Emerald Fennell says Saltburn is a ‘lick the rich, suck the rich’ movie

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.

As the environmental, political, and above all, financial stress between the ultra-rich and the remainder of the world continues to develop, it’s a matter that retains driving darkish, memorable films — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest movie pageant, together with this yr’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which performed as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, appears to suit the invoice completely as nicely: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, certain to show up in awards-season dialog once more) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is half horror movie, half basic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or simply to be Felix.

But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell advised Polygon she doesn’t fully see Saltburn as one more eat-the-rich train.

“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she stated.

Image: Prime

Saltburn is an intoxicating expertise: a visually wealthy, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a whereas to completely unfold inside the movie, is obsessive about the luxurious, comforts, and informal conceitedness of Felix and his rich household. But as they spend extra time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the household property, additionally they drop hints that he’s most likely simply the plaything of the season, prone to be discarded out of boredom.

Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the difficult, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t fully sympathetic towards Oliver, who’s clearly greedy and needy in addition to ruthless. At the identical time, it isn’t absolutely on board with Felix and his superficial, egocentric relations, both.

“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”

As Fennell has defined in different interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the web, and parasocial relationships, about the type of connections folks make from a distance and construct into elaborate, typically unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the type of famous person who would earn a fandom: He’s good-looking, charming, and expert at every part he tries, however he’s additionally surprisingly type.

“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell stated. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”

Image: Prime

Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about poisonous starvation, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting one thing that they’re keen to chop any ethical corners to get there. In phrases of different connections, although, Fennell says her personal obsessions could also be displaying in the new movie.

“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”

The purpose Saltburn appears like so many basic British tales about class, Gothic manors, and darkish secrets and techniques is as a result of Fennell wished the movie to be a recognizable world, a style train the place viewers suppose they know what the guidelines are, and what’s coming subsequent.

“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell stated. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”

As far as different comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that each Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love tales. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”

It could seem a little counterintuitive to check web fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of those books and on-line obsessions as intently related.

Image: Prime

“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she stated. “If the Gothic custom is about an outsider being launched to a world which is each fascinating and scary — that’s completely what we’re doing with the web, and our relationship with the world of fame and wonder.

“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”

Referencing certainly one of the extra visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, the place Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell stated, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”

Saltburn is in theaters now.