Director Peter Strickland, of The Duke Of Burgundy and Flux Gourmet fame, says it’s “very tough finding money” for his next film.
British filmmaker Peter Strickland has spent well over a decade captivating audiences with his unsettling and one-of-a-kind films, including Berberian Sound Studio (2012), The Duke Of Burgundy (2014) and In Fabric (2018).
On X (formerly Twitter), however, the writer-director revealed that he’s found it difficult to secure financing for his next project.
“Unlikely we’ll be shooting a new film next year,” Strickland wrote. “Very tough finding money, but we’re trying our best.”
Strickland’s most recent film was Flux Gourmet, a blackly comic drama about gastronomy and performance art told with a distinctly Cronenbergian edge. Starring Asa Butterfield and Gwendoline Christie, it received almost universal praise when it emerged in film festivals last year, which makes Strickland’s difficulty in finding money for his next project even more surprising.
Strickland hasn’t mentioned the name of the project he was planning to shoot next year, but it’s potentially Night Voltage – a 1980s-set story of a young musician trying to get his career going in the New York City borough of Queens. It’s a film he’s been trying to get made for about a decade now, and in an interview with Jezabel last year, Strickland said that the project’s period setting was making it tricky to finance.
“It’s just an expensive film to do because it has, you know, clubs in New York, so you’ve got a lot of people, a lot of period costumes, and now you’ve got the added issue of pandemic with testing all those people and distancing and so on,” the filmmaker said. “No one will give us the money. Or they’ll give us the money if we have an A-list actor. We tried many A-list actors, nobody wanted to do it.”
In between feature film projects, Strickland revealed that he’s been “writing film scripts for others” as well as embarking on a “ghostwriting job for an Ivory Coast footballer’s autobiography.”
Here’s hoping Strickland has more luck on the financing front soon. Are there any producers or financiers reading this who’d like to lend him a hand?
