Warning: This article contains spoilers from Saltburn.
When it came time to shoot this eye-popping Saltburn scene (below), something was bothering writer-director Emerald Fennell. Initially, the script only called for Barry Keoghan’s Oliver to finger and kiss the freshly dug grave of his beloved Felix (Jacob Elordi). But on the day of filming, Fennell changed her mind. “I spoke to Barry in the morning, and I just said, ‘I don’t know, Barry. I think that he would…unzip,’” she recalls with a devilish smirk. “And Barry just said, ‘Yup.’”
“She plants seeds, Emerald, you know what I mean?” Keoghan says of his director. “She knows that they’re going to grow, these seeds, especially when she plants them with me. But it is a testament to Emerald and having that idea and me meeting it with, to be honest, no questions. I was totally on board for it.”
Armed with Keoghan’s gung ho spirit and a rain machine, they shut down the set. Just Fennell, Keoghan, cinematographer Linus Sandgren, and script supervisor Sam Donovan were permitted to watch the star shtup dirt… Not that the shtupping was the point, says Keoghan.
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“For me, it wasn’t about fecking the grave, it was more about I don’t know what to do with this obsession; it’s making me confused and making me unhuman in a way,” the Irish actor says. “It was a total discovery for him, I think. And it was sad. It was very, very sad.”
Fennell admits that though the resulting scene is at once “shocking and darkly funny and uncomfortable,” at its heart, it “had to be a moment of profound despair — an almost relatable moment of grief over this completely forever unrequited love.” As such, the shot lingers and lingers (and lingers) on Keoghan and his, ahem, mounting despair.
Though Fennell contends that “the awful length of it is what makes it so powerful,” there was some early pearl-clutching behind the scenes. “People said, ‘Oh, we know what’s going to happen. Why do we have to watch it?’ And I said, ‘Watching it is the point! Not cutting away is the point. You have to sit in your discomfort — you can only understand it if you sit with it.’”
Plus, there’s the fact that her star knocked it out of the cemetery. “There’s no way it couldn’t be in the film. There’s no way I could see a performance of that dedication — an expression of grief and love as intense as that — and not show it,” she says. “It was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever seen.”
The scene also had a lasting impact on its star… for better or for worse. “I can’t look at graves anymore the same way. Do you know what I mean?” he says, joking, “They won’t allow me into graveyards actually. They’ll see me coming. They’ll be like, ‘Nah, nah.’ Especially if I arrive with no clothes on.”
Saltburn is in theaters now.
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