Emerald Fennell Dives Into Her “Sticky, Sexy, Complicated & Funny” ‘Saltburn’ Love Story [Interview]

There is no need for anyone to delicately dance around the reactions to “Saltburn.” Director and screenwriter Emerald Fennell is well aware her follow-up to the Oscar-winning “Promising Young Woman” is, for lack of a better phrase, somewhat polarizing. In fact, after speaking with her late last week it’s clear those sorts of passionate reactions (throw this writer into the growing “love it” camp) are exactly what she’s going for. Fennell wants her audience to gasp, to scream, and to elicit a response. And judging by its fantastic limited-release opening weekend box office, it’s done just that.

READ MORE: “Saltburn” Review: Barry Keoghan’s posh big boy summer is truly wild [Telluride]

Initially set at Cambridge University way back in 2006, “Saltburn” finds a somewhat quiet, introverted freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan), dreaming of being part of the popular clique of students. When he lets campus stud and rich kid Felix (Jacob Elrodi) borrow his bicycle, a friendship is born. By the end of the school year, Jacob has invited Oliver to spend the summer at his family’s lavish estate (where the film gets its title) and the latter finds himself navigating the delicate social constructs of the former’s arguably out-of-touch family. The film includes another awards-worthy performance by Rosamund Pike as Felix’s mother and a hilarious cameo-esque role from Carey Mulligan as Pamela, the houseguest who simply won’t leave. As Oliver engrains himself in the family’s heart, Felix’s cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) is increasingly suspicious of our hero’s true motivations.

“Saltburn” is about many things, but Fennell says it’s first and foremost a love story. Just as “Promising Young Woman” was a love story. She notes, “A love story about what happens when the thing you love the person you love can’t love you back.”

“It is a film that I want people to feel, and I want it to feel like falling in love for the first time,” Fennell adds. “Feel like being 19 and being able to make yourself and become a new person, become an exciting person, be the clever, sexy person you always believed you were, and then what happens when the world keeps sort of shutting that door on you. So, it’s never about one thing.”

Throughout our conversation, Fennell discusses her writing process (she’s had “Saltburn” in the back of her mind for years), how Mulligan snagged her role, that incredible Sophie Ellis Baxtor drop, Keoghan’s bravery, the incredible response from an 80-year-old audience member and much, much more.

This interview has been edited for clarity…but not as much as you’d think. Fennell has a lot to say, so many of her longer responses are kept for accuracy and enlightenment.

Note: There are some potential spoilers in the context of this interview.

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The Playlist: I know you’re in the home stretch of your publicity efforts but how relieved are you to have your actors by your side so you’re not carrying the weight of promoting this film on your shoulders?

Emerald Fennell: Oh God, I’m just so, well also because SAG just got such an unbelievably great deal because they’re so triumphant, it feels even more exciting. It really, really feels like all of that pain kind of feels like it has really come to something. So, I’m so thrilled. But obviously, personally, I am so thrilled because they’re all incredible. They are all incredible in this movie, and they just deserve to have all of the attention and all kinds of praise. So it’s lovely that they can experience that. And then just personally, I mean, I’m sick of the sound in my own voice, so I can’t imagine how [everyone] else feels.

Was this a story that you’d had in the back of your head for years or did you finish “Promising Young Woman,” sit down and it came to you?

No, it’s been a long time coming. I’ve been thinking about “Saltburn” for about seven or eight years, and that’s kind of how I work. I sort of have these parallel universes that I live in for years and years and years until they feel like they’re concrete enough and specific enough and that they’re ready to be written down. And with this one, it’s been, I think Oliver, just as a person, as a character, is very persistent. So, he’s been kind of nagging me for a while. But it’s sort of interesting. When you make something you never really think thematically. I don’t know that it’s useful, but I think now I have a bit of distance from it, I think it does make sense that this was the thing I wanted to make during Covid, during lockdown, at a time when this is a film about what happens if you can’t touch the person you want to touch.

Without giving too many spoilers away, when you sat down to write it did you start at the end and work backwards or was it different puzzle pieces you had to put together?

It’s always difficult to describe because it’s completely finished before I write it down. So the writing happens over nearly a decade in my head. Every room, every scene, every character, every blade of grass I have lived with for years and years and years. Been in every room. The conversations change, the people change, characters die, characters are resurrected. People fall in love. People don’t fall in love. All of these things happen. And then bit by bit gradually you find that the rooms stopped changing, that the dialogue stops, and you find you’re not playing so much anymore. The thing is more concrete. And so for me, it always feels like once there just comes a point where I’ve been everywhere a thousand times, I’ve heard the conversations a thousand times, then they don’t change any more. Then it’s time to write it down and then put it into somebody else’s hands. That’s when the next kind of change happens.

This is one of the most entertaining, stunning, moving films I’ve seen in so long. That being said, many people describe it as a takedown of the British class hierarchy. Does that resonate with you? Or do you feel that’s just a byproduct of the story you’re telling?

I think honestly, I’m never taking anything down. I’m just anatomizing it. I just want to cut it open and probe it. What I think is useful is what the person watching it thinks. It’s clear, I hope, from the film, the way I feel about power and about class and about sex and all of those things. But it’s not interesting to me to make only a satire. This is, of course, a satire. I think the thing it is most profoundly is a dark comedy. For me, it works as an Ealing comedy,* as something, the more outrageous it becomes, the more overwrought it is the funnier and more wonderful it is. But I think it’s a love story in the same way that “Promising Young Woman” is a love story. It’s a love story about what happens when the thing you love the person you love can’t love you back. Whether that’s in “Promising Young Woman” because that person is no longer with us or here where that person isn’t capable of loving you the way you need them to love you. So for all that, it plays with the genre of the British Country House kind of summer literary trope. It is a film that I want people to feel, and I want it to feel like falling in love for the first time. Feel like being 19 and being able to make yourself and become a new person, become an exciting person, be the clever, sexy person you always believed you were, and then what happens when the world keeps sort of shutting that door on you. So, it’s never about one thing.

*refers to a decade of comedies made by Ealing Studios in the U.K. between 1947-1957

I was going to ask if the love story is between Oliver and Felix or Oliver thinking he loves Felix. In particular, there’s a moment in the film where Felix is mad at Oliver because of something that Oliver has done with his sister. When Oliver finds him it’s the most annoyed we’ve seen Felix in the entire film. And you can read it two ways. You could read it as Felix is upset that his little toy is sort of playing with somebody else. Or you can read it, that he’s generally upset that someone he cared for did something that hurt him. Do you like the dynamic that it can be viewed either way?

Of course, but also I think that, again, we don’t just feel one thing at once. I can say I’m angry about this, but the truth of it isn’t that I’m angry [or] I’m jealous, it’s more detailed. It’s more surprising. I think that so much of what makes characters interesting, what makes people interesting is they don’t know necessarily. Oliver’s unique in the sense that he does kind of know what he wants, even if it’s not ever quite within grabbing distance. He can never quite grasp it. But I think in general, our motivations for everything we do all the time are myriad and often conflicting. And so that’s the nature of it. Why is Felix angry? There are 10 reasons. There are some reasons that Jacob might have felt that I didn’t know about. It’s not an analytical thing. It’s more of a like, “Oh, I see what’s happening here. I see the way he’s framing this conversation. I see why he’s bringing up this other person. I see that he’s not good when he believes that he’s subtly bringing up something.” It’s not subtle, but it can be everything all at once.

You shared that you had this story in your head for eight years but was there one narrative choice, one part that was the hardest to sort of nail? Was it deciding when to sort of tease that Oliver might have plans?

Well, actually that stuff wasn’t difficult in the sense that we tell everyone exactly what the movie is and exactly who he is in the first two minutes.

If you’re paying attention.

Oh, well, I mean the opening tells you. Literally tells you in very clear terms. There was never that sense. There is sort of this interesting thing that always happens with a framing narrative that often happens between an audience and a film. It’s actually that there’s been a process of forgetting or unknowing something. But actually, I mean, I’ve always felt that right from the get-go, we sort of know where [it’s] going to end. I mean, we’re sort of told. It’s not a thriller in the sense that it’s constantly trying to do lots of twists and turns. It’s more that it’s the motivations are the things that are surprising. That the nature of it is surprising. That the way in which things unfold is not what we were expecting. That’s the stuff that interests me really. And so I think the thing that was always the most difficult was when it comes to a character like Oliver when it comes to any character that I’m interested in, there has to be a reservoir that is inaccessible, that we get a sense of it, that we get a feeling that there is something, that we get glimpses of it, that we can smell it, but again, it’s a similar thing. I think of Robert Mitchum in “The Night of the Hunter” or Robert De Niro. These are more overt examples of that sort of thing. But there is a sex appeal, there is a darkness, there is a vulnerability. There is a very, very acute insight into the way that other people behave. That’s the sort of thing I’m interested in. Finding the balance of somebody being up to a point unknowable, but also relatable enough that we emotionally connect with him. Because his feelings are very real. It’s just that the way he processes them are maybe different to how we might.

How we might act in those situations, maybe.

Yeah.

I was lucky enough to catch the film at Telluride, and then I got to see it at the LA premiere a couple of nights ago. And it was so nice to watch it with a non-billionaire audience. And, during the shocking scenes, this crowd reacted like I expected them to in the best way possible. Is there one moment that surprises you the most in terms of how people react?

I don’t think so. I think the thing that is thrilling is that they do react because that’s what we were all doing in this film. What we wanted to make was something for the cinema to go and watch with people. That’s the thing that’s so sexy and amazing and intense about movies is that you go and you sit in a dark room with strangers and you can hear them breathing and you feel them shifting around in their seats. And all of you are not only responding to the thing that you’re seeing, but you’re aware of other people’s responses. And the thing that happened in “Promising Young Woman,” and the thing that happens here is that the audience turns on itself because nobody understands why some people are screaming, some people are squealing, some people are angry, some people are turned on, some people are bored. And nobody can understand why that other person is feeling the way that they feel. So, they start shushing or they start rolling their eyes or they start being like, “Why is this person so lame?” Or they’re thinking, “This is so disgusting, this is so disgusting. Why would somebody put this in front of me?” Or they’re thinking, “Oh, well, I’ve seen, I know every movie in this genre, and so I can sort of analyze every kind of shot, whatever it is.” It’s an experience and it’s designed to be sticky and sexy and complicated and funny. It’s supposed to be fun. For people to come in and do what they did at that screening, what they’ve been doing at screenings all over is screaming. You don’t get people screaming in the theater. You don’t get people applauding. You don’t get people gasping. You don’t get them laughing in this way unless you’re making a horror movie maybe or out-and-out comedy. To get a physical response from people, to have that shared experience, to make people leave the theater and want to go and just live to some degree, sleep with people, argue or be furious or go on the internet and [say] whatever. That is why you make a movie. It’s got to feel. And so for me, with the stuff that’s sort of shocking, I know it’s working if when I write it gives me a really specific thrill. And when we are filming it, everyone in the room has that thrill, that it’s electrifying, that even if it’s excruciating, it’s felt. What we are always trying to make [are like] the movies that I love, give me that feeling of like, “Oh my God.”

The cast overall is incredible, but I have to ask about the character of Pamela because I’ve been obsessed with her ever since I first saw the movie. I know you’d worked with Carey before and she’s amazing, but I’ve never seen her do anything like this. Were you thinking of her while you were writing it? And who is that character inspired by?

I didn’t think of Carey because it’s a cameo. And I sent her the script just to read as my friend. And she called me immediately and said, “I have to be poor dear Pamela because she’s the coolest. And I think the thing is, and why it’s so important to have somebody as good as Carey play poor dear Pamela, she is, like everything in this film, the temptation would be to not take her seriously. The temptation would treat her [like] the family treat her, which is an object of derision and that she’s sort of frivolous. Firstly, I disagree that people who kind of create themselves to that degree, to the same sort of degree that Oliver or Farleigh is, the sort of person who looks like poor dear Pamela, she’s a work of art. She’s a work of art that is a very specific genius. And I think there’s a sort of inherent misogyny in not taking those sorts of people seriously, of valuing one art form over another. So first and foremost, I think that Poor Dear Pamela, she’s this creation to look at, but there’s nothing going on underneath. I just think the thing about her is that actually, she’s the most devastating and poignant part of this film is that everyone says she’s sort of delusional. [That] she’s oblivious. She’s not oblivious. She knows that she’s outstayed her welcome. She knows that they’re tired of her, but she has nowhere to go. And so she has to sit there and take their cruelty. And so she’s a very important person when it comes to looking at Oliver’s relationship with the Cadens, Farleigh’s relationship with the Cadens, and therefore with Oliver. And so even though it does feel brief, and it’s very funny, all of the comedy has a thing inside it, which is to say, “But look how cruel we are because we are complicit in kind of laughing at her too,” in the same way that we were complicit at laughing in the things in “Promising Young Woman.” That’s the game. And that’s why you always strive to work with somebody as good as Carey because she completely understands that it’s a piece of comic genius, that part, as is Rosamund’s, I would say, as is Jacob’s. And Archie’s, these are all genius comic performances that they all give, but never at the expense of them being real people. And that’s the key.

There is a classic Sophie Ellis Baxter song that plays at a key moment at the end of the film, and I literally almost screamed in the theater when it happened. Just a home run moment. What was the inspiration for that? Also, can you just quickly talk about how fearless is Barry as an actor to do that scene let alone everything else in this movie? Was there ever any hesitation? Is he always game for all of it?

Well, so Sophie Ellis Baxter, it had to be because it’s everything that the film is, which is that it’s fun. It’s fun, it’s camp, it’s self-aware, and it hits you. It gets you. That’s the hope is that it f**king gets you. You can’t resist. You are tapping your foot and then you are with him. You are in it. We are all in it together. And that’s the thing that I’m always looking for. And originally it was going to just be a kind of walk, a naked walk through the house, like the inverse of Felix’s tour. It just needed to be that song that gives us that joy, total joy, unbridled joy, and being unbridled is such a big thing. And that’s the thing about Barry. There’s lots of stuff as an actor that, like all actors, he finds complicated and difficult but not these things because these are the things that I think that you have to be incredibly connected with your actors always. Barry…there’s never a question, it’s always, yes…not always. In fact, if it doesn’t feel right, he’s very, very good at saying no. But he never said no to these things because these things are what the film is. It’s about being taken over completely. It’s kind of a cannibal physical experience. And so it has to feel that. And that’s when Barry is just f**king dynamite.

I know “Promising Young Woman” came out during the pandemic and you couldn’t see it in theaters, but I’m hoping wherever you are in London, LA, New York, that you get to pop in and see so many people watch this movie.

Oh, it’s been amazing. A woman in her eighties came up to me and said it was the most turned on she’d ever been. And I was like, yeah!

Honestly, that should be the quote on the top of the poster.

That’s what I said. Put it on the poster!

“Saltburn” is now in limited release. It opens nationwide on Wednesday.