EXCLUSIVE: Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell says that “if you’re prodding at something uncomfortable, that’s what movies are for.”
The filmmaker spoke to this columnist at the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) opening night gala reception held at BFI Southbank following the international premiere of Saltburn, her deliciously dark comedy about manners and class.
Recently, at Telluride, Ilker Çatak, director of The Teachers’ Lounge, Germany’s submission for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards, discussed movies that provoke, and he admiringly cited the example of Fennell’s Saltburn.
Speaking to me, Fennell accepted the compliment graciously but argued that the Amazon Studios film is not provocative for the sake of it. “If you’re aiming to make something that sounds true and even if it’s metaphorical and kind of Gothic, and there’s something that makes people shift in their seats, it’s because we’re feeling something that maybe we shouldn’t. That maybe we don’t want to interrogate.
“And so there’s no point in being provocative for the sake of it – but if you’re kind of prodding at something uncomfortable, that’s what movies are for.”
“I stick my finger in,” she adds gleefully.
And I give a thumbs up to Fennell for sticking her finger in.
“The thing is that we just always want to make things that are fun, that push buttons and that make people excited,” she tells me, adding wryly: “And make people want to watch it again.”
Emerald Fennell chats to guests at BFI London Film Festival opening night gala reception. Photo: Baz Bamigboye/Deadline
Quite reasonably, she says that ”you want to make something that everyone talks about afterwards.”
Laughing, she adds: “And everyone has a slightly different impression of what happened. The dance you’re always doing as a filmmaker is around how much you let people fill in the gaps. And how much do you show? And it’s really ,really lovely to hear so many people feeling so many different ways about what they just saw, and that’s just thrilling.”
Saltburn’s set in 2006, as a new intake of freshers arrive at Oxford. Freshest of them all, is earnest and eager, Oliver Quick, played with ferocious fearlessness by Barry Keoghan.
He’s read all 50 books on the reading list, including the King James’s Bible, a feat that prompts his tutor -an exquisite Reece Shearsmith, to splutter with incredulity at such acumen.
”His callousness and his disdain is something that only Reece Shearsmith can do, but also his tawdriness,” Fennell observes.
Quick wants to befriend the college’s most desirable student, the impossibly handsome Felix Catton [an incredible Jacob Elordi], an aristocratic Lothario whose entitled mummy and daddy [played with delightfully astute comic timing by Rosamund Pike and Richard E.Grant] reside at Saltburn, an ancient castle that’s been in the family for centuries.
“Sorry, mate,” Felix tells Olivier, “We dress for dinner, black tie. Do you have cuff links?”
It’s that seemingly easy formality that’s hell for any outsider who doesn’t know the rules. They’re not written down anywhere. Rather,they’re handed down to a particular class along with a silver spoon.
There’s a shift when Oliver arrives at the Cattan’s impressive pile. As Fennell put it to me at Telluride, where the film had its world premiere, Saltburn’s is a kind of more outrageous Kind Hearts and Coronets.
There are scenes involving intimate bodily fluids and necrophilia that had the audience at the Royal Festival Hall shifting in their seats. Mission accomplished for Fennell .
A film executive took me aside at the LFF reception and declared the film to be “twisted, nasty, sexual, bold … and I loved it. Everyone’s talking about it. That’s what we want.”
As he was telling me this, his wife was whispering to my Aussie wife [who loved it], that she’d found it funny at first, then “gross.”
“Better than all this anodyne stuff we’ve been getting,” a gent muttered. Oh, wait, that was Fennell’s father. He’s right though.
Fennell calls Olivier Quick “our throbbing desire”. She adds: “I think he’s a very kind of fascinatingly ambivalent person, driven in a very kind of fascinating way.”
Fennell tells me that Keoghan “has absolutely no fear or shame …he just wants to get into it. And the thing that excites him as much as it excites me is is that feeling of: let’s do it. let’s do it. let’s get in.”
She proclaims Keoghan as an “exceptional“ actor dedicated to making something that’s going to be “intense and memorable, and new. I suppose we’re all looking to drill down into something deep.”
At the party, revellers slurped bubbly through straws in mini bottles of champagne and snacked on canapés and mini burgers. Guests included Kristy Matheson, LFF festival director, Ben Roberts, BFI chief executive, 007 titan Barbara Broccoli and filmmaker Edgar Wright.
Party bubbly. Photo: Bamigboye/Deadline.
The dress code read ‘formal,’ but there was a lovely clash of ever-so slightly formal and ever-so casual. And there’s the rub, chums. There were no stars in glorious gowns and dapper black-tie get ups.
Stragglers who stayed out late welcomed reports that trickled in via Deadline that SAG-Aftra and studios negotiations would continue Friday and next week.
Let’s hope the long dispute that has caused immense collateral damage both here in the U.K. and the U.S. is over in time for this cast – and I should say, the casts of the dozens of movies I’ve seen over recent weeks [many of which are playing the LFF] – to come out and talk about their good work.
Along with the aforementioned Keoghan, Pike, Grant, Elordi and Shearsmith, the company of players in Saltburn also includes super work from Archie Madeekwe; Alison Oliver, Paul Rhys and a scene-stealing cameo by Carey Mulligan – star of Fennell’s Promising Young Woman.
https://deadline.com/2023/10/emerald-fennell-saltburn-london-film-festival-2-1235564578/
