AUTUMN FILM SPECIAL
BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO
Peter Strickland’s latest fi lm is a strange and perplexing ‘anti- horror’. Hannah McGill speaks to lead actor Toby Jones to fi nd out what attracted him to such an unusual project
T wo stories drew Toby Jones to Berberian Sound Studio, the sophomore feature project by British-born director Peter Strickland. There was the tale to be spun onscreen: that of a mild-mannered British sound engineer coming unstuck while working on sound effects for a gore-soaked Italian slasher movie. Dark, interior, wreathed in shadows and cruel humour, Jones says that Strickland’s script reminded him of ‘the kind i lm I wanted to be in when I was a teenager hanging out with people older than me and going to the local arthouse – and that I thought didn’t really happen any more because there was no market for them. for them.’
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th B t f But there was also the story of Strickland himself and his i rst i lm, Katalin Varga, which Jones had picked up from a distance around its release in 2009. ‘I was making a i lm in America and I used to download the podcast of the Radio 4 Film Programme. I remember exactly when I heard this extraordinary story about this man living in Reading, moving to Eastern Europe, working as a computer games writer, always having this dream, getting a bit of inheritance and through all of that winning the Silver Bear at Berlin – and it stuck in my mind. We all live around
people who say, ‘I’m gonna make a i lm’, well, he made his i lm! And then this script arrived . . .’
Katalin Varga, which had its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival after its win at the Berlinale, was an intense rape-revenge fable set in Transylvania and distinguished in part by extraordinary use of sound effects and an otherworldly electronic score. Berberian Sound Studio extends its director’s interest in evocative and unsettling audio, as Jones’ character, Gilderoy, deploys outré means to replicate the sounds of torture and murder, and feels the i lm’s nasty energies colouring his own perception. Jones, who has been seen of late in blockbusters such as The Hunger Games, Snow White and the Hunter and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, would soon discover that Strickland’s iconoclasm was part-founded in genuine inexperience. ‘I only realised after we’d made it that the frustrations I’d felt during it – Why is he putting that in? Why are we doing it like that? – were because he’d never been in a i lm studio before.’
This unusual freshness clearly contributed to the oddness and originality of Berberian Sound Studio, but also permitted Jones a degree of freedom not always afforded to the ‘character actor’. ‘It feels like a different job. On the big i lms, it’s not quite as cold-blooded as “do your thing,” but to a certain extent you are a brand; you’re brought in to deliver things on a craft basis, because European actors bring a certain cachet. That’s all i ne – that’s show business – but then that allows you to do this kind of job, which is an interpretative job, much closer to how you trained as an actor.’ And Berberian Sound Studio, as its strangeness piles up, certainly takes interpreting. How much did Jones have to make his own sense of the ambiguous narrative? ‘I had a chart on my wall,’ he admits, ‘because it was so easy to get lost in the maze. But I can only act one way, on one level: that this is a person to whom concrete things are happening. Otherwise I’m acting an idea, which is impossible.’
Berberian Sound Studio is on selected release from Fri 31 Aug. See review page 52.
LOOPER
Once the lavish summer blockbusters are out of the way, there’s always a slice of brain-boggling sci-i set aside to keep genre ai cionados going. Writer/ director Rian Johnson’s Looper reunites him with his Brick star Joseph Gordon- Levitt for a time-travelling action i lm also featuring Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt. The premise is that Joe (Gordon- Levitt) is a hired killer with a difference; Joe is responsible for bumping off the enemies of organised crime who are sent back from the future (2072) for execution in 2042. But when he recognises one of his potential victims as being his future self (Willis), Young Joe is forced to track down Old Joe to save himself from himself. With a plot seemingly derived from the late Chris Marker’s short La Jetée (later remade with Willis by Terry Gilliam as Twelve Monkeys), Looper adds a further layer of obfuscation to things by adding Emily Blunt as a woman with telekinetic powers. Confused? Almost certainly, but at least the trailer promises the most potent mixture of sci-i paradox and action since Christopher Nolan’s Inception. To do so, Johnson will have to channel the style of his breakout hit Brick rather than the rote blandness of his follow-up The Brothers Bloom, but the snazzy trailer suggests an enjoyably loopy thriller. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 28 Sep. 23 Aug–20 Sep 2012 THE LIST 15