'Flux Gourmet': Peter Strickland On Taboos, Kink & Finding The Dignity In Flatulence & Gastronomical Problems [Interview]

“Flux Gourmet,” the new smorgasbord of sensation from Britain’s preeminent oddball Peter Strickland, is all about personal expression (read our review). And not just in the artistic sense, though the film does take place at the prestigious Sonic Catering Institute, where experimental music groups receive funding and support for their work generating blizzards of feedback by plugging modular synthesizers into food. The characters are expressed in the same way a dog’s glands might be, stretched to their limits so that the pent-up stuff festering inside them can get out. This goes literally for Stones (Makis Papadimitriou), the in-house videographer subject to constant, tragic agony due to the celiac-induced wind-breaking he tries to hide from everyone around him. As for the members of the unnamed band currently in residence at the Institute — imperious and overbearing frontwoman Elle (Fatma Mohamed), opinionated counterweight Lamina (Ariane Labed), and milder-mannered Ringo of the group Billy (Asa Butterfield) — they’ve all got their own neuroses, anxieties, and fetishes that rear their disfigured heads once the creative types start feeling the pressure to deliver.

READ MORE: ‘Flux Gourmet’ Review: Peter Strickland Delivers Sensory Overload In His Most Bizarre, Possibly Best, Film [Berlin Film Festival]

Within this high-stress, high-competition corner of the art demimonde’s obscurest fringe, a surprisingly tender psychodrama of manipulation and power-struggling takes hold. The fractious band could break apart due to infighting, though tensions between de facto leader Elle and Institute director Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie) represent an existential threat just as urgent. Underneath everyone’s petty exterior, however, beats a vulnerable heart in search of someone to share in past trauma, masturbatory rituals involving eggs and nipple-tweaking, or an unashamed toot. The byzantine dialogue, the psychedelic orgies held in place of an afterparty for the performances, the interludes of visual abstraction that turn pasta and smoothies into infinite vortexes of nothingness — it’s all handsome, sumptuous dressing for a story about how we use esoterica to cover up the universal squishiness we all share.

With “Flux Gourmet” soon headed to theaters in the States after a well-reviewed premiere at the Berlinale earlier this year, Strickland spoke with The Playlist by phone from his home in the UK. Just as one would expect from his cinema output, he’s got a head for the arcane, able to rattle off the time and place he saw an Italian crime classic two and a half decades ago, along with the name of a forgotten singer briefly appearing on the soundtrack. But he’s also a candid and kindly guy, or at the very least, the only one extending a hand of compassion to the tormented fart-holders among us.

Between “Flux Gourmet” and “Berberian Sound Studio,” you seem to have a significant relationship with food. How would you articulate the supernatural qualities of food, the deeper meaning beyond taste and eating?
It’s not so much the food itself as it is the stomach and its response to food. I wasn’t aware of many films tackling this. There are some depictions of anorexia and bulimia, eating disorders, and so on, but you don’t see so many characters where it’s the stomach that receives food as a poison. There’s one line in the film Fatma [Mohamed] ’s character says something about how what’s so tasty for her can be deadly for someone else. These natural compounds can cause anaphylactic shock or an autoimmune response in the digestive tract; they’re like invisible poisons. I was coming from that point of view, as well as the sonic perspective, being interested in the sound these processes make. The noise could be a veil for Stones to hide behind, the sheer volume of it covering him.

I have a temperamental Jewish constitution, and I don’t think I’d ever seen a film that approaches chronic flatulence with real empathy, capturing the anxiety produced by being in extreme discomfort in a social space where you can’t let your poker face break.
It’s all context, I’d say. I’d never dismiss films that use it humorously; I just thought there was something different still to be done with this. The symptoms of IBS, Crohn’s — I hope you’re doing alright, by the way.

Oh, I’m fine.
Good, good. These things can be quite serious. But yeah, I wanted to look at this with, and maybe this is, the wrong word to use, but with a bit of dignity. If you can open up a conversation without feeling embarrassed, eventually, we’ll be able to say we’ve got a problem without shame, which shouldn’t be there in the first place. It’s interesting how we treat bodily functions like we have to hide them. It’s a taboo. I’m not interested in taboos of violence, though; I don’t feel there’s much for me to say there.

In “The Duke of Burgundy,” you took more interest in taboos within intimacy.
Because these shouldn’t be taboos at all! We’ve come so far — queer rights, transgender rights, coming to accept kink, understanding consent in roleplay between adults. The consciousness is growing a little, but we’re still in a dark corner in many ways. I’d like there to be fewer stigmas out there. If people can walk away from a film of mine and feel more prepared to talk about fetish play, or their farts, that’s fine by me. That’s the Greek in me. We love talking about our problems, our pleasures, our desires.

You gotta let things out, emotionally and rectally.
When I look back at the Andy Warhol films he did with Paul Morrissey, “Trash,” and “Heat,” and “Flesh,” this opened up so much. Holly Woodlawn in “Trash” it’s not about her being trans; she’s just there living. Or Rainer Werner Fassbinder in “Fox and His Friends,” when he brings his boyfriend back, it’s not all ‘oh, my God, he has a boyfriend.’ It’s a matter-of-fact thing, a non-issue. My hope was that it would be the same with “Duke of Burgundy.”

Did you still have the modular synthesizers from your days in a band? How did you find this equipment and go about building these intricate soundscapes?
Right, I was in the Sonic Catering Band back in the day, though I never actually had any equipment. I was the one doing frontman stuff on stage, and the two of them had the gear. But they very kindly turned up to set and brought the Watkins Copicat, the homemade tape delay. The only thing that wasn’t theirs was the mixer, because theirs was 2U, so we got a vintage one. They were so great, especially because they helped out the actors, showed them what buttons to push, what dial does what. They pretty much gave Asa [Butterfield] and Ariane [Labed] a crash course in synthesizers. And then what excited me most was that the guys from the band, Tim Kirby and Colin Fletcher, we split up years ago and just now got together to make the sound, with the same gear you see in the film. And then Tim Harrison, the sound designer, he brought in his Eventide flanger. Rodge, who made some of the music, he brought an ARP 2600, a modular synth that Ben Burtt did the R2-D2 sound effects on back in the ’70s. We fed gongs into that.

The shoot wasn’t fun. Fourteen days, very stressful. But doing all the sound in post, that was great fun.

I take it you were working in the thick of COVID during those two weeks.
Yeah, we had many issues with the audience extras in the performance scenes. We were going to shoot it two years ago, but we couldn’t get insurance because the pandemic had just started. Then we had three or four false starts; I can barely keep them straight. We got lucky the fifth or possibly the fourth time we managed to do it.

You’d mentioned that the Sonic Catering Band broke up and reformed a lot of times, which tends to come from personalities colliding. What was your position in the band dynamic?
I was Fatma’s character! I was the performer, and didn’t know about technical things. I don’t think we’ll get back together again, though, after making the sound. We’re all getting old! We get on perfectly well, is the thing. We never split up out of animosity or infighting; it was always just life taking up too much time. It’s quite a time-consuming act, bringing all the electrics and cooking material onstage. The guys were very supportive, even though we don’t come out of this looking so good as these characters’ counterparts.

You do look cool, at least.
Well, they’ve got a bit more hair than we had in real life.

At this point in your filmography, Fatma Mohamed is the closest thing you’ve got to a muse. What’s drawn you to her again and again over the years?
When I started with her, she had a very small part in my first film, “Katalin Varga.” There was never any plan. We became friends after ‘Berberian,’ and the truth is that I don’t even see her that much. She’s out in Transylvania, doing theatre. I only see her when we’re making another movie. But God, she has something. All the actors in my first one were from the same theatre company, so once I cast Hilda Péter, she introduced me to all her friends, and Fatma was one of them. She can be many things — scary, mysterious, funny.

She fits in with your casts, which are mostly made up of people with unconventional, memorable, striking faces.
To a point. It’s all about intensity. I didn’t know this until a while after we met, but she’s got an incredible background. I suppose it’d be better to hear from her, but she’s said that she hasn’t felt at home anywhere she’s lived. She’s Romanian because she grew up there, but she isn’t Romanian by blood. Her dad is from Sudan, and her mum is Hungarian, so I think that’s made her unique, which doesn’t sound like much, but she really is unlike anyone else. I think she’s playing Petra Von Kant at the moment in Romania.

Man, what I wouldn’t give to see that.
Right? She’s the greatest.

Gwendoline Christie’s character Jan Stevens has some pretty far-out-there outfits. How did you and the costume designer start visualizing her look?
That was Gwendoline’s collaboration with Giles Deacon, her partner who’s also a designer himself. I had a few thoughts — “don’t turn up in jeans,” you know — but apart from that, it was about leaving them to do what they do. I haven’t a clue about fashion. It was sort of on purpose that we had someone separate costuming her in specific, because it shows how in the Institution, Jan Stevens is on a different echelon of power than everyone else. And Saffron Cullane handled the others, got this fantastic tatty Gothic look, holes in the elbows. I don’t know much about clothes, so I make sure to surround myself with people who do.

I wanted to learn a little more about the chapter intertitle cards, with the chemical compound notation printed at the bottom. What motivated those?
We wanted it to go along with the four humors, which was tricky because we only had three chapters. Four humors, four weeks of the residency, but that structure just didn’t work for the script. We tried to compensate by sneaking in a phlegmy blue for the opening title card. And that’s where we went for the chemical components; the red card symbolizes blood, and the notation refers to hemoglobin, I think, and so on.

Do you cook much on your own time? Do you have a signature dish?
[Laughs.] I’m pretty good with lentils. Good with gnocchi bake, feta cheese, whack it in the oven with some capers. But I can’t really bake all that well. I make a fine hummus.

The Sonic Catering Institute in which the film is set has many of the same quirks as any part of the art world, not just performance art. Do you find many commonalities there with cinema, which is necessarily larger-scale and more collaborative?
Most filmmakers have to sit down opposite a financier, who’s giving notes. That’s a core experience everyone making art has in common. It’d be too easy to portray my side of the table as the put-upon poor artist. I was much more into turning Fatma’s character into someone machiavellian. I consider myself like a referee, not on anyone’s side. When you write, you try to look into people’s lives. So in the case of the financiers, and you take a look at rejection, what it’s like when saying no is your job and awful people won’t leave you alone about it. You try to understand everyone’s impulses.

Last thing — going from the full-body catsuits with the eye part cut out, are you a big fan of “Danger: Diabolik”?
Yes! Complete rip-off, no shame there. The fun thing is, and I didn’t know until Saffron showed me, but the original actor John Phillip Law had facepaint on him, otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to breathe. So we had to use different fabric on the facemask parts to make sure everyone would be alright. But yeah, God, that movie! I remember seeing it in 1998 as part of a two-month Mario Bava season at the National Film Theatre [now known as the BFI Southbank]. The [Ennio] Morricone soundtrack is fantastic, and it still hasn’t gotten a formal release, you can really only hear it via bootlegs, and it sounds like it’s been recorded from a television. Beautiful music, there’s this song “Deep Down” sung by Christy Brancucci, so good. Try and look it up.

“Flux Gourmet” opens in limited release this Friday, June 24.