Emerald Fennell talks ‘Saltburn’ at Friday night screening: ‘I just want everyone to, you know, hate it, love it, be turned on, be freaked out’
Emerald Fennell, the filmmaker who won the Best Original Screenplay Academy Award in 2021 for her “Promising Young Woman” script, presided over before an enthusiastic packed audience Friday night attending a screening at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood of her latest, the Amazon MGM Studios release “Saltburn.” During a post-film Q&A with fellow producer Josey McNamara and moderator Clayton Davis of Variety, Fennell noted that her biggest goal for the movie that’s already generating abundant positive buzz was for “everyone to, you know, hate it, love it, be turned on, be freaked out…whatever it makes you feel. I want people to feel something. That’s the reason you make a movie and not a TV show or a book.”
“Saltburn” centers on the unexpected friendship that develops between Oliver (Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan), a young Oxford student on scholarship, Felix (“Euphoria” star Jacob Elordi), the hunky, wealthy and popular big shot whom Oliver grows obsessed. The film draws its title from Felix’s family’s estate, where Oliver spends he summer getting to know his new friend. The film features an all-star cast that also includes Carey Mulligan, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, “Conversations with Friends” breakout Alison Oliver and Archie Madekwe. Felix’s eccentric family populates a twisted film that stands as a demented critique of British upper-crust pomp and privilege.
Keoghan, Mulligan, Pike, Elordi and Grant are all prominent in this year’s Oscar conversation, as is the film itself. And Fennell could receive Academy Award bids for producing, writing and directing. The film debuts in limited release in theaters on November 17 before going wide on November 22.
For her part, Fennell said on Friday that she believes “Saltburn” (which gets its title from the name of the country home where much of the film takes place) will be “a conversation starter. I think it’s so much more than that, but it is something that really does move audiences in different ways, and I like getting the vast spectrum of reactions and talking to people afterward.”
Fennell added, “I wanted to make something about desire and the relationship we have with the things that we want. Maybe we’re kind of in this permanent state at the moment of wanting, of looking at things that never look back at us because they’re unattainable. And you find that we’re all kind of post-COVID watching and wanting. I’m interested in what that does to all of us, and you can see increasingly the cycle becomes love, obsession, self-loathing and then hatred of the object. I think the thing that we did with ‘Promising Young Woman’ and what I love to do so much is to take the genre, quite a specific sub-genre, and press down on it until it squeaks.”
Turning to the “Saltburn” cast, Fennell concludes, “They’re all exquisite…The way that they weaponize charm, the way that they know their audience, the way that they’re able to kind of shine a light on you and then withdraw it…that’s why these people are so fascinating, is we all think and hope we’re immune to it, and we’re not…I mean, certainly it’s a kind of comedy, and I think it’s a satire, not just of the aristocracy but of our relationship with money and stuff and houses, and I say that as somebody that’s not immune, to the extent that I’m so not immune that I’m chronically obsessed with all of these things.”
She also opined on the point of view of the film’s lead character, Oliver (Keoghan), and how his own mindset is so relatable to the masses.
“There’s nothing more shaming or pathetic than having parents love you, and being boring,” Fennell said. “And that’s what Oliver really fears. I think that’s what we all fear, is being boring. And so, you know, (the film is) about how do we make ourselves special?”
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