Berberian Sound Studio is a twist on 70s horror movies, but without a drop of gore on screen. The film's director explains how he tried to create a spell with sound
Peter Strickland, a slight, olive-skinned man of 39, speaks with the accent of London commuter towns. "What's interesting about sound," he says, "is that to do it properly, it's the one part of a film that still needs a human touch. So even now you have sound effects of people doing terrible things to vegetables. And meat." The smile fades. "Although I'm vegetarian, so I didn't want to get involved with that."
In a small cubicle at a film company office, Strickland is discussing his second movie as writer-director, Berberian Sound Studio – about a mousy English sound engineer uneasily employed on a seedy 70s Italian horror flick. His own manner is closest to that of a science teacher with a varied life outside the classroom, dryly enthused as he tells the tale behind his film.
Its hero is a hunched ball of timidity named Gilderoy, played by Toby Jones as a man who may well have been born wearing his brown cardigan. Hired in murky circumstances, flown to Rome and set to work in a studio that feels hermetically sealed from the world outside, his job is to create the sound effects for a strutting producer's latest project – a low-rent giallo involving occult curses, sexed-up goblins, and some grotesquely inventive violence.
Hence the vegetables; Gilderoy working his way through endless spattered marrows and stabbed cabbages as he fashions the sounds to match those gory visions. Expertly deadpan and knee-deep in brutalised salad, Strickland's movie is a lot of fun – yet its default setting is a clammy hum of dread, the result not quite a horror film but perhaps its enigmatic cousin.
"It's like putting tracing paper over the horror movie," Strickland says, "taking its highs and lows and getting the same response from the audience without actually showing anything horrific."
Sure enough, while Gilderoy is tormented by what he sees on the studio's screen, we witness none of it. Instead, what emerges is a tribute to the secret role of sound in film as one vast sleight of hand – so much of what we hear in the cinema is manufactured by jobbing technicians after the cameras have been switched off. "I was always fascinated by how sound confounds us," Strickland says. "How it leads us up the garden path. And in the people who do the leading."
A long-time experimental musician, Strickland first planned to make a movie about the real-life avant-garde composers and performers who paid the bills moonlighting on giallo soundtracks. Only in the writing did it turn into a study of creeping fear and rampant homesickness.
It's tempting to assume a note of autobiography. Gilderoy longs for his tranquil life back in Dorking – Strickland grew up around the M25 in Reading, but has spent the past decade plotting a nomadic course through Hungary and Slovakia, "moving ever further east in search of cheaper rent". When we meet he's about to move to Budapest with his Hungarian wife.
"God, no," he says to the idea the film might reflect his own experience as an Englishman abroad. "For one thing I'm half-Greek. I also believe in keeping your personal life off screen." The thought of a permanent return to Britain leaves him lukewarm: "It's unlikely. I'd like to settle somewhere. But I'm pretty ambivalent about here."
Yet Gilderoy did have his models. Among them was trailblazing record producer Joe Meek, whose taste for sonic adventure failed to benefit his mental health before he shot both himself and his landlady in 1967. Other inspirations were less troubled: "I was interested in Vernon Elliott, who composed the music to The Clangers. I wanted Gilderoy to have that very particular Englishness."
It worked – lost in the scuzziest corners of the Italian movie industry, Gilderoy feels like the human embodiment of his hometown. "Dorking was important," Strickland says. "I can just about remember 70s Britain – Saturday teatime, Dad's Army on TV, egg and chips on the table, hardly anyone having been abroad. And when I think of that innocence, that slightly sheltered quality, I think of Dorking." A second later: "Not in a bad way. I don't want to offend people from Dorking."
But while 70s Britain was glued to Dad's Army, in Italy directors such as Dario Argento were turning out the floridly stylised gialli whose zealous attention to music and costume Strickland would later relish. His own film is a riot of sly references to the underground cinema and music he admits being obsessed by (the title alludes to avant-garde singer Cathy Berberian). Yet despite what Strickland himself calls the "trainspotting", his story pushes in unexpected directions. With nods to the trials of freelance employment and workplace bullying, this oddball horror-art movie has a firmer grasp of working life than many sober slices of social realism.
Strickland's own route into the movies was some way from the usual path of film school and advertising agency. It began with a trip to London at 16, his first visit to the capital alone – one that took him to the fabled Scala cinema in then-perilous King's Cross. That night, previously limited to "watching Cocktail at the Reading ABC", he saw David Lynch's Eraserhead. If the film proved predictably formative – it ripples through Berberian Sound Studio – the venue was still more so.
"There was something magical about that space, how it felt so illicit. And the films they screened had this sense of everything being up for grabs, Tarkovsky one night, a Russ Meyer triple-bill the next. For me, it was feverish. I can still trace the urge to make films back there."
Yet most of his 20s went by working not behind the camera but for exam board EdExcel. The leap into action came with the sale of his late uncle's semi in Aldershot. Strickland's share of the inheritance was £25,000; the consensus was that he should put a deposit on a flat and gratefully step on to the British property ladder. Instead, he decided to move to eastern Europe, free of the distractions of a social life, and to use the money to fund his first feature film, a rape-revenge drama set in Transylvania.
The result, Katalin Varga, was eventually shot in the Romanian countryside in 17 days. That was 2006. The film would be released in 2009. In between, the cash ran out.
He had already lost his job writing dialogue for computer game monsters in Bratislava. Now, his movie would sit and moulder, an unedited mass of raw footage.
"Not a good memory," he says. "Not a good time." He still looks traumatised discussing it. "There was a lot of despair. Eventually I just had to accept the film would never be finished, and I was dead in the water."
The low, he says, came at the end of 2007 when, heavily in debt, he gave up and moved back to his mother's house in Reading. His luck stayed bad. "Before it had always been easy to get temp jobs, but you get into your 30s and there's always someone younger than you. My CV was full of holes. I didn't like to think about the future."
Ultimately, with pennies scraped together and colleagues working cheaply because they liked the material, Strickland's debut was dragged to completion. Three years after it was shot, the film was released in Britain to justly ardent critical praise. That must have been nice?
"Sure, that was a good day – the day I went to the newsagent. But overall, though it would be easy to romanticise the memory, the truth is it was horrible. I was glad to see the back of it."
He says that even when all was going well he assumed Katalin Varga would be his only film. Instead, it opened doors. While his debut was funded from a satchel stuffed with Romanian lei he carried with him while filming, Berberian Sound Studio received backing from the new production arm of the British Film Institute.
Fond portrait of Dorking aside, it seems unlikely to have been what David Cameron had in mind when he once spoke of British film's duty to encourage tourism. At that, Strickland is nonplussed. Still, having all but bankrupted himself for his art, he's grateful for public money. "If you're using it you should be pragmatic and say: 'I'm glad British film produces these big, mainstream crowd-pleasers.'" He pauses. "I mean, I don't want to make one ..."
It may be a product of his brush with personal disaster or it might simply be his nature, but there's a certain steel to Strickland's faith in his own judgment. His approach to his work, meanwhile, borders on the evangelical.
"Film has the potential to blow minds – to awe. It's a spell. And I wouldn't claim I can do that, but it's what I aspire to. So if people see Berberian expecting a spell, maybe they won't be too disappointed." He frowns, then he shrugs. "Maybe they will. But I hope they realise I tried."
Berberian Sound Studio is released in the UK on 31 August
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/aug/23/peter-strickland-berberian-sound-studio
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