When Oscar-winning cinematographer Linus Sandgren first sat down with director Emerald Fennell to discuss the look of her latest film, “Saltburn,” a lot of things immediately came to mind, primarily Gothic literature and silent film.
“Saltburn,” the follow-up to Fennell’s 202 debut feature “Promising Young Woman,” follows a young man (played by Barry Keoghan) who spends a holiday with a wealthy friend from school. His desperate obsession to fit in with the family leads him down dangerous and, ultimately, deadly roads.
“I asked Emerald for words to describe the film and she said ‘vampire,’” Sandgren told TheWrap. “She [also] said, ‘hair,’ ‘sweat,’ details like that. There were all kinds of words that got us into quickly thinking it’ll be interesting if we thought of it like a vampire movie, even though it’s not real vampires, but it’s in a similar vein.”
Sandgren is no stranger to movies that are dirty and emphasize the base nature of humanity. He captured the hedonistic grotesquerie of early Hollywood for Damien Chazelle in last year’s “Babylon,” greedy conmen in David O. Russell’s “American Hustle,” and America’s desire to welcome their own annihilation in “Don’t Look Up.”
Interestingly, Sandgren went back to that sense of Hollywood in its infancy for “Saltburn.”
“We thought of German Expressionism, or the ‘Nosferatu’ kind of vampire movies,” said Sandgren. “The other was the voyeuristic part of it, which felt more in the vein of Hitchcock suspense, where you would just see a close-up of an eye or you have the POVs through doorways and then the sunny, romantic days. [Those] sort of sexual tones throughout had its own vibe that intervened with all of this.”
Sandgren said these early talks with Fennell were imperative to crafting a visual language for the film, one also heavily inspired by the works of Caravaggio and other painters. “Baroque art is oftentimes depicting nasty things with beautiful light. So that felt like the soul of our film,” he said.
The cinematographer went on to discuss working within the actual house they filmed “Saltburn” in, as well as capturing Barry Keoghan’s nude dance scene on-film.
TheWrap: Why film this in 4:3 aspect ratio and what was the challenge in that?
Linus Sandgren: When we think cinema and you think grandiose, you think widescreen to see more. You see more people, you see anything that’s on the ground. That’s cinematic thinking. But the house itself had these very square rooms. So shooting [widescreen] there would have been cropping [of] a lot of the environment. You would have seen more people, but you would have seen less environment, and we wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to see more house, and the ceilings are beautiful. So why not see more squares? You see more house and fewer people.
It’s very much about Oliver, and about Oliver and one other [person] that he singles out,
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