Breaking Baz at Telluride: Emerald Fennell Says Making ‘Saltburn’ Was Like “Taking My Clothes Off And Exposing Myself”
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Emerald Fennell likened making Saltburn, her dangerously dark comedy of class and lack of manners, “to taking your clothes off and exposing yourself.” The filmmaker, who won an Oscar and BAFTAs for her debut feature Promising Young Woman, clarified that the “transgressive” material that she’s interested in working on means “that you have to spend a lot of your time as a director saying, ‘Trust me, I think this how we’re going to do it.’ And so then people watch it, which is so thrilling.
But yeah, you are showing yourself. You are taking your clothes off and exposing yourself.” She added that Saltburn, while made on a big canvas, is a ”very intimate“ movie.
She told me during a long conversation at the Telluride Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere, that this is a film “about needing and wanting and desire and sex.” RELATED: Telluride Film Festival 2023: All Of Deadline’s Movie Reviews Saltburn exposes the cruel tricks and dastardly traps set by titled British upper classes; systems that could just as easily apply to those living at the top of the class structure in, say, Hollywood, the Cote d’Azur, Rome, Sydney, any place really where fabulous wealth can often encourage vile, bloodsucking behavior.
Sadly, I have observed such actions close up. Early on in my career, I covered the posh party scene at snotty London nightclubs and studied the abhorrent goings-on of the British upper classes at play, something that Fennell observes with savage comic acuity in Saltburn, which will next open the BFI London Film Festival on October 4. RELATED: 2023 Film Festival Calendar Fennell cast Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin, The Killing of a Sacred Deer), who’s on sublimely cracking form
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