&A session, adding that he “learns a lot from the audience as well”.
“I learn about what they like about the film, what emotions are triggered, and as a writer, particularly, I’m always learning about the audience.
“I’ve done thousands of Q&As over the last 30 years as a filmmaker, and you never stop learning, and it’s something you never perfect.
“These Q&As are just a reminder that I’m still learning, and I think that if you ever feel complacent and when things may start to fall apart, a bit of self-doubt is quite healthy,” he said.
Grace Pudel, as a character, “suffers a lot”, according to Elliot, but it was also a creative direction to make her resilient.
Elliot deliberately made Grace someone who was not heroic, but still someone who is brave, “in a sense that she just endures the suffering”.
“She learns a lot of lessons but ultimately comes out the other end as a whole person; there are times that I feel guilty about all the things I do to her, but you know, as I said before, I really want the audience to be emotionally exhausted by the end of the film,” he said.
The human condition is the biggest focus when it comes to the narrative of Elliot’s films.
He added that the characters are universal, and their archetypes are a deliberate creative decision.
“Grace is an archetypal underdog, you really empathise with her because all of us have gone through bad luck and suffered loss in our lives,” Elliot said.
“So I wanted her experience to be very relatable, and that’s been a really rewarding part for me as a filmmaker – anyone being able to relate to Grace, that’s what I was really hoping.”
The screening will be held at Bunjil Place’s studio, for a duration of the whole event to last two hours and 20 minutes.
The gates open at 2:20pm, with the film beginning at 3pm, and the Q&A session scheduled for 4:35pm.
For more information and ticketing, visit www.bunjilplace.com.au/events/memoir-of-a-snail
