Emerald Fennell’s Anatomy of Desire
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The rift inside the Democratic Party now over Israel and its campaign in Gaza is profound. And this week on our podcast, the political scene is...

Andrew Morantz talks about Israel and the left and how the divide may be impacting the presidential race. Andrew Morantz joins host Tyler Foggett on The Political Scene, a podcast from The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Emerald Fennell was an accomplished actor before making her debut as a writer and director with Promising Young Woman.

Fennell's second movie comes out this month, and she sat down to talk about it with Michael Schulman, who covers culture and entertainment for The New Yorker. Here's Michael.

You might know Emerald Fennell for her acting work. She played Camilla Parker Bowles on the middle seasons of The Crown. I actually couldn't talk to her about any of her acting because of the SAG strike. But she has emerged in recent years as a really provocative, hot-button-pushing filmmaker. Her first movie, Promising Young Woman, came out in 2020, and it was just...

a movie that people love to argue over. It was a feminist revenge thriller. And chances are, if you saw it, you either loved it or hated it. But she won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. So now she's back with her second film,

Salt Burn. It draws on the Evil and Wow novel Brideshead Revisited, and it follows a middle-class Oxford student, played by Barry Keoghan, who falls in with a handsome aristocratic classmate, played by Jacob Elordi. And so the Barry Keoghan character goes to spend the summer with this guy's family at their luxurious country estate, also called Salt Burn, and more or less infiltrates their lives.

Emerald Fennell does not do things halfway. She really goes dark. She's not a crowd pleaser. And I have a feeling that Saltburn is going to get people talking just as Promising Woman did. I imagine that it was really important not only just to cast the actors, but to cast the characters.

of Saltburn, you found this place that dates back to the 14th century. Can you tell me how you found it, how you chose it? It was really important to me. And it's funny that you say casting because it absolutely did feel exactly as important as a character. And me and Linus, the wonderful cinematographer, talked a lot about

shooting the house as a sex object, as a kind of fetish. You know, we're always sliding up and down staircases and it's, you know, sort of part of the like erotic texture of the film, really the house. And so many of these houses have been in, you know, because we're so successful at exporting the aristocracy abroad.

So we've seen them all. We've seen Gosford Park and we've seen the remains of the day and we've seen Downton Abbey. And all of those are within a certain, usually within a certain kind of area of shooting near London. So we knew we'd have to go much further out to find it. And then, you know, part of it we shot...

Because of all of the oners and the way I like to work, it had to be one place. But it also meant we all became immune to the beauty immediately. And you need that feeling, right? Of like, oh, oh, you're just walking through it. And after a couple of weeks, you're like, oh, it's so big. How am I getting from it? You know, it's no longer the most beautiful, overwhelming thing you've ever seen. It's suddenly just...

another thing. Well, that's the point is that the people who live there could care less. They're so used to their lives of luxury. This movie is such a vicious satire of the kind of idle rich. Is that how you see it? And what interested you in sort of observing this sliver of aristocracy? Yes, it's absolutely a satire. But it's also a satire of

those of us who want in. You know, it's actually, it's not just, it's not just, of course, you know, the absurdities of the class system and, you know, which I'm very much like a part of as every single person in England is, but really it's about our

willingness to prostrate ourself at the altar of beauty and wealth always and our longing for it. And even when we know better, even when we know that it's not good for us, even though we know that it's never going to love us back, that these systems are just like in place to make us feel ugly and stupid and boring and whatever, we're still on our knees. All of us are. And so yes, absolutely, it's a class satire.

But the thing for me that I wanted it to feel more like is about what is our relationship with the things we want? Why do we hate them so much? Why do we hate them as much as we love them? Why do men look at beautiful women on the internet? And because they're so aroused by them, they want to strangle them.

where is that impulse from? You know, what is this constant sort of voyeurism and need and want and endless wanting, wanting and looking? What does it do? And so, yes, I hope absolutely it's like a comedy of manners and a social center, but I'm interested in like being a human inside of all of this and what motivates us and the British class system and the house and

It's all really, you know, it could be any number of things that we are pressing our faces against, I guess. Well, I'm curious how you drew on your own life and background in satirizing or anatomizing the British class system. In this movie, you're not someone who's coming from the wrong side of the tracks and, you know,

peering through the windows like Oliver is. You seem to grow up in a very rarefied setting. Your father, Theo Fennell, is known as the jeweler to the stars, the king of bling. And, you know, you went to the same boarding schools, Kate Middleton, and then to Oxford. I'm kind of just curious, like with your father, you know, the people he supplies jewelry for have included Madonna, Elton John, who's a family friend. Growing up, how did you sort of process this

world you were living in. But this is so interesting because this is all about the intricacies of the class system because I would say, what I would say is, oh, that's very much pressing your nose against the window because actually...

The psychotic detail of the class system means that actually, I mean, do you think you're thought of as being very, very, very posh if your father is known as the king of bling? Do you know what I mean? So suddenly, yes, of course. But this is what's fascinating is that, yes, by any standards, my life has been absurd, like an absurd situation.

parade of mad privilege of course I mean and I'm very aware of that but also on the other side of things my parents both you know my father's was his family were in the army my mother's family you know ran a farm were farmers in rural Wales and they both you know

they both went to London to make themselves and they both worked and worked and worked. You know, I suppose everyone in my family would just, were pretty, you know, a bit flashy, some would say. And certainly in Britain, that would be a real slam. You know, there's a kind of- I see what you mean. This is very different from America where, you know, wealth is flash. Well, I think, but everywhere, again, it's just about where this, again, it's like,

It's all about learning the rules. And so, you know, for me, for me too, I had to learn those rules. But if you are a writer or if you are a maker of things, I guess, you're a voyeur and you're a watcher and you're interested in detail and you're interested in how people communicate with each other. You're interested in how you communicate.

transform yourself to make yourself more palatable to other people. And so all of these things are true. Yes, I'm

from a very kind of, grew up in very rarefied circumstances, but also there are places where that wouldn't be the case at all. I went to Oxford and yes, there are lots of different subdivisions there too. You're divided up constantly until your tiny little slither. Well, it's funny you mentioned Oxford. Saltburn begins at Oxford where these two students

befriend each other from across this class divide. And I'm curious if there were things from your own experience there that you directly drew for the movie or maybe more thematic things that found their way in. Well, I think I did probably what a thousand people who go to Oxford did, which was I wanted to be a kind of loose chain-smoking person

sexy genius, having affairs with my tutors. And of course it was just not... I've always felt like a profoundly unserious person. And so it was very important to me to go to a place that at least would

I could at least point to so that people might want to take me seriously, even if they didn't. But I think I just... I don't know what I was looking for quite, but it's also just a time of your life where you can be anything. And I don't think that lying is... I don't think of myself as a liar at all. I hope I'm very honest. But...

That's what a liar would say. I imagine you didn't lead with people saying, hey, my father's the king of bling. I mean, maybe I did, though. Maybe you did. Maybe to be with certain people, that's probably what I did do. And you were acting during this time, right? Yeah. Did you think of yourself as someone who wanted to be a director someday or were you primarily focused on acting?

being an actress? No, I think I was writing a lot. I did an English degree. And I think actually it was really interesting. I met Mariel Heller for the first time yesterday, the amazing director. And she said something that really struck me, which was that the only visible job for a woman on a film or a TV set was an actor. And I felt that very strongly because I think that is probably the truth for me too, is that now I know that this is the only thing I ever wanted to do.

But I didn't know that it exists. I suppose that acting was the thing that I, because we don't really have film schools in the same way in England as you do here. And I didn't really, and there weren't any female directors at the time. I mean, of course there are lots at the time, but I mean, just in terms of just sheer volume, there wasn't anyone that I could, I mean, I looked up to all of the like female comedians who wrote their own things. I looked up to kind of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French and, and people like that. And, but,

I suppose that acting, I love acting. Whether or not I'm particularly good at it, I don't really know. But I think that I wanted to write and I wanted to make things. I wanted to make the stuff that I thought about. Well, you know, both of your films, Promising a Woman and Saltburn, I would describe as darkly perverse, which is a compliment. They start dark and they get even darker. Were you always like that?

Yeah, I think so. There are a lot of calls to my parents to, you know, to come and have a talk about a piece of creative writing I'd done when I was in, you know, primary school. I don't know. I don't, I don't know what it is. I don't know where it comes from, but I'm, I think that I want to, I want to push, I want to push something. I want to press something and I want, and I, and I want to

talk to people I don't know I want I want to talk about things and I don't know how else to talk about them and it's interesting when you make a film particularly a film like Promising I Won't people expect you to have an answer always and I don't have one and it's the same with you know it's the same with with Saltburn but it's interesting I think it is also interesting that actually a lot of it is sort of just the work of imagination which is something that

you know, maybe we talk less about like in interviews maybe than the like real life things that inspire it. But I just, yeah, I don't know. I suppose I'm interested in like why we all love popping zits and why people watch it on the internet and what that squeamish pleasure is.

Emerald Fennell, talking with Michael Shulman about her new film, Salt Burn. The conversation continues in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Michael Shulman is a staff writer covering arts and entertainment for the New Yorker, and he's speaking today with the writer, director, and actor Emerald Fennell. Fennell made the 2020 film Promising Young Woman. It starred Carey Mulligan, and it was one of those movies that seemed like everybody was talking about it and not without some controversy. We'll continue that conversation now.

Well, this would be a good time. So I don't want to spoil anything about Salt Burn. Obviously, people haven't, in general, seen it yet. But maybe this would be a good time to talk about the ending of Promising Young Woman. People have had three years. Yeah, get on with it, guys.

Instead of carrying out this revenge in the way that the audience might be rooting for, she finally gets the rapist cornered and he frees himself and smothers her with a pillow. And she has a kind of final victory from beyond the grave. This was a really divisive, polarizing argument starting, ending. And I'm curious...

what effect did you want it to have on the audience? Did you think about that? Yeah, of course. I mean, of course. I think for me, it was the

The purpose of the film was not just to kind of examine the very recent past where all of the nice people that I knew did all of the things in this film. And so in many ways, that scene where Cassie dies, which was in real time, you know, so I found out how long it would take for somebody to be suffocated to death. And the answer was about two and a half minutes. So it's two and a half minutes.

pushing in. Excruciating. It's excruciating and it ends on him. You know, it ends on he then becomes our protagonist, her murderer. And it's not just that scene that's very important in the film, but it's the scene after where his best man comes in and it's the most broadly comic, it's the most broadly comic scene of the whole film. She's dead, Joe. Come on. I'm not kidding. All right. You're being ironic.

What? You killed the stripper at your bachelor party? What is this, the 90s? Oh, classic. And we're all laughing because we've seen it. We're all laughing because we've seen it and we know it. And that was always part of it for me is just, you know, to really talk about how we get

how we get catharsis and how we, and, and, and, you know, to, to, to try and explain to people that it's no use saying, why didn't you, why didn't you, why didn't you, because this is the answer. There's no, you can't, there's, you know, the winning is relentless and excruciating and, and often feels very futile. Well, it really complicates the relationship, the audience's relationship with our,

In a way that I think Saltburn does in a different but related way, which is that our instinct is to root for this person whose story we're seeing, who it seems like somewhat of an underdog. I think that the people who recoiled at that end of Promising Young Woman felt like, wait a second, is this supposed to be a victory for her? Because I don't feel like it is. I felt personally like...

It's okay. I understand that I'm supposed to feel queasy and maybe even question her self-destructive instinct, which may be something like a death wish, or there's something kind of psychopathic about her. But do we question that when it's John Wick getting revenge on his puppy? Do we say, why is he putting himself in these dangerous positions? Do we do it when men go on revenge quests and die heroically at the end? We don't, because it looks different.

And, you know, there was a lot of, there were a lot of conversations at the time about the kind of, you know, the relationship of the cops to her and the fact that they kind of arrest him at the end. And it's so, it's sort of fascinating because the cop, the male and female, but mostly the male policeman in this is the most useless, misogynistic person.

He goes and interviews Bo's character, who's a kind of children's doctor and is completely overwhelmed by him. And I mean, you know, Bo was directed to give the most... This was Bo Burnham. Sorry, Bo Burnham, who plays Dr. Ryan, who's Cassie's love interest. The ultimate nice seeming decent guy who turns out to be yet another schmuck. Yeah, disappointing schmuck. Yeah. So, but he was directed in that scene to be as shifty...

and guilty-seeming as possible. And the policeman is like, just keep feeding him all the information to free himself. Between you and me, it sounded like she wasn't feeling so good. Mentally, I mean. Her father seemed to think she was a little unstable. Yeah, she was not in a good place. Do you think she might have wanted to hurt herself? Yeah. She could have. She could have, yeah. I thought that might be the case.

Thank you for your honesty. Also, we don't see the court case probably gets off scot-free. Well, that's what some people argued as a criticism. How is this a victory if he's just going to get off on self-defense? Well, but it's not a victory. There is no victory. That's the point of the film. There is no victory to be had. But also when you're making a film like this, you also have to, you kind of have to acknowledge that for it to hit widely, you can't be so...

You can't be so nihilistic that, you know, because the original ending did end with not just the best man and the kind of perpetrator burning her body, but everyone from the bachelor party standing around the mountains. And that was the end. And, you know, the initial argument was that was just too bleak, that actually it would be impossible for people to engage with it. They'd be too annoyed. And of course... Who was making this argument?

You know, the usual people, lovely, well-meaning, honest people who I work with. Like producers, studio heads. Yeah, like all of those people. And I, of course, initially my first thing, like any person, was you're fucking idiots and you hate art and you hate women and I hope you will die slowly and tonight. Well, I'm sure there were people who felt that even your final ending was...

unbearably bleak and why can't we just end with a bang? But that was the thing is that actually... With her glorious victory. But this is the thing, this is the thing, you know, is that actually they were right. They were right. It reminds me of Fatal Attraction, which famously had a reshot ending. You know, it was originally, it originally ended with the Glenn Close character. It's letting her...

throat in the bathroom alone. And this was so horrifying to the studios basically that they came and reshot it with, you know, the, the wife character, like shooting her in the head and sort of protecting the family and the, you know, the sort of stalker evil, you

chaos-causing woman is sort of cast out like a monster. But those are the Hollywood rules, which you sort of undermined with your ending. Thank you. But I think also that's it. You have to also operate within those rules because you also want the most people to watch something and engage with it. I think the thing that I'm coming to terms with is that I think perhaps as a female filmmaker more than any other kind,

you're expected you are sort of still expected to be maybe a memoirist people are more comfortable with that still and so I found the personal the the fact that I was always such an intrinsic part of the work difficult because actually even though you know because of the actor strike and all these sorts of things I'm sort of here talking about these things I would really rather

it existed without me, that people were able to look at it without me. And so I found that difficult because I, I, I think I, you hope the thing speaks for itself, but you also don't, you know, me and Carrie were at a point with Promising Young Woman where I,

constantly being asked about our personal relationships and material and really quite kind of openly frankly being asked in what manner we'd been sexually assaulted and could we please detail it in lovely graphic detail to the man who just introduced himself to us via zoom you know it was kind of bleak and and um and i think that that stuff is the stuff that i always will find difficult because it's necessary but i but i also feel like the

You know, you sort of want to step away from it a little bit yourself. For sure. I mean, so much of the press around Promising Woman had to do with you as a specifically female storyteller showing a female point of view and how women experience women.

like consent and sex and harassment so much differently than men, just like a different universe. Sopra really is about men primarily. The central relationship is between these two men. Did that interest you, like exploring male friendship? Yeah.

Male friendship is a really excellent way of describing the things that happen here. Yeah, it's insufficient to this relationship in the movie. Friendship with a big wink. Male ways of relating to each other. I guess. Well, again, you know, perhaps in 2006 as well, even more than now, there feel like more barriers exist.

between male friendship physically, so less now than... But with all my female friendships were very tactile. You're often entwined together, for example, certainly growing up at that age. When you're a young woman, you often change in front of your friends. You're often in the bath in front of your friends. You're often talking about masturbating. You have intimate relationships that are maybe a bit different, certainly again, during the period that this was in. And so...

I suppose that this film about a kind of bottomless well of desire that can't ever be sated kind of felt uniquely male. But again, that's just me honestly pulling something out of my ass because you asked me. I think truthfully, it just was. And I'm interested in men and boys as much as I am in women and girls. We're all in it.

A couple years ago, it was announced that you were making a film about the character Zatanna for DC Comics. And you've also been attached to a Nemesis movie at Marvel. First of all, I'm curious, are those still happening?

Are these on the works? No, no. Those aren't in the works. So Nemesis was, I think, that was a few years ago and that wasn't anything I was ever formally attached to, but did some work on early on. And it was one of those things that interested me because, again, I like genre. And I wasn't at the time hugely familiar with the superhero genre, actually. And I thought, well, this would be interesting if I could make a film that would

appeal to me maybe and people like me which is you know maybe people who don't wouldn't traditionally go and see those films then that felt like a really fun exercise but I think that the truth of it is is I'm I am much much much better on my own the development process the traditional development process is one that um I've I've done in the past for lots of reasons and it's

And I do love collaborating with people, but it's not, it doesn't work for me. I can't do outlines, can't have endless conversations about ideas before writing. For me, I can't write anything down until it's finished because once it's down, it's sort of,

it feels complete not entirely you always have to change things a little bit but it's sort of a secret it has to be a secret and if you're going to be really honest with yourself and you're going to write the things that you find really troubling and interesting and sexy and difficult you kind of can't you need to sort of

work it out in your head alone so are you at all interested in doing like a superhero or franchise movie or is the sort of corporate mechanism around it where you have to outline things just the the barrier of entry at this point yeah i think so and i i honestly don't know is the answer like certainly for the next few films if i'm allowed to make them i i already know what they're going to be of my own and that's you know i've got two small kids like i

I can only ever do one thing at a time. So I do one thing at a time. And so at least for a few years, again, if I'm allowed to, I'll just make my own things. But you never know. Doing something that's difficult or that seems counterintuitive is always something that appeals. But certainly not for a while. Well, Emerald, thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.

The New Yorker's Michael Schulman spoke with writer, director, and actor Emerald Fennell. Her film Saltburn comes out on the 17th. You can find much more from Michael Schulman at newyorker.com. He just profiled director Ridley Scott looking at his new historical epic, Napoleon. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening to the show this week. See you next time.

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