Life begins to imitate art for Captain America co-star
Toby Jones is set to star in Berberian Sound Studio. You might recognize this actor from his work in Captain America: The First Avenger (as Arnim Zola) or as the bad-ass grocery store clerk in The Mist.
Jones will play a sound engineer whose work for an Italian horror studio becomes a terrifying case of life imitating art. Peter Strickland will direct from his own script.
Mary Burke (Submarine), Simon Field and Keith Griffiths are producing.
Here’s a lengthy synopsis – this could be a good one, we’ll keep our eyes out for more on the film: 1976: Berberian Sound Studio is one of the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed and sharpened in this studio. Gilderoy, a naive and introverted sound engineer from England is hired to orchestrate the sound mix for the latest film by horror maestro, Santini. Thrown from the innocent world of local documentaries into a foreign environment fueled by exploitation, Gilderoy soon finds himself caught up in a forbidding world of bitter actresses, capricious technicians and confounding bureaucracy.
The longer Gilderoy spends mixing screams and the bloodcurdling sounds of hacked vegetables, the more homesick he becomes for his garden shed studio in his hometown of Dorking. His mother’s letters alternate between banal gossip and an ominous hysteria, which gradually mirrors the black magic of Santini’s film. As both time and realities shift, Gilderoy finds himself lost in an otherworldly spiral of sonic and personal mayhem, and has to confront his own demons in order to stay afloat in an environment ruled by exploitation both on and off screen.
Source: Ryan Turek, Managing Editor
