Earlier this year, at the Berlin film festival, the starry directorial lineup included Theo Angelopoulos, Chen Kaige (陳凱歌), Lukas Moodysson, Costa-Gavras, Andrej Wajda and Peter Strickland. Peter Strickland? Who he? That is a question almost the entire film industry has been asking ever since.
Strickland’s meteoric rise to prominence is nothing short of astonishing, and should hearten anyone toiling in obscurity. The plain facts are these. Strickland is 35, with an English father and Greek mother (both teachers), and was raised and educated in the English provincial town of Reading, west of London. “Oscar Wilde was thrown in prison there. That’s all you need to know about Reading,” he says. But how did Strickland come to leave “dull and flat” Reading for “exciting and mountainous” Transylvania to shoot a feature film in Hungarian, a language he didn’t speak?
Katalin Varga, an eerily beautiful, rural revenge tragedy, is not the first film of Strickland’s to be presented in a film festival. In 1997, he got his 15-minute short Bubblegum into Berlin. In order to make it, Strickland took what little savings he had and went to New York to track down Nick Zedd, the underground filmmaker behind the Cinema of Transgression manifesto, and Holly Woodlawn, one of Andy Warhol’s drag queens, to play “a crypto-Elvisian rockabilly” and his ageing fan respectively. Five years later, after a series of soul-destroying jobs and trying to find a producer interested in his scripts, he decided to spend an inheritance from his uncle to escape from England and make a feature film.
“I was relatively wealthy for the first time in my life and realized that this might be my only chance to make a feature,” Strickland says, sitting in a modest apartment in Budapest where he now lives with his Hungarian girlfriend. “Almost everyone said I was insane, suicidal, deluded, etc, and that it’s impossible to make a film for less than US$330,000 even in Romania. I had barely a third of that. There were many times when I seriously doubted what I was doing. I often thought of just buying a flat, as almost everyone advised. But I asked myself, ‘Should I buy myself a one-bedroom flat in Bracknell (near Reading) or should I make a revenge film in Transylvania?’ I think the main thing that kept me going was knowing that if I bought a flat, I would always wonder, ‘What if?’ Even if I failed, I would know I tried my very best.”
Katalin Varga is set in the Hungarian-speaking part of Romania. Strickland only had a smattering of Hungarian, and directed the film in English. “Even though I got to know the Hungarian translation quite well, I felt very helpless if the actors wanted to improvise certain parts. For me, this film represents a movie Transylvania — but not in the Dracula sense. Everything is heightened — the goat bells, crickets, wind ... It’s a conglomeration of what I felt as an outsider. To help the certain intense atmosphere I wanted to capture, I listened to Pornography by The Cure and Suicide by Suicide on headphones endlessly during the writing process. I also watched Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter and Paradjanov’s Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors again and again.
All the ingredients for the film were in these and the Popol Vuh soundtrack to Herzog’s Nosferatu.
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