Gastro Sonata

Maestro of the macabre Peter Strickland returns with a culinary spectacle: Saffron Maeve uncovers the ingredients for success in her conversation with the filmmaker.

The gurgling, spectral noises emitted from Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet—an effectual sound bath of culinary clangs and gastric upset—can’t quite shatter glass or judder the floor, but they agitate and consume all the same. 

Partly inspired by his own Sonic Catering Band, Strickland’s fifth feature observes a finicky collective of sound artists at a remote residency, tweaking and perfecting their onstage routine of gastronomic performance art, while a Celiac-stricken journalist writes up their bizarre lifestyle. 

There’s a lot at play in these studio walls: culinary ASMR, reflux, troupe histrionics, orgies, grocery store pantomimes, sabotage, and a grungy Asa Butterfield to boot. Flux is awash with questions of artistic integrity and the body—the mechanics of digestion, labour, sex, and exile—while remaining invariably compassionate to even its most obnoxious players. 

Untwining his yarn of eccentrics and their pan-fried vibrations, Strickland tells MASSIVE about his process, myth-making, fetish, and Sirkian aspirations. 

Did your relationship to food or cooking change at all during the filming of Flux Gourmet? 

My personal relationship to food and to cooking didn’t change much. But as someone says in the film, something I find tasty can be deadly for someone else, or cause inflammation.

I was fascinated by the idea that we usually think of things as universally dangerous or deadly, but you put a chocolate cake on the table and everyone’s going to have a different relationship to it. It’s about looking at the darker side of food and the stomach. “Quest” is too strong a word, but with digestion, it’s to explore something and not know how people will react. 

Were any tracks by Sonic Catering Band, your own musical group, integrated into the film’s sound design? 

Yes, three tracks from my memory. We also did some new stuff. Normally, we don’t play together anymore but we needed some extras, so we got back together for a weekend to enhance the sound and do some sonic catering. 

Do you have a favourite Sonic Catering Band recording?

It would be A Gourmet’s Slumber, which was a compilation of our favourite tracks. But everything we did was hit and miss—we were not very successful. Our biggest success was getting sold in Other Music in New York back in 2001. 

Talking about specific tracks, there were two things we did. One was a spoken word piece about stomach issues, but in Hungarian, and multi-tracked with whispering. It was kind of ASMR before I knew what ASMR was. The other one was just gas from the oven, but we multi-tracked it at different pitches—you pitch it up by a semitone, have that on a loop, pitch it down by a semitone, loop that. It’s not as good, but it would sound a bit like Ligeti when he did Lux Aeterna. 

This is your sixth project with actor Fatma Mohamed. Can you tell me a bit about your working relationship?

I think she’s brilliant! The way she acts, and even some of the words, are down to her. English is not her mother tongue, so she’ll sometimes make a mistake and I’ll keep it in because it sounds really unique. I didn’t know we’d be working together so much when I first started, but now I can’t go back. I’ve always got to work with her, so long as she wants to work with me. There’s a trust that comes out of it. 

Do you write Fatma’s roles around her at this point?

To be honest, I’ve written everything but the first film around her. But she doesn’t always say, “I want to do that part.” She’ll look at it and say, “I don’t want to play that” or “I want to play someone else” and then I write those parts with her in mind.  

During the writing process, was there ever a version of the script that veered more into horror? 

Honestly, not really. I feel a bit boxed-in now. I was trying to do something recently, a romance, and they just wanted horror from me. I’ve dabbled in horror and In Fabric is obviously in that world, but nobody ever asks me to do a romance. I’d love to do a Douglas Sirk type of film. 

Oh my god?

I don’t know if I’m just getting old or if I’m just more and more into relationships and desire. They’re much more relevant to the human race than someone getting stabbed or whatever. Weirdly, there’s more of an appetite for violent films than there is for romance or sex. I have a couple of projects that I’m working on, though. One is about male hedonism in New York in 1980 and the other is a kids film. I don’t know when they’re going to get made. 

I joked in a review a few months back that Flux is about edging. How much did sex and fetish inform your initial design of the film?

That’s funny, and I guess we live in a world where that might be a pejorative. But it’s about consensually exploring beyond heteronormative boundaries. Like, I’ve just finished a gay porno that’s showing somewhere tonight as a short film. I like to explore kink, or anything that goes beyond what we normally see onscreen, and to bring out the humanity in it—open up emotions that people who are very conservative can maybe relate to somehow. It’s less about shocking audiences than it is saying that someone who’s into bondage is actually the same as you. 

There’s an interesting mix of performance as truth-telling versus performance as myth-making here: Stones seems to embody a kind of objectivity or integrity in prodding around the collective’s history, and Elle seems intent on narrativising her artistic journey, usually by corrupting the truth. 

So much of it is relevant to us, especially in the social media age. That mythology of ourselves that we present to the world, the things we choose not to say about our background. Like Elle’s guilt about laughing at this anaphylactic shock—she was a child, so you can’t blame her, but then she makes it worse by rewriting herself as the hero of the piece. 

As you say, there’s this idea of myth-making that’s in a sense piggybacking, which we all do as writers. You’re hijacking someone else’s story. For example, I’m not celiac. I’ve hijacked other people’s frustrations. When does that become exploitative? I don’t really know, but with Elle, there’s this self-punishment in her performances that leads back to her lies. Ultimately, catharsis is what I was really keying in on. All the characters within the film—whether through performance or through sexual discretions—are looking to purge something. 

Would you say Flux is more about procedure or consumption? 

Process is everything, really. Consumption is hard to define, with the characters’ dysfunctional relationship to food. So with that, I was looking at how kitchen politics and gender related to this story. My mother had this American cookbook from the 1950s and, though I changed the wording, the sentiments in Flux were pretty much the same as that book from the fifties. 

Procedure is what we did naturally as a band. More than process, even, a kind of ritual. So much was in the process of treating sound the same way you treat food—we would physically chop the tape the same way you’d chop carrots. Layer it up, mix it, process it.

Flux Gourmet is out in UK cinemas from September 30.

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