DIRECTOR
The Oscar-winning film-maker excels at combining humour with horror – and her latest compelling drama is no exception
‘DEFINITELY KEDGEREE! WAY MORE DELICIOUS,’ Emerald Fennell instructs me – and, to some degree, our waiter – in Soho’s Dean Street Townhouse. Breakfast decision made and order duly taken, she turns to me, wide-eyed with mortification. ‘Oh my God! I’m so sorry. It’s like I’m your controlling boyfriend.
Obviously order what on Earth you want.’
Within minutes, the director, writer and actress and I have gone on to review other inadmissible male moves on a date, and how to handle power imbalance in the moment.
Fennell, I soon realise, is a stellar conversationalist – which makes sense for someone known for the crackling dialogue in her scripts. She clearly brings a great deal of herself to her projects – starting, on a cosmetic level, with the contralto RP she deployed to play Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown. Moreover, I witness much of the empathy and emotional honesty shown by her Call the Midwife character Nurse Patsy; the fierce feminism that underpins 2021’s Promising Young Woman, her directorial debut, for which she won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar; and the black humour that bewitched audiences in Killing Eve and now takes riotous centre-stage in Saltburn, the second feature film she has both written and directed.
After the success of her recent projects, Fennell was inundated with offers to create similar, women-led scripts, but she wanted to explore uncharted terrain – to turn her attention to men, and to a different genre. While Promising Young Woman, led by Carey Mulligan, was an alternative take on the revenge thriller, in Saltburn Fennell is stretching the boundaries of the British gothic country-house mystery. At the film’s centre is Oliver (played by The Banshees of Inisherin star Barry Keoghan), an awkward 18-year-old from a troubled, working-class Merseyside family who wins a scholarship to Oxford University in 2006. Like everyone on campus, he is beguiled by the handsome, louche aristocrat Felix Catton, winningly portrayed by Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi. Felix takes a shine to Oliver and, when term ends, invites him to spend his summer holidays at the Catton family pile, the titular Saltburn. So far, so Brideshead Revisited – a source of inspiration that Fennell acknowledges early on, in a line from Felix. But this story’s summer, in all its sun-soaked, hedonistic and increasingly sinister glory, unfolds in a rather different fashion, as do Oliver’s relationships with his host family. The cast is superlative: Conversations with Frie
