This story contains spoilers for Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn.
At an October Q&A hosted by the Writers Guild of America (attended by The A.V. Club), Oscar-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell was asked “From what part of your sick, sick mind” did Saltburn originate. “The thing is, the really sick thing is, I don’t think it’s that bad,” she said with a chuckle. The thing is, Emerald Fennell seems to think everyone’s mind is the same kind of twisted that hers is. “When it comes to character in general, I don’t think any of us are nice, not really,” she said in a viral clip from Vanity Fair. “Not anyone I know well. I don’t think I’m nice. I think we’re all completely in denial about our own characters.”
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Whether or not that’s true (and many have disagreed), this is apparently the driving philosophy behind Fennell’s screenwriting. The other driving force, apparently, is to shock her audience. “The thing that I am thrilled about is this film has really physically shaken people,” she said in an interview with IndieWire. “It’s made them feel aroused in a way that disturbs them. It’s made them feel some kind of latent violence is being drawn out [of them].”
With that in mind, it’s no wonder that “The first thing that came to me… on this film was a boy saying ‘I wasn’t in love with him,’ and then… the sight of him licking the bottom of the bathtub,” Fennell revealed at the WGA Q&A. The bathtub scene—in which Barry Keoghan’s Oliver licks semen from a drain after Jacob Elordi’s Felix has just masturbated in the tub—has become one of Saltburn’s most talked-about images. “What I’m saying with that scene is I think that scene is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” the writer-director said in an interview with People. “And I’m saying that anyone else is safe to feel that.”
She had similar feelings about the grave scene, in which Oliver strips and fucks Felix’s freshly buried grave. At the October Q&A, Fennell said the scene was inspired by a scene in Wuthering Heights “where Heathcliff tries to dig down into Cathy’s grave, and the sort of implication, subtext there is very much made text, I suppose, in this film.” Of the lengthy sequence, which “goes from funny to horrible to terrible to sort of weirdly sexy to awful again,” she said, “[In] terms of cutting away, of course everyone wants you to, you know, of course the producer and the distributor says a lot of, ‘Are you going to cut away? Can you cut away there? No, you will cut away there,’ and I said, ‘No.’ Because when I saw it, it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”
Fennell is banking on an equally twisted audience feeling the same way. “Not everyone’s going to love it. But for the people that do, the people that connect to it, it is such a deep connection. It’s such a profound feeling of being seen—that all of us felt making it, actually,” she told People.
And for those who do not get Fennell’s brand of twisted, “there are moments where I think, ‘Oh, I hope you die,’” she joked to IndieWire. “‘Oh cool, you didn’t like it? Great. I hope you fucking die … and your whole family … slowly.’” Fennell knows she has “to try not to be a pissy little bitch about it,” as she puts it, but some of her critics make her think, “‘Oh, you just profoundly didn’t understand what I was trying to do. Whatever.’”
TL;DR: We’re all mad here. But if you’re not the kind of person who’s into grave-fucking, move along, please!