‘Saltburn’ - Interview with Cinematographer Linus Sandgren
Emerald Fennell took a bold swing to followup her Oscar winning film, Promising Young Woman, with Saltburn. Fennell crafted a perverted fairytale of manic infatuation and greed starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, and Alison Oliver. The gothic narrative follows two college students at Oxford as a mystery unravels one summer. Offscreen was lucky enough to speak to cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, about his work on the film.
Jillian Chilingerian: I'm so excited to talk about this film with you because I am in love with it. I've seen it twice and, I just can't get enough of it.
Linus Sandgren: Great. What did you feel like the second time?
Jillian Chilingerian: The first time I didn't know what to expect and I tried to not read reactions as they were coming out at the festival. I walked away from like wow, that was a movie with so many emotions of love, disgust, and discomfort. The second time, I went to a more public screening, and I brought some of my friends and I just sat there and watched their faces..
Linus Sandgren: Well, that's so lovely to hear, what people's reactions are. Because the first time or the second time would obviously be different. But I feel like the second time when I see it, I obviously know the film, from shooting and reading everything, but when you see it again, it's like you see new things.
Jillian Chilingerian: I definitely picked up on little things in the second viewing of Barry's character, and more into the idea of this love and lust relationship. And that's something I wanted to talk about with your work. I love the close-up scenes of the hair, sweat, and pores. It speaks to this idea of obsession and primal nature of Oliver towards Felix. I wanted to hear some of your thoughts about approaching those scenes.
Linus Sandgren: That very important for Emerald to integrate a sort of sensuality and an erotic approach to friendship. For example, Farley and Oliver in the Karaoke scene, when they're looking at each other, and we're really close to their faces. They sort of like each other, but they're also having sort of an argument and they're hating each other. But also, it's sort of erotic and I think, throughout the film, it's a mix of shots where you give the audience the sense because it's sort of a mystery. The film starts as a mystery that asks this question was he in love with him then you start a journey, and the audience doesn't know what is to come and as you explore that journey you want elements of whether it is about friendship or about the love for each other or is it everything that we do discover. It's like, love and hate and disgust and everything at the same time. A lot of the film is stylized in a way where it's sort of composed and you couldn't just do that only in the film if you want to convey sort of those more intimate erotic things. We just felt like we got to get in there and be really close. We were always in between the characters with the camera physically. When he's watching him in the bathtub, I would just be in there with the camera like really, really close to him and making sure to light up the sweating body with a spotlight, so it's like shining and you see every hair and every detail because it's also that thing where you could make it slick and erotic. But what's beautiful with Emerald's approach is that it's also hairy, which for some people is not so sexy. Maybe it can be a sense of the combination that is so human, you have you have this shot of Oliver in the grass, and it's a beautiful romantic sunset. That's a real sunset. And we shoot him in the grass and it's like a memory of the time they had together, him and Felix and Oliver lie there in the grass and, and you see a great actor who's so vulnerable in his look right into the camera, as if he's looking right into all right into Felix and while doing so, it's like a hairy armpits and sweaty man. I hope that everybody feels like that is sensible and sort of just very intimate, even though it's also kind of slightly gross for some people. It is also natural. You want the beauty but you also want the ugliness.
Jillian Chilingerian: I feel like we're used to seeing people very glossy and filtered. I love that there's a perfect balance of like the grittiness with these people who are very attractive, but what is, hiding beneath them? There are a lot of these moments lingering in the the home, specifically from Oliver's POV of being here and what are you doing in those moments when you think you're alone? I love the use of the mirror motifs. How was it to craft that? It just feels like you're watching a painting, but there's like always something that feels off.
Linus Sandgren: Every time you make a film, for me, it's very important that we establish a language because there are so many ways you can shoot a film visually. Whatever decisions you make are important and for me, it's always been about that, what I felt more and more over my career has been that cinematography should be about conveying the emotional story. That's number one. So if you're conveying that emotional story, then you have to disregard what's literally going on and how much you see, as long as you convey the emotional story, perhaps it should be a black frame and it's really emotional, or it's really like what you want the audience to feel. Because it's scary, but so that is the base of it. In this film, because it is an absurd sort of black comedy, it's sort of sensible, but it's also kind of vampiric. Early on I talked to Emerald about those things. What kind of words can you give me? That is important. There were lots of things in the discussions with her that made me feel like the family is like this aristocratic family. They're like vampires in a way. Everyone is sort of loving each other to death, but it was like a vampiric tone, that Gothic discussions came in and how to sort of with a voyeuristic approach. There was inspiration we felt came from Hitchcock that's in castle house to portray the people in a similar way to the ancestors have been portrayed in paintings. We came about the idea that perhaps you should be stylized enough, in a way that silent horror movies were like Nosferatu at the same time, like Hitchcock would sort of create his suspenseful imagery and the same time as paintings of all kinds of eras, actually, but specifically, maybe the Baroque era where they used a lot of dramatized scenes with with dramatic lighting. The scenes were kind of obscene, but it's beautiful with a hard spotlight from the sun coming in from the side, in a dark, big room with a lot of negative space in the image. It's something you can see in the museum, and you can still watch it because it's all inspiring, but it's actually gross. So as opposed to portraying that kind of thing in an ugly way, sort of in a more real way. We thought to stylize it to heighten the reality a little bit., and with all these things together, I feel like that's how, that's how the language was established of painterly compositions that were precise, in a square format, with negative space. We started looking for the shots in the scenes and blocking the scenes, we compose the shots, and oftentimes, as the whole family could sit in a composition, they're not just sitting in the room, they're sitting in a specific composition that feels like you're watching them on the wall behind them, maybe a painting of the other family, how do you still keep that emotional feeling that you're after, to begin with, so you can't lose the emotions because of that. The close-ups are where you really buy back, the sort of artifice of being in a big wide shot, which is beautiful and maybe emotional as well to an extent but especially going in then to the close-ups you sort of get that back with the audience, but it's too dramatic sides of it, it's like the wide and the tight instead of doing everything. It's an experiment you don't know but you feel like if you're confident in your storytelling then and you stick to it then you sort of earn hopefully that certain scenes that require the audience to feel a lot that they do that because you're used to now while watching the film to that kind of imagery. I love that with Emerald, she's bold. She wanted to be expressive with the film and she was really encouraging and going all the way with these things like when we went more Gothic and silhouette areas she wouldn't like shoot coverage she didn't need. We didn't have any close-ups of scenes that in the film you see as just the water or we didn't do any you know additional shots just in case or what if that doesn't work because she was very confident that was going to work and I think that has to do with when you feel like you have established a strong language then you just do it that way.
Jillian Chilingerian: There's so much confidence in this film where we have these stylized moments, but it's feels also grounded with the emotion. I also wanted to say I am a Babylon defender. I saw it 10 times, so I love seeing the back-to-back of these films about the beauty mixed with filth and humanity. love seeing that and you work back to back with such bold filmmakers.
Linus Sandgren: I love Babylon too, but it's about mixed reviews. I kind of liked that too though. It's like good that people feel something and I can feel the same. I watched a film that people love and unlike, I'll give it a one out of 10. If you're sort of offended or you feel provoked, films that are provocative, should provoke feelings. Either you're with the film and you love it or you actually get provoked to a negative point of view. It's better to do a little more expressive things.
Jillian Chilingerian: Congrats on the film
You can read our review of Saltburn, here.