‘Saltburn’ - Interview with Hair & Makeup Head Siân Miller
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 the Hair and Makeup Head, Siân Miller, about her work on the film.
Jillian Chilingerian: I walked away with wanting the Saltburn aesthetic, which I don't know if that's good or bad because of the early 2000s. This film brings back a lot of memories from when I was younger. First, I want to start with the early 2000s. And that period of how our makeup and hair are coming back in style. Were you surprised by that or just the timing of this movie coming out and all of these trends resurfacing?
Siân Miller: It's a happy coincidence, of course, fashion and trends are cyclical, and get reinvented, whether it's Westwood reinventing the 18th century, or it's in film. I see Saltburn very much as a period film and I approached it in the same way as I would any other kind of period film, delving into the early noughties and mid-noughties for this particular project. It's always really interesting to see how there's often a little bit of flavor of the now when you do recreate the period film, and it just happens to be that it's suddenly coming around again, a lot of my crew, where the kind of at 19 years old when this movie is set. So I was able to tap into their memory and I had kind of firsthand research as well as all the normal places that one would go for research, whether it's films or fashion, runway, music, and popular culture. I think it's great it's come around again and it's really tapped into the zeitgeist, which is wonderful. People really want to be a part of this kind of vibe. It's great.
Jillian Chilingerian: I love that you mentioned period pieces, because, we're getting a lot of 2000s time capsule movies. I think they should be treated the same as if we're getting something from the 18th century. A lot of times we forget, something in 2012 like that could be a period piece.
Siân Miller: I think it's something that our hair and makeup designers particularly struggle with in terms of perhaps with recognition for the kind of work that they do on more contemporary pieces in that because it's not so obvious because it's not bonnets and bows, it's not so obvious to the eye, what's gone on but there is as much invention and as much added hair pieces hairpieces, etc. The way that the makeup is done, it's for me, compared to one of my former films like Cyrano for example, I see it as no different it's just because we're kind of 21st century it doesn't often strike people as standing out it's different but of course the moment you delve into it and like you said yourself those were your younger days. Oh yeah, we did that because we sort of segue into new areas in fashion it's very hard to see that not too distant far past as clearly as we might see the 1920s for example so yeah, it's it's something that I think is it's sort of misrepresented in those terms because it very much there.
Jillian Chilingerian: I want to dive into the Catton family, like Venetia with the bleached hair and the smokey eye with the pale lip. What was the process of creating what they were going to look like? Did you have direction from Emerald on what she was envisioning?
Siân Miller: In my early meetings with Emerald, everybody knows Emerald's work Promising Young Woman will know that her scripts are laden with detail and she has so much whether it's the music, the fashion, the production design, the food on the plate, she's so into that so it was an incredibly collaborative process from the beginning. I started with the script and there are lots of signposts in the script to where I should go with each character. For example with Venetia, she's described as barefoot and gorgeous, but she's cripplingly self-conscious, it's becomes evident that she's probably got some kind of eating disorder, and her sexuality and her image masked all of that. I looked back at the time at various kinds of icons like Kate Moss and Georgia May Jagger, it was an era of blaringly obvious hair extensions, so we wanted that with the bleach and the root shadow. If anybody has seen Alison Oliver, before, they know her work, when she arrived for tests and fittings, she very much had the kind of similar look to which she'd had in Conversations with Friends, so I'm very proud of her character. It was a huge transformation. She let me bleach her hair, and to create the brittle ends. When we first screened I remember Margot Robbie coming along to the first screen of tests and saying, Wow, look at the brittle ends and that's exactly what we wanted. We wanted clumsy hair extensions, regrowth, and chipped nail varnish, you know, which is that shabbiness? So we wanted that about her and again, the grungy eyeliner and the spray tan. It's all in with some tattoos thrown into it.
Jillian Chilingerian: I feel like sometimes in film, you want everything so perfect. Here, every time they had a close-up, I was like, Oh my gosh, the nails. Does that ever bother you when you think it's supposed to be like this on purpose?
Siân Miller: For me fundamentally, as a hair and makeup designer, it's about creating character. In my time as a teacher, for young aspiring makeup artists, I constantly have to say this isn't about perfection. This isn't about creating this uber, slick, polished Instagram look, we create characters, and sometimes you have to do things clumsily and badly. I think contriving the uncontrived in my job is probably one of the hardest things and, letting it go back that hair, I think we've come we've arrived at a period now where everything's so overdone, and it's almost like the hair is almost like Lego hair. I've always really hated that and film I liked to see the hair, I like to see the roughness around the edges. It grounds everything, it gives it a reality. It's not editorial, we want these people to appear real. So I don't struggle with it and, funnily enough, some of my team, they'll often say to me, what about the hair and that little bit out of the way and, I'm like, I like that. So I want to see the imperfection and, I think it really lends itself to building the characters and giving them gravitas.
Jillian Chilingerian: Watching this, their house feels so lived in because sometimes you watch things and, I'm like, This feels like the first time they've stepped in. Here what you're mentioning like it, that it feels like real people.
Siân Miller: I think it's really important when one watches any drama, any film, set in any period that we're not aware of the production design values. I think we want great values, but I think the moment we start to notice them, we're detracting from the story and I think it's my job, the DP's job, the costume designer, the production designer, to help build the character to help build the story, to collaborate with the director's vision but to support that and not take it over. So I think sometimes stepping back from it and not overdoing it is really important. It's almost as much art is what you don't do as to what you do, do as it were, and as I always go back to saying it's the contriving the uncontrived I think it's really important.
Jillian Chilingerian: I think sometimes when you see affluent people, like you're kind of like, Oh, you have all this money and like that's what you chose to wear.
Siân Miller: Yes, it's a big difference between the aristocracy and the nouveau riche. It's always something that I've always been aware of growing up that there is a shabbiness, there's a casual kind of thrown-on moneyed, entitled elegance, but it doesn't necessarily it's not a brand new Bond Street handbag necessarily, it might be cashmere, but it's more theater. It might be a dinner jacket, but it's just thrown in the wardrobe along with everything else. So that was really important. With Elspeth, with her look for Rosamund Pik, she's a very beautiful woman. Rosamund is fantastic, I collaborated with her a long time ago, and it was very important to me that she had a kind of effortless elegance about her. This former socialite model who back in the 90s, alludes to having Common People written about her, and those throwaway lines are just so fantastic. She lounges around with snobbishness, just with an effortless elegance that just looks like she's just throwing it together.
Jillian Chilingerian: I love the long hair because we usually see her with a short bob.
Siân Miller: Rosamund came to me, so I think we zoomed originally, she was growing up quite a short-line bob. I thought I wanted to add hair, we decided to just give her a very simple every day one or two hairstyles. It's not a hair show. We had other hair pieces made that we could kind of confer her style and then as her own hair grew, we were then able to get it cut into that world fabulous, effortless, lovely bob for when she's matured and so on later in the film, without giving anything away. The other one I want to talk about as well is Carey Mulligan.
Jillian Chilingerian: Oh my god. Yes.
Siân Miller: Carey had a hiatus on Maestro actually. I zoomed with her and she landed there was very much like the experience I had when I was key on Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch. A lot of the actors come, and you get them the day before you shoot so I collaborated with her wig maker and her team on Maestro and managed to get that sorted. I had the wig made and tested colors for the red in the kind of inspired a little bit by Karen Elson. We tested the colors because many scenes she has are in the red dining room to make sure that the red really kind of worked in that space. It was such an exciting exciting look. The makeup was based on an actual Chanel campaign from 2007. We tested with her the day before we shot with her for three days. Emerald wanted a lot of tattoos in the film. I sat on set on night shoots hand drawing each one of those tattoos then I talked about the placement and then she was just like, you know, we're just going to mirror image them. They're just on the right arm and then the left arm and there are all sorts of those tattoos inspired by the Russian mafia. There's there's the daddy tattoo and the dagger. There is a horseshoe in there, so that's what they call an Easter egg, isn't it? So that's my LuckyChap nod.
Jillian Chilingerian: I need to watch again to find that.
Siân Miller: Then of course the tattoos on Felix and Venetia. They both have the stars from the family crest in the same position on their hands. They both have a Carpe Diem tattoo. Venetia has a tattoo in the same placement as the Carpe Diem, but it's a nod to the script and the word pi. I won't give any more away. But it was a derivative of a pi with an English kind of thing, which we then took to be the pi sign as in the 3.145, whatever it is, and so I scribbled that on the back of an envelope and I just threw that in a way and that's on the inside. For film buffs is quite interesting, that's where that arrived from. I mean, you don't really see much of it in the film. So there was lots of inspiration and lots of kinds of thought processes in this film, which were really great to develop seen or unseen. Yeah, it's great.
You can read our review of Saltburn, here.