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Emerald Fennell’s latest cinematic spectacle, Saltburn,
savagely peels back the veneer of the British upper class of the mid-2000s,
crossing Brideshead Revisited with The Talented Mr.
Ripley served with a twist of vampire-infused black comedy.
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The film revels “in voyeuristic repulsion and the
fetishization of beauty,” writes IndieWire’s Bill Desowitz,
told through the point of view of cunning Oxford student Oliver (Barry
Keoghan), who becomes infatuated with his aristocratic schoolmate, Felix (Jacob
Elordi), following an invitation to stay for the summer with his eccentric
Catton family at their titular estate.
Fennell’s bold visual plans began
with shooting in 35mm to capitalize on the rich color and contrast, and using
the 1.33 aspect ratio to enhance the story’s voyeurism.
“She wanted to convey the hot summer and foggy
night, influenced by the legendary landscape painter Gainsborough, as well as
more dramatic lighting inspired by Hitchcock, Nosferatu, and baroque painters
Caravaggio and Gentileschi,” we learn from Desowitz’s interview with the film’s
cinematographer, Linus Sandgren (La La Land).
The DP landed the job at the suggestion of Saltburn producer
Margot Robbie, who had just worked with Sandgren on Babylon and
knew first-hand what dark beauty he could achieve shooting in 35mm.
“I had seen Emerald’s debut film, [Promising
Young Woman], where she made some very interesting decisions,” Sandgren
said. “For example, letting the lady die in a single take, which was horrible
to watch. And then when I got the Saltburn script, I thought
it was brilliant. She writes very visually and in a descriptive way and I got
some very clear images in my head.”
They both agreed that shooting on film was right for the story, as Sandgren explained following a screening at Camerimage, as reported by Will Tizard at Variety. The medium’s reaction to red light in some key scenes inside the family home was particularly well-suited to the growing sense of horror, Sandgren said. So were close-ups of characters feeling extremes of emotions, with sweat, hair and bodily detail helping to build on the descent into obsession.
He shot with the Panavision Panaflex Millennium XL2
camera equipped with Primo prime lenses to get colors and contrast with
under-corrected spherical aberration. It all worked out well to propel the
journey into darkness, Sandgren said, growing into other scenes of seduction
that push boundaries. All of which just enriches “the bloody cocktail of Saltburn,”
he says, noting that, after all, “Vampires are sexual beings.”
When the director first spoke with
Sandgren about the project, she described it as a vampire movie “where everyone
is a vampire.”
Elaborating on this to Emily Murray at Games Radar, Fennell says she liked the vampire metaphor as a
vehicle for attacking the class system and our unhealthy fascination with the
rich and famous.
“We have exported the British country
house so effectively in literature and film, everyone internationally is
familiar with… their workings,” she says. “As we are talking about power,
class, and sex, this film could have existed at the Kardashians’ compound or
the Hamptons, but the thing about British aristocracy is that people know the
rules because of the films we have seen before. We all have an entry level
familiarity but the things that are restrained about the genre are overt here —
as we look at what we do when nobody is watching us.”
This embodied the vampire ethos at night in all its
gothic beauty and ugliness. “Emerald’s attracted to something gross happening,
but you see it in a perfectly composed image with the light just hitting
perfectly,” Sandgren said in an interview with Tomris Laffly at Filmmaker Magazine. “I think the challenge was finding a language for
the film with secrets that you don’t want to reveal and having it seem
ambiguous.”
Fennell wrote Saltburn during
COVID, when people couldn’t even be in the same room together, “let alone touch
each other, let alone lick each other,” she said, commenting on some of the
film’s explicit scenes. “This is a film really about not being able to touch.
Now, especially, we have an extra complicated relationship with bodily fluids.”
As Laffly prompts, this sounds like
Fennell wanted to unleash a beast we all have in ourselves that was so
oppressed during lockdown.
“That certainly felt like one of the
motives,” she admits. “There’s nothing that is more of a rigid structure than
the British country house and the aristocracy, nothing more impenetrable. So
yes, to unleash the viscerally human into that arena was so much of it.”
To Fennell, so much of cinema is
“frictionless, smooth, so consistent. And I feel like cinema — without being so
grandiose and pompous — is designed to be watched in a dark room of strangers,
and it can be expressive, it can be to some degree metaphorical. When I look at
the filmmakers that I love [like David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick] these are
people who are making films that I feel in my body.”
This idea of foregrounding intimacy
led to their decision to shoot within the Academy ratio. Again, she and
Sandgren referenced classic portrait painters.
“To do that formal framing, if you’re
looking at Caravaggio or lighting in a Joshua Reynolds and that kind of
blocking, it is so much easier the more square you are. And I like extreme
closeups, especially when you’re talking about sex and intimacy and inhuman
beauty,” she told Filmmaker. “If you’re 1.33, you can have a full face. It can
fill the frame completely.”
Scenes in the film are deliberately uncomfortable
to watch. They are what Desowitz calls “disgustingly beautiful moments,” but
Fennell emphasizes that they aren’t in any way there for shock value: “A lot of
this film is an interrogation of desire,” she tells the Inside Total Film podcast.
“With this type of love, there has to
be this element of revulsion, and for us to feel what Oliver is feeling and
understand that, you need to physically react to stuff. We did a lot of work
then to make it a physical experience — uncomfortable, sexy, difficult, queasy.
I thought a lot about the feeling of popping a spot — queasy pleasure.”
Much of the more salacious coverage of Saltburn has
concentrated on its final scene where Keoghan dances stark naked through the
estate to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s hit 2001 song, “Murder on the Dancefloor.”
“Everything is diabolical, but it’s exhilarating,” Fennell explained to Jazz Tangcay at Variety.
“It’s post-coital, euphoric, solitary and it’s mad.”
As for Sandgren’s camera moves, he
pointed out that Oliver was always in frame for most of the film. “But this
way, we see him full-figured. I think it was clear we wanted to follow him.
Following him through that scene felt more natural to watch everything about
him, and watch from the outside. It’s about his physicality and how he feels in
that moment.”
It’s a tour de force for Keoghan,
who, according to the cinematographer, was fearless throughout, but worked
especially hard at rehearsing and shooting the choreographed dance sequence.
In capturing it, Fennell used 11
takes. “They were all very beautiful,” she said. “It’s quite a complicated and
technical camera. A lot of the time, he was immensely patient because there was
a lot of naked dancing. Take #7 was technically perfect. You could hear
everyone’s overjoyed response, but I had to say ‘sorry’ because it was missing
whatever it was that made Oliver that slightly human messiness. So, we had to
do it a further four times.”
Fennell likens the actor to Robert Mitchum, as she
explains to Filmmaker Magazine. “I think he’s just exceptional, not
just now but for all time — someone like Robert Mitchum is a good comparison.
There are actors who have a thing that nobody else has had before, and I think
Barry has that.”
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