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Reading born director Peter Strickland may have waited a while to make his first film, and gone to Romania to make it, but the result is worth it as FOCUS reports.
Think of Reading and you may picture Ricky Gervais, Kate Winslet, perhaps even Steve Coppell. Now the Berkshire town has a new star to celebrate, though 36 year old Peter Strickland had to travel far from home to make his mark.
He has joked in print, once too often he now fears, that Reading is as famous for being the place where Oscar Wilde served his time in prison. But it seems that Strickland also found the place incompatible to his creative needs.
So it was that, lacking the encouragement and support of the film industry at home, he embarked upon his debut feature Katalin Varga in the heart of Europe.
"Sometimes you just want to escape," he explains down the phone line from his current home in Hungary, "to get as far away as possible, hence my making a film in Transylvania."
Working with a group of theatre actors from Romania, shooting his film in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains, Strickland was initially funding the endeavour with money he inherited from his late uncle.
"It was 30,000 Euros which was enough for the pre-production, the shooting and the editing then it all went to seed a little bit. Even with the editing I couldn’t quite pay people enough money, so they did other jobs and I took a back seat.
"That becomes a problem because I was doing teaching jobs and trying to balance everything. But it became a mess when what became a straightforward post production job took two and a half years.
"I'd do one day of editing and then someone has to go and do other work for more money, and I've got to do more work to stay afloat. It could be one week before we got back together, or two weeks. The longest period was eight months of nothing.
"At that point I went back to England to get a job, and it was just soul destroying. When you return to it you've forgotten everything you've done, you lose your momentum. It's incredibly hard to be enthusiastic about something. And then everyone hated the rough cut we produced. I was told the film had no potential.
"That really gets to you, especially on a first film. It's a very lonely job. With proper financial backing you get a support network, someone to call when everything is going wrong. You realise afterwards that most filmmakers go through this, but at the time you think that you're the only one.
"Of course the shoot itself was absolutely fantastic, but when it's over everyone goes home and moves on. Even the chef goes on to other films, and you're just stuck with this responsibility to put the film together. So when the money eventually dried up I had to find somebody to come on board and fix it all.
"That took quite a while. A Romanian production company put up some money - 70,000 Euros - in May 2008. Between August 2006 and May 2008 it felt like a disaster, then from May until December 2008 things picked up, I had the money to do the lab work and the sound post production."
The film was eventually picked up for distribution in the UK by specialist distributor Artificial Eye, which pleased the director.
"I grew up buying their videos," he chuckles. "I'm just a fan boy, so just to have my film next to the Artificial Eye DVDs with same colour coding is wonderful. That's a typical male preoccupation, I suppose. And I think there was a slight revenge element, on all those people who laughed at me when I was trying to get it made. It was like 'well up yours!'."
Appropriately enough the beautifully measured, hauntingly powerful Katalin Varga - featuring Hilda Peter in the title role – is itself a revenge tale, but one that develops nuance as the story unfolds.
"The main motivation behind it was to provoke myself and the audience to find some balance between very different forms of judgement, be it social justice, political justice, divine justice - from whichever point of view justice is administered. It's frustrating when you see a film and the answers are given to you. I don't have those answers, and if I did I wouldn't have made this film."
The quest narrative in this film has echoes in many a classic western movie, while other cinematic references evoke such luminaries as Nic Roeg and Stanley Kubrick.
But it is the name of Peter Strickland that stands out above all from a movie that announces an exciting new talent, one who can reflect on the warm words for his first film and know that it has been a job very well done.
"You always want to share what’s going on inside your head," he adds, "and communicate something. It's a huge pleasure when somebody tells you that your film affected them because that's ultimately what you want."
ANWAR BRETT
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