Academy award winning filmmaker Emerald Fennel discusses one of the most meaningful scenes from her film 'Saltburn.' Get her full breakdown of the arrival scene, from working with the art department to create the glamorous yet toxic spirit of the film to working alongside actors Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan.
MGM & Amazon Studios will release SALTBURN in select theaters Friday, November 17, 2023 and expanding Thursday, November 23, 2023
Director of Photography: Adam Lance Garcia
Talent: Emerald Fennell
Producer: Madison Coffey
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Associate Producer: Rafael Vasquez
Production Manager: Natasha Soto-Albors
Production Coordinator: Tania Jones
Talent Booker: Meredith Judkins
Assistant Camera: Chloe Ramos
Gaffer: David Alexander
Audio Engineer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Nicholas Sims
Post Production Supervisor: Edward Taylor
Post Production Coordinator: Jovan James
Supervising Editor: Kameron Key
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
MGM & Amazon Studios will release SALTBURN in select theaters Friday, November 17, 2023 and expanding Thursday, November 23, 2023
Director of Photography: Adam Lance Garcia
Talent: Emerald Fennell
Producer: Madison Coffey
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Associate Producer: Rafael Vasquez
Production Manager: Natasha Soto-Albors
Production Coordinator: Tania Jones
Talent Booker: Meredith Judkins
Assistant Camera: Chloe Ramos
Gaffer: David Alexander
Audio Engineer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Nicholas Sims
Post Production Supervisor: Edward Taylor
Post Production Coordinator: Jovan James
Supervising Editor: Kameron Key
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 It's such a difficult thing to play a sort of nice guy.
00:03 When it comes to character in general,
00:05 I don't think any of us are nice.
00:07 I just don't know anyone nice.
00:10 Not really.
00:10 Hi, I'm Emeril Fanel.
00:11 I'm the director of "Saltburn,"
00:13 and this is "Notes on a Scene."
00:15 (dramatic music)
00:18 Our protagonist, Oliver Quick, played by Barry Keoghan,
00:23 has just arrived at his friend Felix's house for the summer.
00:26 Felix, sort of taking pity on him,
00:28 invites him to stay at his house.
00:30 Little does Oliver know that the house,
00:32 which is called Saltburn, looks like this.
00:34 (door knocking)
00:41 I'd seen "Barry and the Killing of a Sacred Deer"
00:43 and just thought it was the best performance I've ever seen.
00:45 Just full stop, I think, that any actor's ever given.
00:47 It was just so chilling and sort of sexy
00:51 and weird and real and horrible,
00:54 and he seemed to get the thing that I really love
00:57 in all movies and really wanted in this
00:59 is that he's both a real person and a sort of feeling, too.
01:04 He understands how to be super grounded and real,
01:08 but also how to be otherworldly.
01:10 - Mr. Quick, you're early.
01:14 - I got the earlier train.
01:16 - Well, do let us know next time.
01:18 - This is the most kind of gothic moment
01:20 in a funny way of the movie.
01:21 We go from, you know, the kind of university,
01:25 secret history type brideshead tale
01:27 to the like, oh, we may be in a kind of
01:30 hammer house of horror movie.
01:32 - You see, the gates were not open.
01:33 - Oh, that's okay.
01:36 - We sent someone to pick you up.
01:37 - Oh, sorry.
01:41 - It was very hard to find Duncan.
01:42 Duncan is the butler at Saltburn,
01:46 and he is its sort of spirit.
01:50 Here we've got Paul Rees,
01:51 who is just one of the greatest actors of his generation.
01:53 He's just extraordinary,
01:55 and when I was meeting people for this part,
01:57 I said, Duncan is Saltburn.
02:00 He could have lived for a thousand years.
02:02 He could be, you know, one of the bricks.
02:05 Everyone else was like, uh-huh, yeah, okay,
02:10 kind of get it, and Paul was like, absolutely.
02:13 - Follow me.
02:14 - I mean, the little look that Paul gives him there,
02:19 just, I love it so much.
02:21 The disdain, he does almost nothing.
02:23 - Wow.
02:33 That's amazing.
02:36 - A huge shout out to the art department,
02:38 who were just exceptional,
02:39 because when we were looking at this shot,
02:42 I said, we need something.
02:45 We need, like, a pair of knickers
02:47 that have been tossed up there during a party.
02:48 We need a streamer.
02:49 We need some tinsel from Christmas,
02:52 something old, something shabby,
02:53 something that's been missed.
02:54 Because this is a film about our obsession with beauty,
02:57 our kind of fetishization of, like, stuff,
03:00 and Dave, who is our amazing on-set dresser,
03:03 kind of went, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,
03:04 and just went and made this flypaper.
03:07 And then all of the lovely dead flies, RIP.
03:11 This is a really, really good example
03:14 of why the aspect ratio works.
03:15 You can see the height of this.
03:17 The house is very tall and square.
03:19 We didn't want to be cutting off
03:20 all the beautiful frescoes on the ceilings.
03:22 The squarer ratio made us,
03:24 made it just much easier to shoot
03:25 just from a practical point of view.
03:27 The fact that we could get the floor and the ceiling
03:29 into this enormous room, it was really something.
03:33 This house has never been seen in anything, ever.
03:36 There are no photographs of it on the internet.
03:38 But one of the things, when I walked in,
03:39 the moment I knew that this was "Saltburn"
03:41 was that they had hats on the busts.
03:46 The busts in there are, um,
03:48 yeah, those kind of priceless, beautiful marble statues.
03:52 And they had these silly hats put on them.
03:54 And I thought, that's exactly what this movie is.
03:57 It's the kind of surreal and the kind of mundane,
04:01 the kind of beautiful and the sort of silly,
04:04 all like together in one.
04:06 - Wow.
04:08 - That's amazing.
04:11 - Wow, wow, just wow.
04:18 - I mean, obviously, super, super gothic.
04:20 It's incredibly kind of useful
04:22 to play some of these things in silhouette.
04:24 It gives you this sort of sense that all is not well.
04:27 - Just leave your bag there.
04:29 Someone will get it for you.
04:31 - Ollie!
04:32 Thank God you're here.
04:33 - Duncan, I'll show him to his room, don't worry.
04:35 - The incredible costume designer, Sophie Kanae,
04:37 she and I, when we first spoke,
04:40 we were talking about this is a period drama in many ways,
04:43 or most, the most part it is.
04:45 It's set in 2006, which distressingly is now
04:47 very much a period drama.
04:49 And I think it has the effect of sort of slightly
04:51 humanizing all of the characters,
04:53 because there's nothing that kind of feels lamer
04:56 than 15-year-old fashion and hair and makeup.
04:59 You can see on his hand here some crucial period detail,
05:03 which is number one, Livestrong bracelet.
05:05 For them, this house is just where they live.
05:08 They're always super casual,
05:10 or claim to be until they sort of dress for dinner.
05:12 And so part of the thing of being very beautiful and posh
05:15 is kind of not really trying very hard.
05:18 His shirt isn't ironed.
05:20 Can we just like peek there to see
05:23 the sort of slightly cringe seatbelt,
05:26 like aeroplane seatbelt belt,
05:29 which was very much of its time.
05:31 Hair-wise, the main thing was his sideburns,
05:34 long hair sideburns was 2006.
05:37 I know, guys, I know, I can just see everyone
05:40 behind the camera feeling like, huh?
05:42 I mean, so many times the costume designers,
05:44 somebody would come and be like,
05:46 "Oh my God, look, we found this super lame dress."
05:49 And I'm like, "Ha ha ha, it's in my cupboard.
05:51 "I wear that all the time.
05:52 "I'm gonna burn it when I get home.
05:54 "It's so embarrassing."
05:55 - Duncan, stop being so frightening in front of my friends.
05:58 - Well, I'll try.
05:59 - Come on, then.
05:59 - Shout out to Anthony Willis here, the composer,
06:02 one of my favorite people.
06:03 He did "Promising a Woman" as well.
06:05 This whole school, as a jumping off point,
06:08 starts from the very beginning, Zadok the priest,
06:12 which is the coronation hymn in Britain.
06:16 And so that was always our kind of jumping off point,
06:19 this kind of super British coronation.
06:21 Duncan is so frightening,
06:23 and then immediately you just see him,
06:25 you know, he will have been there
06:26 for whole of Felix's life.
06:28 And me and Paul talked a lot about how much he loved him.
06:30 Oh, look here, double hats.
06:34 There you go.
06:35 Playing with light always.
06:38 Part of the reason that you choose like linen is for this.
06:41 You're always kind of catching the body through the clothes.
06:44 And we see it again and again in this movie of, you know,
06:47 we're always kind of shooting light
06:48 through night dresses or shirts.
06:51 You know, think when you're in love with someone,
06:54 you are always aware of their body.
06:56 And so it's important that we kind of got that element.
07:01 - Okay, so.
07:03 - So this is Felix's tour.
07:06 This is kind of one of the reasons why we chose this house.
07:09 This house is so beautiful, so exceptional.
07:12 But it was also important to me framing wise
07:14 that actually, even though it's a tour of the house,
07:17 even though we're all dying to see it,
07:20 even though it's the most beautiful house in the world,
07:22 we're not looking at it.
07:24 - Red staircase.
07:27 I accidentally fingered my cousin here.
07:29 - That's the kind of thing that Felix would say, right?
07:31 Like he doesn't care about the paintings, not really.
07:33 It's that thing, it's the kind of constant dismissal
07:36 of the beauty.
07:37 And the only things that are interesting to Felix really
07:41 are the kind of tawdry, silly things.
07:44 - Henry VII's cabinet,
07:46 ghost of granny.
07:48 - Us, the audience, get a sense of place.
07:51 So you can see that, you know, all of this stuff
07:55 out of every window, we recognize every vista
07:57 when we go upstairs to the bathroom
07:59 and we shoot people in the bath and out of the windows,
08:03 we can see the scale all the time.
08:05 It enabled us to have these long kind of shining style takes
08:09 where you kind of could have a real tour of the house.
08:11 There's also the exact inverse of this tour
08:14 much later in the movie that is the inverse
08:18 and is hugely, hugely important.
08:20 - Green room, garden, some fucking hideous Rubens.
08:25 Broken piano.
08:26 - The Enfilade here, we kind of mimic upstairs,
08:29 which is, there's so much about these houses
08:31 is kind of the sense of being watched,
08:33 of things being like cleaned up without you noticing,
08:36 of everything just being like kind of whisked away.
08:38 People are always watching you,
08:40 they're always sort of judging you.
08:41 Also, there's an enormous amount of voyeurism in this film
08:44 and kind of yearning.
08:46 And the thing about the number of mirrors in the Enfilade
08:48 is being able to see through,
08:49 almost entirely through the whole of the house.
08:52 - Blue room, it's blue.
08:54 - So cutting back to Oliver here was not trickery.
08:57 We did the whole shot always.
08:59 It was just important to see him occasionally.
09:04 - This is the long gallery.
09:06 - We created like a little sitting room.
09:08 And out here, which you can't see,
09:10 as Felix will tell us, is the maze,
09:12 which has four little balls in it.
09:15 Two are pewter and two are pearl.
09:18 You can actually play the maze game.
09:19 Just to quickly talk about the maze,
09:21 it was really important to me
09:22 that it was a real workable maze.
09:23 I read about a man named Adrian Fisher,
09:25 who's the world's foremost, and I think only, maze designer.
09:28 He designs all of the mazes for like video games,
09:31 as well as like Hampton Court Palace.
09:33 I just had two stipulations.
09:34 There were two ways of getting into the center of the maze.
09:38 One should be the hardest maze he's ever designed,
09:41 like the most complicated route,
09:43 the most impossible to get into the center.
09:45 And then the other is the cheats route.
09:47 - Dead rally, dead rallies, for daddy's old teddy.
09:51 - This is why Jacob Elordi is just such an absolute genius,
09:54 and why at the moment he came in and auditioned for this,
09:57 I wanted him to play the part.
09:58 When people auditioned, they came in
10:00 and they kind of gave a sort of brideshead type performance.
10:02 It was quite loose and sort of arch.
10:06 And Jacob just came in and did this,
10:09 which was just, he was just this kind of like normal guy.
10:13 Such a difficult thing to play a sort of nice guy.
10:16 When it comes to character in general,
10:18 I'm not, I don't think any of us are nice.
10:21 I just don't know anyone nice.
10:24 Not really.
10:25 Not anyone I know well.
10:26 I don't think I'm nice.
10:27 I think we're all completely in denial
10:29 about our own characters.
10:31 I don't think it would be possible for any of us
10:34 to describe ourselves accurately
10:36 in the way that other people see us.
10:38 So that's always at the back of my mind
10:39 when I'm thinking of character.
10:41 - So yeah, we'll just do here.
10:43 - Okay.
10:44 - My room.
10:47 You'll be staying just next door.
10:48 - Always, which is my obsession,
10:50 is what I used to call on "Promise Me Young Woman" gubbins,
10:55 which everyone found hilarious
10:56 'cause it's not an American word apparently,
10:58 although it's very useful.
10:59 The stuff of life, like the clutter of life
11:01 that even if you live in a house like this, you have.
11:03 So guys, this is where we get into the super detail.
11:07 Bright blue '90s Ikea lamp.
11:10 You know, he would have kind of had all his stuff
11:12 from when he was a kid.
11:13 Cigarettes, always, everyone's chain smoking.
11:16 Diet Coke, empty.
11:18 We've got, I think they're called Wilsdon Cricket manuals.
11:21 Every bedroom one visited in 2006
11:24 of certain type of boy had those.
11:25 You know, there's nothing to me that's more satisfying
11:28 than seeing like this tapestry,
11:29 which is 30,000 pounds worth of kind of Flemish tapestry
11:34 and then shit in front of it, you know?
11:36 That's how something becomes alive.
11:39 Every single frame of this movie
11:40 you need to be able to pause
11:41 and it needs to feel like that.
11:42 It needs to have that amount of detail.
11:44 I don't know why you would make a film
11:45 if you weren't kind of obsessive over
11:47 whether it's Diet Coke or, you know, Dr. Pepper
11:51 or, you know, what kind of books he's got.
11:55 Bathroom.
11:56 Oh, by the way, we're going to be sharing a bathroom.
11:58 I hope you don't mind.
11:59 Otherwise you'd be miles away on the other end of the house.
12:02 Bathroom features very heavily in this movie.
12:04 This was just a kind of white, plain room, I think, before.
12:08 So these guys are, we had two of these built,
12:12 inbuilt sinks that are matching opposite each other.
12:15 So it meant the boys, even when their backs are to each other
12:17 they can always see each other.
12:18 And then the bath is freestanding
12:20 right in the middle of the room.
12:21 There's something very exhibitionist
12:23 about the way that people live in houses like this.
12:25 In the olden days, people would have just, you know,
12:28 servants would have just come in and out.
12:30 You're on display.
12:31 And that's very much part of this film.
12:35 And so you can see when you're sitting in the bath,
12:37 when Oliver's sitting in the bath later.
12:40 Isn't that such a good picture?
12:41 Here are the taps.
12:42 You see them from behind
12:42 and you can just see the whole of the vista.
12:45 This is the most incredible Pierre Frey wallpaper
12:48 that Susie found, which looks,
12:50 it's both looks like marble and smoke.
12:51 It was about finding stuff that was masculine
12:53 using a lot of like mahogany slate,
12:55 dark, masculine, sort of sexy fabrics.
12:59 What we usually have on here,
13:01 wash and go, bright green shampoo, hideous.
13:05 You've got to have a kind of purple toothbrush
13:08 and some Colgate.
13:09 It's always about sort of just making sure
13:11 that no matter how beautiful it is,
13:12 you've still got the stuff you need to live.
13:15 - Dressing room.
13:18 And
13:21 (door opening)
13:23 your room.
13:24 - I mean, who doesn't want to stay there?
13:26 I do.
13:28 I do.
13:29 Yeah, who's say no to Felix?
13:30 No one, I don't think.
13:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]