Looking at the poster for new movie Strawberry Mansion, you’d be forgiven for thinking it came out in the ‘80s.
The fantastical, kitschy design certainly has a throwback quality to it, reminiscent of the covers of VHS releases. When I tell writer/director duo Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley this they are delighted, as that’s exactly what they were aiming for.
Birney told Zavvi: “The initial idea came from a lifelong love of movies. When I went into video stores as a kid I would feel this joy, the sense that anything can happen, anything is possible.
Bulldog Distribution
“That idea was central to our premise, we wanted to make a movie that our 12-year-old selves would have been excited to pick up.
“Then you know, an image pops into our heads of a character walking towards a house. So, you ask, ‘who is this character? What is this house?’ You just start filling it in.”
That character is James Preble, a government employee who gets sent to the Strawberry Mansion to conduct an audit on the elderly, eccentric artist Arabella.
Bulldog Distribution
In this dystopian future the government records and taxes people’s dreams, with Preble sent to review Arabella’s accounts. On this journey through both the present and Bella’s dreams, Preble uncovers dark secrets that endanger him, such as the fact that the government sells off dreams as advertising space.
In the latest edition of our free digital magazine The Lowdown, the pair spoke about creating their unusual dystopia and how it reflects the state of today’s modern world.
