Between 2009’s brutal thriller “Katalin Varga” and this year’s audio-based horror-thriller “Berberian Sound Studio,” British director Peter Strickland has found himself receiving no end of critical praise. The latter, his most recent feature, was released in the U.K. towards the end of August and has played to North American audiences at TIFF, Fantastic Fest, and most recently the New York Film Festival, to a generally positive reception.
Well, thanks to that success, Strickland is celebrating signing with a major agency, CAA, and while that’s great news for Strickland, it isn’t that interesting for the rest of us. What is interesting though, is the news that accompanies his new agency deal: Deadline report that Strickland currently has a few projects in development, and that one of them is an adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel “The Beginning of Spring.”
The 2003 novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize upon release, and it tells the story of a troubled printworks in Moscow. The story follows a man called Frank Reid who is struggling to cope after the printworks he inherited from his father has shrunk to a fraction of its former size and his wife leaves him without explanation to return to her native England. It’s not a surprise that Strickland would be attracted to this, as his last two features have seen him tell fascinating tales set in mainland Europe. Whether this is the project that will see Strickland find more mainstream success remains to be seen.
