Saltburn's Provocative Final Shot Took 11 Difficult Takes To Get Right [Exclusive]
This post contains spoilers for Emerald Fennell's new film "Saltburn."
In "Saltburn," Barry Keoghan plays a nerdy boarding school student named Oliver Quick who has trouble making friends at school. He eventually manages to attract the attention of Felix (Jacob Elordi), an ultra-rich and ultra-popular classmate that everyone, regardless of gender or sexuality, seems to be attracted to. Oliver and Felix slowly bond, and Felix offers to host Oliver at his sprawling estate, Saltburn, for the span of a weeks-long school break. There is a notable scene wherein Felix gives Oliver a tour of the manse, flippantly pointing out the various palatial rooms individually.
When finally at Saltburn, however, Oliver's true colors soon begin to show. He's not the shy wilting flower everyone had previously assumed, but a conniving sneak who has a plot of his own. It seems Oliver doesn't just want to be Felix's friend, but he also wants to be his lover. At the same time, Oliver seems to resent the strange, feckless disconnect the wealthy have with the rest of the world and appears to have no problems lying and manipulating Saltburn's denizens for his own insidious ends.
Without revealing too much, the final shot of "Saltburn" — in an inverse of Felix's tour — is a prolonged single take of Oliver dancing through the empty estate, bare-ass naked, celebrating his dominion over the home. The song "Murder on the Dancefloor" plays on the soundtrack. Where the previous denizens of Saltburn ended up, I will leave for Fennell to reveal.
Fennell recently sat down with /Film's own Jacob Hall to talk about her film and what was required to shoot Keoghan's prolonged naked dance. It seems it involved some pretty precise choreography and 11 full takes to get just right.
From the page to the screen
Fennell revealed that in her script, Oliver was merely to walk through the Saltburn estate in the nude, a stroll to show his comfort in the new place, now absent of its previous owners. Fennell found that a mere walk didn't represent the bleak triumph of the character. In her words, it "didn't feel like desecrating or an act of territory-taking and all of that kind of stuff." She noted that the scene should feel "post-coital" and that the audience should feel "shaken up, complicit, and thrilled." She admitted that she wanted to provoke her audience, seeing how deeply they might be able to relate to Oliver, who does some pretty monstrous things. In her own words:
"[Y]ou are always wanting to push how far people are going to extend their empathy. So it needed to feel like, 'F**k yeah.' It needed everyone at the end to be like, 'Take them, take them all down.' 'Kind Hearts and Coronets,' all of those graves, just boom, boom, boom. Just be like, 'Okay, why not? Why not?' And so it needed to be jubilant, and I thought 'Murder on the Dancefloor' was just the perfect amount of camp and self-aware versus an actually joyful and thrilling."
Robert Hamer's "Kind Hearts and Coronets" is a dark comedy from 1949, one of the best-known comedies from Ealing Studios. In it, Dennis Price plays a man who, keen on revenge, plots to murder a family of wealthy bankers that ruined his life. In a comedic twist, all eight members of the doomed family are played by Alex Guinness.
In order to recreate that vibe, Keoghan's dance was incorporated. However, it seems the dance was very difficult to light and film.
Dance!
The sequence had to be illuminated by natural-looking light coming in through open windows. It's hard to hide a mic on an actor who is fully naked, Fennell noted:
"[I]t was incredibly difficult to do because we had to light, obviously it's a oner, and we had to light every room completely from outside without seeing any of the kit because we had to set up all of the sound so we could switch to every room because of obviously the lag, without again, seeing any of the kit."
Fennell also recalled the difficulty of the choreography and how hard it was to frame up a long, moving take without running into the actor, or letting him get too far ahead.
"[T]he distance [between], obviously, the cameraman, and Barry had to be very, very specific. And Poly Bennett choreographed it, so it was very important that it felt clean and precise, but with the perfect amount of spontaneity and joy that made it feel both like a fantasy sequence and something like somebody might do in a moment of spontaneous evil glee."
It also seems that the scene was shot with as few people on set as possible, perhaps in an effort to make Keoghan more comfortable with appearing nude:
"So it just took a long time to get that, that was the eleventh take. But it's just a joy when you are all-in on something. And we all really were including Barry. It's also difficult because of course it's a closed set so nobody else can see it, it's only me and [...] the skeleton crew following him. So there's also this fascinating thing of everyone's doing their job but nobody can see what they're doing."
The sequence is indeed, in Fennell's words, "amazing."