Peter Strick­land: ​‘The Office was a big influ­ence on me’

In Fab­ric is Peter Strickland’s dark­ly com­ic hor­ror tale about a pos­sessed dress and the lives it affects. Mar­i­anne Jean-Bap­tiste plays Sheila, a bank clerk look­ing for love who buys the ill-starred gar­ment from odd­ball depart­ment store Dent­ley and Sop­er. She finds her­self in a real-life cos­tume dra­ma, quite aside from putting up with her amorous son Vince (Simon Manyon­da) and his dom­i­neer­ing girl­friend Gwen (Gwen­do­line Christie).

The writer/director’s pre­vi­ous film, The Duke of Bur­gundy, is an intrigu­ing­ly strange and beau­ti­ful­ly deliv­ered study of desire and devo­tion. Once again he tack­les sex and love from an unusu­al per­spec­tive and here explains how his very own phan­tom thread got made with inspi­ra­tion from man­nequins, Mel Gib­son and The Office.

LWLies: You’ve made a film about a haunt­ed dress. What inspired the idea?

Strick­land: I think this idea that all cloth­ing is haunt­ed by a human pres­ence. Peo­ple think you can’t make a film about an object but I can guar­an­tee you can reduce any­one to tears if you gave them a dead relative’s cloth­ing. How cloth­ing can make you grieve, how cloth­ing can turn you on, how cloth­ing can dis­gust you. And also how we feel when we wear cloth­ing, how you can trans­form, how your pos­ture changes, how your expres­sion changes and the oppo­site of that: how you can hate your body when you wear some­thing, how you can have body dys­mor­phia. It’s explor­ing ideas about fetishism, loss. I remem­ber buy­ing sec­ond-hand cor­duroy trousers which had a come stain on them. The idea of, ​‘My god there’s a whole history’.

Did you wear them?

I washed them first. It’s also char­i­ty shops: cloth­ing marked by sweat and bod­i­ly flu­ids and dead people’s cloth­ing. The film is open­ing up a dis­cus­sion about how we per­ceive cloth­ing. There’s a very light satire on con­sumerism in the back­ground. I don’t want be earnest or right­eous about it because I’m sure there’s some­thing I’m wear­ing now which was made in a sweat­shop, so I’m a hyp­ocrite to go down that path.

It looks like it’s set in the 1980s. Is there a rea­son you focused on that time?

It’s 1983 – there’s a news­pa­per front page which has it dis­creet­ly hid­den. I want­ed it to feel like the ​’70s, maybe because depart­ment stores always had that look. Ide­al­ly I would have set it now but if I did that the whole dat­ing thing would have been very dif­fer­ent with Tin­der and swip­ing. What I want­ed was the mys­tery of dat­ing back then. You had to imag­ine what a person’s like.

On one lev­el the film does feel like a satire of retail. Do you have a par­tic­u­lar affec­tion for those stores?

I love the world of those stores, I love the flam­boy­ance, I love the height­ened the­atri­cal nature of those stores. It’s a cel­e­bra­tion as much as a par­o­dy. All of that is dying out. I love that human inter­ac­tion. It’s a per­for­mance. I remem­ber this store in Read­ing [where Strick­land grew up] called Jackson’s. It had the pneu­mat­ic chutes where the mon­ey flew up, so that long wait for your change to come back and that awk­ward­ness while you’re stand­ing there. I thought that would be so good to put in a film.

I was try­ing to real­ly true to the way I saw the world as a kid, how the man­nequins feel like they’re pro­tect­ing the store, they’re guard­ing the store like they’re kind of agents in all this. And how inter­change­able man­nequins and the staff can be, the sound of peo­ple shop­ping, the move­ment of peo­ple shop­ping. The impor­tant thing was that every­thing had to be con­nect­ed to real­i­ty. Every­thing is exag­ger­at­ed but when I spoke to the actors every­thing was on a dial. Real­i­ty was, say, zero and com­plete sur­re­al­i­ty was, say, 10. It was real­ly talk­ing about it like that, like an elas­tic band stretch­ing real­i­ty but with­out every break­ing that elas­tic band.

What’s the fas­ci­na­tion with wash­ing machines about?

It’s cloth­ing again, isn’t it? It’s all con­nect­ed. I want­ed to make an autonomous sen­so­ry merid­i­an response (ASMR) film. A lot of the influ­ences were those YouTube videos. It’s like this tac­tile response to cer­tain sounds, like whis­per­ing, cat­a­logue pages being turned, that kind of thing. I want­ed to make a film you could fall asleep to. So it was very impor­tant to get the right paper­weight for the cat­a­logue, to make it thick enough to have that sound. I want­ed to make a film of tex­tures, phys­i­cal tex­tures and son­ic tex­tures, the tex­ture of the human voice and send you into a bit of a trance.

There were cer­tain key influ­ences on your pre­vi­ous work: gial­lo films in Berber­ian Sound Stu­dio and Stan Brakhage on parts of The Duke of Bur­gundy. Were there any par­tic­u­lar inspi­ra­tions for this film?

There was no big sen­si­bil­i­ty. Gial­lo real­ly didn’t come into it at all. The big influ­ence for me was beyond film, peo­ple like Key­holtz, the Ger­man sculp­tor. He did a lot of work with man­nequins. Incred­i­bly scary look­ing man­nequins with resin drip­ping down their faces. Very night­mar­ish. When Mr Lundy gets the shoplifter in a leg-lock, that comes from the end of Lethal Weapon in the fight scene with Mel Gib­son and the bad guy.

The Office was a huge influ­ence. As a mid­dle-class uni­ver­si­ty grad­u­ate you end up in a lot of those white-col­lar jobs. The Office taught me that this is not a waste of time, this is all mate­r­i­al you can use lat­er on and if you use it with­out being self-pity­ing it can be very cathar­tic and peo­ple can relate to it. The Office was a huge rev­e­la­tion for me and was very inspir­ing. Peo­ple want to hear if it was Chan­tal Aker­man or some­thing. I hate to say but tele­vi­sion in 2000 was a big influence.

The por­tray­al of sex and desire in the film is very unusu­al. Can you shed any light on what you were thinking?

I guess cloth­ing is sold on human desire. The whole com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of desire, the cat­a­logues, so it’s explor­ing that, for sure, but also beyond that going into to this par­al­lel dimen­sion of sex mag­ick rit­u­als of the man­nequin being washed and men­stru­at­ing. Is the dress made of men­stru­al blood? Is it act­ing as a dye? In terms of some­one like Gwen and Vince and the under­wear, it’s the ele­ment of show­ing cloth­ing being erot­ic, it’s erot­ic because of the human imprint. And the scenes with Gwen, that’s more about accen­tu­at­ing Sheila’s lone­li­ness. There’s noth­ing worse than hear­ing peo­ple in your house hav­ing fun when you’re not hav­ing fun.

In Fab­ric is released 28 June. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.