FOR HER PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN FOLLOW-UP, DIRECTOR EMERALD FENNELL WAS INSPIRED BY THE SCORCHING DRAMAS SHE GREW UP ON. WRITING EXCLUSIVELY FOR EMPIRE, SHE EXPLAINS HOW SHE BUILT SALTBURN

WORDS EMERALD FENNELL

Elspeth (Rosamund Pike, far left) and Sir James (Richard E. Grant, far right) lead dinner

Barry Keoghan as alluring interloper Oliver

Sir James: “poignancy and madness”

“The past is another country: they do things differently there.”

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“You can put it anywhere.”

Sarah Michelle Gellar, Cruel Intentions

THE BURNING HOT SUMMER MOVIE WAS the genre that obsessed me as a teenager. Bertolucci’s hazy, devastating, erotic masterpieces Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers blazed through our school like a fever: the sole DVDs had passed through so many hands that by the end of term you could barely even get to the Good Bits for the scratches. François Ozon’s Swimming Pool gave us all chronic, lifelong crushes on Ludivine Sagnier, Jude Law’s bottom in The Talented Mr. Ripley nearly finished us off, and Cruel Intentions, our North Star, brought about the immediate loss of virginity of an entire form. Craig Armstrong’s ‘This Love’ on MiniDisc (RIP) has a lot to answer for.

I was also a pathological reader of Gothic fiction and poetry; Angela Carter’s stories, du Maurier’s Rebecca, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights: if there was sex, murder and an enormous house, I wanted to be there. And there was nothing that I loved more than that very specifically British Gothic genre: the Country House Story. Where the twin national obsessions of class and sex collide.

Like all Gothic tales, Saltburn starts with an outsider — in this case Oliver Quick. I had seen Barry Keoghan in The Killing Of A Sacred Deer and had wanted to work with him ever since. We never leave Oliver’s side, and so we needed someone as singular and compelling as Barry; someone who could bring both the vulnerability and the dark sex appeal Oliver requires.

Felix, the Golden Boy, could easily have been a cipher, but Jacob Elordi came in to audition and made him so devastatingly real. The thing I’d been looking for was someone who looked like a god, but was actually just a fairly straightforward disappointing mortal — a lot of people were tempted to lean into a more arch, Sebastian Flyte style of audition, but Jacob’s Felix felt like the sort of boy you’d do anything to snog in Freshers’ Week. Alison Oliver [as Felix’s sister Venetia] and Archie Madekwe [as his provocative American cousin Farleigh] floored us all with two of the best auditions we’d ever seen.