Mark out 2023 as the year of the octogenarian filmmaker. Think Ridley Scott with Napoleon, Martin Scorsese with Killers Of The Flower Moon and now Michael Mann. The director of such confirmed classics as Manhunter, Heat and The Insider is back with Ferrari, a powerful portrait of automobile pioneer Enzo Ferrari. Eight years since his last film, the commercially disappointing cyber-thriller Blackhat, that number pales next to the three decades that Mann has toiled to bring Ferrari to the big screen.

“I’m looking forward to having people see it,” he says, with typical understatement when NME meets him at this summer’s Venice Film Festival. Sitting in the ballroom of the Hotel Cipriani, dressed in a pale shirt and slacks, the 80-year-old filmmaker is still as fiery as ever. “A fascination with cars?” he grunts when his passion for automobiles in movies is raised. “That doesn’t mean you make a movie about it. I have a fascination with motorcycles too. But there’s no motorcycle movie.”

Nevertheless, he can still remember the day, back in 1967, when he was living in the UK, studying at the London Film School. Emerging from an underground station one day, a sleek Ferrari 275 GTB four-cam rolled past him. He was only 24, still a dozen years away from making his first movie, the prison yard drama The Jericho Mile, which came after a spell working in advertising. But he was immediately smitten with the beauty and elegance of the Italian sports car.

In the same year, he went to Brands Hatch to make a student film with Mike Hailwood, a world champion motorcycle racer. Maybe there is “no motorcycle movie”, but Mann is a born petrolhead. He’s raced too, at an amateur level, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “It’s not so gentlemanly,” he grins, calling it “risky amateur racing”. Every time he got behind the wheel again, he was “interrupted” by the lure of filmmaking. “You go make a movie. And then you forget everything you knew and you have to start over at the bottom.”

Mann has been involved in the Ferrari project since the early 1990s, when Brock Yates published Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, the true-life account that would become the basis of the script. As a director, Mann helped shape the late ’80s, culturally at any rate, with his pastel-hued TV cop show Miami Vice, following on from his acclaimed, era-defining, Tangerine Dream-scored films Thief and Manhunter, the first ever movie to bring Thomas Harris’ serial killer Hannibal Lecter to screens. Ferrari, however, would send him back to the ’50s.

The film takes place in 1957 over three crucial months in the life of Ferrari (played by Adam Driver), as his automobile business is heading out of business, with drivers even dying on the track. Meanwhile his personal life is about to implode. A year earlier, his 24-year-old son Dino died of muscular dystrophy. His marriage to Laura (Penélope Cruz), his company’s chief financial officer, is on the rocks. And hidden away, he has a son with his mistress, Lina (Shailene Woodley), his true love.

“Enzo Ferrari made for a very human character”

What was it about Ferrari that so intrigued Mann? “I don’t want to say duality, because there’s more than two sides to him, but it’s the complexity,” muses the director. “There’s so many active components to who he is and his personality, which bare no relation to other parts of him that made for a very human character – who happens to be in a three-month period that’s critical. And that’s where the drama comes in. But, I mean, some of his thinking has the precision of an engineer. It’s there in his penmanship.”

Mann read through his diaries and poured over the ledgers Ferrari used to keep. “Everything is so precise and rational,” he says. But then he speaks of the character’s cantankerousness and his unchecked libido and his penchant for the dramatic, as demonstrated by the title of his autobiography, My Terrible Joy. “Which is typically Enzo,” says Mann. “He can’t just say ‘I’m a happy guy, I’m filled with joy.’ It’s got to be dramatic, it’s very operatic – this is terrible!”

For Driver, the acclaimed American actor who has already worked with those other 80-something legends Scorsese (on Silence) and Scott (House Of Gucci, The Last Duel), was a huge Mann fan going into the project. “His films, they just get, for me, more and more rich, the more I understand filmmaking. And the time that they were made in, it just seems like they’re rare.” Driver did his part, from adopting Ferrari’s slicked-back grey hair look to working on an accent suitable for Italy’s Modena region. He even test-drove contemporary Ferraris to prepare and experience the rush of the track.

“You just accept the character when you see the film, but what it took Adam to build himself into – what we did together, but, primarily, what he did – is extraordinary,” says Mann. “Adam is a fantastic athlete, but the awkwardness… when you’re heavy like that, you breathe differently, you move differently, you pick something up differently. There is a pointedness to his gestures. So every aspect of it. Adam did three-and-a-half hours every morning, to be in preparation for the character.”

Naturally, the biggest thrill was watching Mann work. “He’s so prepared, years in advance, and in this [case] 30 years in advance, off and on. There isn’t a question that you’re going to ask him that he won’t know a historical reference. But at the same time as technically proficient as he is with sound and where you put the camera and colour… he’s very much about the abstract. It’s not something I always thought about when I watched his movies. I would rewatch Heat when I was older and you see that he’s someone who is centred around character and performance.”

With Ferrari entering his team into the Mille Miglia, a deadly thousand-mile endurance race across Italy, in the hope that it’ll save his business, the film saw Mann go the extra mile to shoot the race scenes. The Ferraris and Maseratis were built especially for the production, capable of speeds of around 140mph. “I felt like I had to drive it fast,” says Driver, “just to kind get the sense of ‘Oh, if we flip it, that’s it.’ So that permeated everything, how we played it.” Despite recreating the vehicles, using accurate 3D scans, Mann did borrow one car, a Maserati. “That’s Nick Mason’s car – the Pink Floyd drummer,” he reveals. “So that one’s not a replica, that’s historical.” Such is its pedigree, Mason’s Maserati 250F has even been driven by racing legend Stirling Moss.

“We borrowed a car from Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason”

So through all the crashes and the heartache, did Mann come to a conclusion about Ferrari? Was he – like his peers – obsessed with racing at all costs? “It’s less than obsession. Obsession sounds irrational,” he replies. “I think the best understanding I got from that came from Jean Behra, who drives the Maserati in the beginning [of the film, played by Derek Hill]. And he wrote a paragraph about how our addiction to the ecstasy is so foolish and insane. But we are. We have this addiction. We make life miserable for our wives and our children. It takes our lives.”

Mann, who has been married to wife Summer since 1974 and has four children, including director Ami Canaan Mann, must surely appreciate this. He’s known for his exacting behaviour on set, his precision and his control freakery. Even today, as he does with every interview, he puts a digital recorder on the table, capturing every word he says to ensure there are no disputes or inaccuracies down the line. In fact, you could almost feel as if Mann is a character from one of his own movies: committed to their line of work above all else.

“I don’t think I’ve had a leading character who’s not aware of life, his own life and what’s around him,” he says. “I’ve never done a film where the lead character is just kind of stumbling through and things happen, whether it’s [boxer Muhammad] Ali, or Hawkeye in Last Of The Mohicans, or Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna in Heat or Lowell Bergman [from The Insider]. They know what’s happening in their life. They’re conscious of it. They’re know the struggle that they’re in and they question themselves. They’re aware of their condition, their human condition.”

Talking of Heat, Mann is aiming to adapt Heat 2, the best-selling novel he co-wrote with Meg Gardiner and published last year that acts as both prequel and sequel to his 1995 crime epic. So will it definitely happen? “Heat’s a huge brand,” he nods. “And there’s some studies that I’ve done within the industry… people are kind of getting tired of superhero movies and are becoming more interested in pictures like Heat, if you like. But it’s been a huge brand in Warner Brothers home video for the last 20 years in terms of rentals. So we found that out when I wrote Heat 2, the novel… it was the first week out, it was instantly a number one New York Times bestseller.”

Driver confirms that he’s already spoken to Mann about potentially playing the young McCauley, the character played by Robert De Niro in the original. “I would do it in a second,” the actor says. For Mann, it represents another high-stakes environment to plunge into, with his characters pushed to extremes. Fans wouldn’t want it any other way. “I’m really not interested in a guy who’s ambition in life is to kick back in a Bronco lounger and watch daytime TV,” he laughs. “I mean who would be?”

‘Ferrari’ is in UK cinemas from December 26 and comes to Sky Cinema in 2024

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As fans of Watchmen and Man Of Steel will know, Zack Snyder doesn’t make small movies. Critics can be sniffy, but the director’s bold, bombastic style has earned him a famously loyal following. After Joss Whedon was drafted in to rework Snyder’s 2017 superhero movie Justice League, fans launched a vociferous #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign that proved controversial but successful. In 2021, Zack Snyder’s Justice League was released with a much darker tone, lashings of violence and a jumbo four-hour runtime.

Snyder is known for turning iconic IP into ultra-modern blockbusters, but now he’s building a movie universe of his own. Rebel Moon started life as a rejected pitch for a Star Wars movie and retains a similar epic scope to George Lucas’s space opera. Premiering this month on Netflix, the first film follows renegade Kora (Sofia Boutella) as she assembles a motley crew of rebels to resist the Motherworld, a corrupt multi-planet dictatorship that she escaped from. It’s splashy, spectacular and co-stars Anthony Hopkins as the voice of a melancholy robot called Jimmy. Here, Snyder discusses his plans for Rebel Moon including – you’ve guessed it – director’s cuts of the two movies he already has in the can.

What made you think of Anthony Hopkins for the voice of Jimmy?

“I mean, I was like, ‘Who can I get to be Jimmy? Patrick Stewart? Gabriel Byrne? Something like that?’ And then they were like, ‘What about Hopkins?’ I was like, ‘What about him?’ Like, that’s not a cool thing to say: What about Hopkins? Yes, of course Hopkins! And so we went and asked him and he was like, ‘Sure. Sounds cool.’ It was as simple as that.”

It feels perfect because his voice has such a melancholy quality to it…

“It absolutely does. That’s what I love about him: he can be sort of noble and weary at the same time. And that’s what Jimmy is: he tries to keep his weird dignity. He’s kind of the whipping boy, even though [in the past] he was this fucking crazy war machine. Given the chance, he could murder everybody, but he’s just so broken by the king’s death that he just doesn’t care anymore.”

Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver is coming in April. Do you have the franchise’s future mapped out beyond that?

“Yeah. If we were to go forward, there’s another group of movies we could continue [the story] with. I think when you see movie two, you will understand at the end where it could go. And then there’s the two director’s cuts that are coming, too.”

How will the R-rated director’s cut of Rebel Moon be different from the ‘original’ version?

“Well, the PG-13 [cut] is really a very commercial version of the movie, which is in essence what sci-fi has to be [now] because of its cost. That is to say, if it’s too dark, edgy, violent and sexual, the audience goes like that [shrinks]. Netflix were the ones that came up with the idea for the director’s cut. And I was like, ‘Absolutely perfect!’ It gives me the ability to work on the PG-13 version not in opposition to the studio, but in coordination with them, because I know I always have the director’s cut [too]. So as I make cuts and adjust this movie down so that it’s PG-13 and two hours, I don’t feel like I’m being pushed into it. Whereas my relationship with the studios in the past has always been that the version that’s released theatrically – for me, anyway – is always a little bit of a fight. Because I don’t want to do everything that they want me to do.”

That must be liberating for you as a filmmaker?

“It’s the best thing ever. I like that I’ve been able to go kind of wide-eyed into this process. I’ve always railed against the studio when it comes to this PG-13 model that I’ve been in for a while. And so being able to not have those notes or [have to] cut the movie in response to them, it feels like more of a partnership. And so I’m excited and willing to be the architect of the shorter version of the movie.”

Does that feel vindicating too? Because Netflix clearly appreciate what you can do with a director’s cut…

“Oh, 100 per cent. It feels like they 100 per cent get the concept of what the director’s cut is to me, and that’s a really refreshing place to be.”

Ridley Scott has said his director’s cut of Napoleon is currently running at four hours and 10 minutes, which is a shade longer than Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Does that also feel vindicating?

“Well, Ridley has always been known for his director’s cuts as well. I mean, he has a long history of director’s cuts, so it’s cool. I’m really a huge Ridley Scott fan so I’ll be excited to see that.”

You’re known for making genre movies, but is there a musician you’d particularly like to make a biopic of?

“Well, they did the Johnny Cash movie [Walk The Line] and that was great – that would have been my first choice. I’m a big Nick Cave fan, but there are great movies with Nick Cave, though there’s probably more to be done there. And I’ve always loved Mick Jagger. Oh, and Bob Dylan of course. You know, all these guys have already got a legacy that’s cemented, but I’m always interested in the why of it.”

A Mick Jagger biopic could be fascinating, because he’s such an iconic figure, but we don’t necessarily know what makes him tick…

“Yeah. I mean, if he was sitting here, what would he be like? I want to take my kids to see The Rolling Stones in concert. My youngest kids are 10 and 11, so there’s a very good chance they’ll be alive in 2060 or whatever [year] is the 100th anniversary of their first hit. And then they’d be able to say, ‘I saw those guys in concert’, which would be crazy. If you think about it, it’s kind of unheard of for a band to be performing at the age they are. And it’s still Mick – his voice is iconic.”

‘Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire’ will be released on Netflix on December 22

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Having starred in four seasons of global sensation Sex Education, Asa Butterfield has done more than most 26-year-olds on camera. He’s lost his fictional virginity, starred in his own personal masturbation montage, and had both his real and his on-screen mother see him fake a climax. But until seasonal comedy caper Your Christmas Or Mine 2 he had never done anything risky with a goat.

That all changed with Claus. Claus was the black mountain goat whom Butterfield’s character James has to attempt to wrestle back through an unlocked gate after his phone plops down a toilet. Although the animal was sometimes clearly a toy held by a crew member behind the camera (“Ssh,” says Butterfield), the moments where the actor was grabbing the goat by the horns were very real indeed. “Claus was funny,” says Butterfield, sitting in a Hackney café. “He was a little bit of a diva? He had his moments and when he didn’t want to work he made it known.”

The cast and crew were working on the side of a snowy mountain in Innsbruck, Austria. They would have preferred a trio of identical goats so that the Clauses could be interchangeable in the event of any goat tantrums. “We were a little low on goat options in Austria,” says Butterfield. One Claus had to do – and he didn’t even have any film experience. “He’s not a stage actor. He’s not trained. He didn’t go to drama school.”

Then again, neither did Butterfield. This afternoon, blue-eyed and wearing a hoodie and a silver earring, he is unshaven. A young man. But it was as a young boy that he found fame, acting as one of the leads in The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas at the age of 11. Although he had been to a drama club in London, the city where he was born and still lives, he circumvented drama school by continuing to put big films on his CV when his friends were still learning how to format theirs. Nanny McPhee And The Big Bang at 12. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo at 14.

“After Sex Education, life became a lot more intense”

Was Butterfield – no relation to comedy character Brian, in case you were wondering – conscious of wanting to become an actor when he was just a child? “For the first few years I was acting I didn’t think I was gonna carry on doing it,” he says. “I didn’t really know what acting was.” He loved being on camera and managed to juggle it with schoolwork, always getting good marks thanks in part to on-set tutors. But he didn’t want it to become his life. Even after the success of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas he told his mum he might not carry on. He wanted to dig up dinosaurs.

It wasn’t really until Hugo in 2011 that Butterfield fell in love with acting and filmmaking. He continued to land big films – Ender’s Game, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, Journey’s End – but nothing has compared with the monster that is Sex Education, which landed on Netflix in 2019. As Otis Milburn, he helped a show about a student and his sex therapist mother become a global phenomenon, broaching or advancing topics like consent, slut-shaming, bisexuality and pansexuality. It opened up the world like a treasure chest for Butterfield and made him leading man material.

“It really became a lot more intense,” says Butterfield of this newfound recognition. He still takes the bus and the train – if he couldn’t he would reconsider what he was doing – but he can’t walk around as he used to. The fourth season of Sex Education was, famously, advertised with the aid of enormous billboards featuring the characters’ orgasm faces. This loss of privacy can be uncomfortable for actors and for Butterfield can occasionally bring his mood down. Sometimes people might want to talk to him when he’s not in the right frame of mind. “It’s hard to communicate that without coming across as privileged.”

But the trade-off, the Faustian pact with the devil of fame, is “absolutely worth it”, he insists. He is aware of how extraordinarily lucky he is. And it sounds as though 15 years on movie sets has made him a gift to work with. “‘Ordinary’ isn’t the right word for it because there’s nothing ordinary about his talent when you see him on screen,” says Tom Parry, who wrote both Your Christmas Or Mine films. “But he just puts himself alongside everybody else. He is the most casual and disarmingly low-status star you’ll ever meet.”

What does Butterfield think makes him a good screen actor? “I think it’s confidence,” he says thoughtfully, not so modest that he dismisses the question. “I feel very confident on set and I feel like I’ve got good instincts as to what’s working and what isn’t, and I trust my instincts. I think I’ve got a good ear for comedy.” Parry agrees. “In the rehearsals and on set, anything that doesn’t sound real or plausible or is slightly awkward, Asa is very good at picking that out. Good acting is like a duck paddling, isn’t it – you don’t see it. Asa is exactly that: effortless.”

In the first Your Christmas Or Mine the neat conceit was that boyfriend and girlfriend James and Hayley (Cora Kirk) each decides to surprise the other by turning up at their family home for Christmas. In Your Christmas or Mine 2, the two families – James’ upper-class father and his new American girlfriend with Cora’s Macclesfield relatives – spend all of Christmas together this time, now on the neutral territory of an Austrian ski break. James’ chivalry causes a mix-up with the accommodation and there follows a series of comic misunderstandings and crossed wires. Parry and Butterfield had a sickeningly good time staying in a high-end ski lodge for three weeks. “You’d spend your off days in the sauna,” says Butterfield, “and it would be a sauna where you could look out across this valley in the mountains.” Default nude? “Default is nude. When we got there the hotel we were staying in became a non-nude spa. Probably some HR thing. However, if you went to any of the Austrian spas down in the village, oh yeah – it’s a free-for-all.” Have his bodily inhibitions been obliterated thanks to Sex Education? “Not completely,” he says. “I still do get embarrassed, believe it or not.”

As for his own Christmases, they tend to be big, raucous, family affairs, not dissimilar to the two films. You can also imagine that Butterfield plays a comparable role: both on-screen and off he is considered, fairly serious, not keen to put on a show. He has siblings and half-siblings and this Christmas will be spending the time in Yorkshire, where his mum’s family are from (his parents separated when he was young). “We don’t get to see too much of each other so it’s really nice to have a few days just totally embracing it.”

As for Christmas presents, he’s not sure. He doesn’t know what to ask for. He just got himself plates and a new pot and pan set. He’s just moved house (from Hackney to… Hackney), so we offer to buy him a sofa for his new place. “That would be a bold present,” he says. “We’ll chat later on.” If he’s honest, he says, his favourite part of Christmas is working out what to get everyone else.

“When you do a part for that long it comes so naturally that you almost don’t have to work as hard”

Butterfield is at an interesting point in his career. He feels as though he is at the start of a new chapter. “I don’t know where the next few years will take me now that Sex Ed has gone,” he says, sounding as though he genuinely hasn’t given it much thought. He tactfully avoids a vague probe about superhero films. “I’ve been doing a lot of comedy the last few years and I wanna do something more dramatic again.” He is also at the stage, he admits, where he is keen and able to be more selective about the work he does. He could take a break from the industry or go into producing, writing or directing. He is acting as producer on a TV comedy with a friend but asks that the premise remain private.

Sex Education has been wonderful, he says, but, after four seasons, he needs to go in a different direction. “I feel very comfortable in front of a camera and on set,” he says. “Almost too comfortable. I don’t feel like I need to be kept on my toes so much any more. I love the show, I love the part, but when you do that part for that long it comes so naturally that you almost don’t have to work as hard because everything is there on the tip of your tongue. Saying you don’t have to work as hard isn’t the right way of putting it but you don’t have to fight through that to discover what might be on the other side.”

One of the things he is contemplating is a turn on the stage. It didn’t appeal to him for a long time because he was terrified. He clearly still is. He struggles with the concept of trying to inject variety into the same lines night after night. “But I am now toying with the idea and I’ve spoken with a couple of writers and gone up for a couple of theatre things in the past six months.”

After so long baring so much of himself on-screen for Sex Education, you might imagine that Butterfield would like to hide away. But he is ready for a new challenge, in whatever form that may take. “It would be good for me to push myself outside of my comfort zone.”

‘Your Christmas Or Mine 2’ is streaming now of Prime Video

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Despite its record-breaking reported budget of $465 million (£399 million), producers on the first season of fantasy TV series The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power wanted to axe some scenes because they were too expensive, claimed director J. A. Bayona in an interview with NME.

• Read more: The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power review: epic fantasy franchise returns to rule them all

Among the proposed cuts was a key moment in the first episode when elf Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), who is journeying across the sea to her people’s ancestral homeland of Valinor from where she may not return. As the Elvish fleet approaches Valinor, golden light breaks through the clouds and the sky opens up to admit them – but Galadriel changes her mind and dives off the side of the ship into the water below. Then she begins to swim back to the mainland of Middle-Earth.

This scene contained some of the show’s most impressive visual effects, but Bayona, who directed the first two episodes of The Rings Of Power season one, said producers “tried to take it out” from the schedule because they “didn’t have the money.”

Luckily, Bayona was able to persuade them otherwise. “It wasn’t that expensive,” he said. “I actually convinced them that we were going to be able to shoot that scene in the budget.”

The Spanish filmmaker managed to rescue another scene in episode two, involving giant “sea creatures” that try and attack Galadriel as she shelters on a raft from a violent storm. “I did a lot of stuff that the producers didn’t believe we were going to be able to put in those episodes,” he said, “and we did it on budget and on schedule.”

He added: “In general, I had a great experience in doing that [show]. It was a massive challenge. We had only nine months to do two hours of Lord Of The Rings fiction, you know. It had to match the expectations of the fans and the movies, but we only had nine months. You always want to give more than what you have. It’s a lot from a lot of people.”

Bayona is currently promoting his new Netflix survival thriller Society Of The Snow, which tells the real-life story of a Uruguayan rugby team who crash-landed in the Andes on their way to a tournament in 1972. The few passengers who weren’t killed found themselves stranded on a glacier in extreme conditions with nothing to eat or drink, at one point resorting to cannibalism.

Based on Pablo Vierci’s 2009 book of the same name, Society Of The Snow is a tale of “light and shadow”, said Bayona. This complexity is part of the reason he decided to make it in Spanish, and not in the American system – before bringing it to Netflix to distribute.

“It’s totally the opposite of the kind of stories I’ve seen in Hollywood about survival,” he said. “It’s complex… In Hollywood films, the person who fights the hardest and keeps going [always wins]. In Society Of The Snow, Numa [a survivor played by Enzo Vogrincic] wants to be the hero, but the mountain forces him to learn a different way of being. He needs to learn how to cry. He needs to learn how to be taken care of by the others, you know, which is a very feminine way of behaving. It’s totally the opposite of this masculine way of behaviour that you find in the Hollywood movies.”

The film has today (December 11) been nominated for a Golden Globe award in the Best Film – Non-English Language category. In recent years, thanks to the Oscars success of movies like South Korea’s Parasite and Germany’s All Quiet On The Western Front, debate has intensified around the usefulness of separating films on the basis of language.

“I was talking to one of the heads of The Academy,” said Bayona, “and she told me that 25 per cent of the vote is now foreign, as in, the membership. So that’s changing the nominations and the awards.”

The Academy has been on an inclusion drive in recent years, partly as a response to controversy on social media and the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag that criticised a lack of diversity among nominees. In 2022, the body hit its target of doubling women members and members of colour.

“It took me 10 years to find the financing for this film because it’s in Spanish,” Bayona added. “If it wasn’t in Spanish I would have done this film 10 years ago… So hopefully there will be a moment when that will not be necessary.”

‘Society Of The Snow’ is in select cinemas from December 22 and on Netflix from January 4

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Sophie Wilde is easily frightened. She credits this to her “overactive imagination”, the kind that makes you spend sleepless nights squinting at the dark corners of your bedroom, conjuring up monsters and ghosts in your mind. When she was 11, a move to a new home in Sydney paired with an ill-advised trip to see Paranormal Activity in the cinema sent her imagination into overdrive. “It got to the point where my mum and auntie pretended to bring an exorcist in,” she tells NME in a cosy cafe at the height of central London’s lunch rush. “I’m not even joking, real story. I would put salt rings around my door because I read that warded off demons.”

With a laugh she adds: “Horror movies are not for me.”

It comes as a sort of ironic surprise, then, that the Australian actress’ big breakout arrived this July with Talk To Me, the buzziest horror movie of the year. On set in Adelaide, the cast and crew “knew it was sick”, the 25-year-old says, but nothing could’ve prepared them for the film’s dizzying success: among other achievements, Talk To Me dominated the summer movie season, spawned a TikTok viral track, and became A24’s second highest grossing film behind Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Wilde plays Mia, a grief-stricken teenager who gets hooked on the power of an embalmed hand that when grasped, can allow its user to communicate with the dead. While most horror films fail to explain why anyone would meddle with the afterlife, Talk To Me is as exciting as it is horrifying, and it’s Wilde’s full-bodied performance that captures the ecstasy of possession. One moment she’s rigor mortis-stiff, her eyes wide and black. The next she waves it off with a breathless laugh, drunk on spirits.

That careful balance is felt most acutely in a thrilling montage set to a bass-heavy rendition of Édith Piaf’s ‘La foule’. As the camera circles, Mia and her friends take turns with the hand, each possessed by eccentric personalities as they cackle, cry and growl. The filming process was similarly frenetic. “We actually only had 20 or 30 minutes to shoot that whole montage when we were meant to have an hour,” Wilde remembers. “It was just absolute fucking pandemonium. Us improvising, doing all of this random shit to get as much content.” But that pressure cooker environment was freeing as a kind of quickfire acting exercise. “When you don’t have time to be in your head and just be in your body and present in the moment,” she explains. “That can produce some of the most incredible work.”

“It’s been the most surreal year of my life”

Over lunch, Wilde is giggly and giddy, with a penchant for sprinkling the occasional “slay” into her sentences. She calls this period of time “the most surreal year of my life”, and it began in the snowy mountains of Utah, where Talk To Me premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was the first time she ever saw herself projected across a couple dozen feet, and Wilde spent the minutes before the screening in a bathroom stall, crying on the phone to her friends and knowing that Midsommar director Ari Aster was in the audience. A large part of this year has been spent sharing rooms with big names and cementing herself as our incumbent scream queen. “To have people I idolise like me… what the hell?” she says in disbelief. “Someone came up to me and they were like, ‘Can I get a selfie with you?’ And I was like, ‘Can I get a selfie with you?’”

“I’m definitely having certain conversations that are wildly different to where I was a year ago,” Wilde adds. “I feel like maybe I still haven’t really processed that that’s actually happening.”

Once the dust settled on Talk To Me, Wilde was back on screens with Everything Now, a school drama positioned as a successor to Netflix’s homegrown British hits (think Sex Education or Heartstopper), but with a more vulnerable edge reminiscent of early 2010s coming-of-ager My Mad Fat Diary. Wilde stars as another Mia, who plays social catch-up to her friends after taking time out from school to recover from an eating disorder. The audition for Everything Now happened in the middle of shooting Talk To Me last spring, and the crossover between the two runs even deeper. Both stories find levity in dark places, encouraging Wilde to turn inward in ways she hadn’t before. For Talk To Me, she “wanted to pick traits of mine and then exacerbate them to the point of creating a character”, particularly her “silly side.” As for the Mia of Everything Now, Wilde looked to the past. “We’re very different but she felt like my younger self,” she says. “She felt like the version of me when I was in my early twenties, and I did not know myself and I did not like myself and I was figuring out a lot of shit.”

If starring in a British drama has left a mark in other ways, it may be in her love for London. A month before we meet, she came to town and decided to just, well, stay – living out of a suitcase filled with clothes not meant for the October cold. When we meet, Halloween has just passed, and Wilde excitedly recounts her night spent gatecrashing parties and raves, and scoping out members clubs that turned her and her friends away at the door. “I feel like it’s my spiritual home,” she tells me, confessing that she hopes to move here properly next year. “I love Sydney but sometimes I feel…” she takes a beat to search for the right word. “Understimulated.”

Wilde grew up in suburban Sydney, and if her hometown lacked the excitement she’s now found in London, she discovered fulfilment in unexpected places. Her tastes were refined from a young age thanks to her grandparents. “They’re not, like, patrons of the arts,” she downplays, but evenings were often spent wide-eyed at operas, plays, ballets and orchestra recitals. Her very first play was My Fair Lady, and when everyone got up to leave at the interval, a young Wilde refused to budge from her seat. “I don’t want to miss anything!” she pleaded.

“I had intense impostor syndrome and anxiety”

It was a VHS boxset of Audrey Hepburn (who starred in the 1964 movie version of My Fair Lady) movies that convinced her to pursue acting. “That final scene [in Roman Holiday] when she’s looking at Gregory Peck…” Wilde says. “Just the emotions that elicited in me. I want to be able to make people feel that way.”

Wilde has been acting since she was five years old. At her performing arts high school, she treasured being in an environment that “appreciated people’s individuality”, even as she’d nip to the park with friends to chug goon sacks (translation: boxed wine). Drama school was a “whole other kettle of fish”, which she didn’t particularly enjoy. She got her bachelor’s degree from the National Institute Of Dramatic Art, the same school she played pirates at when she was a toddler. Of course, those classes were very different at the higher education level. “It felt slightly archaic in the sense that they very much still rely on breaking you down to build you back up,” she says. “And I think that you can get the same or even better results from just nurturing people. You don’t need to psychoanalyse a bunch of 18-year-olds who don’t know anything about themselves.”

Transitioning to screen acting proved difficult, even as she picked up leading parts in Australian and British series. In class, Wilde was sheltered in a safe space where she could fail without consequences, learn from her mistakes. But now the stakes were immediately tangible. “I had the most intense impostor syndrome and anxiety,” she admits. “I still do, it’s not like that’s gone but I can manage it better. I’d call up my parents all the time, bawling my eyes out.” Talk To Me was different though, the first time she felt truly comfortable on a film set. As if catapulted right back to performing arts school, she could dance around a camera and be outrageous without worrying about messing up.

Even as horror films like Talk To Me garner acclaim, they continue to be ignored in the awards conversation. While performances from the likes of Toni Collette (Hereditary) and Keke Palmer (Nope) have been rightly hailed as some of the best of their respective years, they fail to pick up any awards. Now in 2023, it seems like Wilde’s turn is being teed up for the same fate – that is, unless voters can get with the times.

“It’s really interesting that horror doesn’t get recognised in the same way as other films,” Wilde says. “I think that with horror, you often get such wide-ranging performances from artists who have to go to so many extremes. People just don’t take horror seriously or maybe because it’s just a commercially mainstream genre that they think it doesn’t have the gravity of a traditional drama. But it requires the same level of integrity and craft as any other performance. Like Mia Goth in Pearl: snubbed!”

Anything can happen now. Wilde can sense it, even if she hasn’t fully absorbed what Talk To Me’s success means for her future. “I feel like maybe now I’m at a nice point in my career where I can actually take charge,” she says.

Next she’ll be on set in New York for Babygirl, an erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman, Antonio Banderas and Scrapper‘s Harris Dickinson. It’s her first time working in the States, which she confesses she finds “terrifying”. Her dream list of filmmakers Includes Aftersun’s Charlotte Wells, as well as The Babadook director Jennifer Kent and horror auteur Robert Eggers, hinting that she’s more than happy to return to spooky territory. That also includes the announced Talk To Me sequel, which Wilde is certain can squeeze her in despite Mia’s unfortunate end.

“I want to be in it,” Wilde says. I’m gonna get FOMO. I’m like, ‘Guys, can I be the assistant director? Can I be the boom operator?’ I just want to be there!” She has another proposition: “When I’m 40, bring me back for Talk To Me 10. I’m playing the long game.” Perhaps horror movies are for her after all.

The post Sophie Wilde on her scary big year: “‘Talk To Me’ was pandemonium” appeared first on NME.

This interview first appeared in a December 2017 issue of NME magazine

The first artist I remember hearing

Bob Marley

“I remember my aunt always played Bob Marley. We’re West Indian and it was the one aspect of my culture that I was still connected to, because everyone had been so Americanised. I remember being around my aunt’s house and hearing a lot of Bob Marley and then being around my uncle’s house and hearing Led Zeppelin and Ozzy Osbourne.”

The first gig I went to

The Jacksons, 1984

“It was the Victory Tour. I don’t remember a lot – but I had a poster on my wall from it! The Victory Tour, Teena Marie and Prince were my first three concerts.”

The first album I bought

Prince – ‘1999’

“My mother had all his other albums and I was always fascinated with him. I used to love ‘Little Red Corvette’. Prince was the was the first artist I got obnoxiously obsessed with.”

The song that makes me want to dance

Jaden Smith – ‘Icon’

“There’s not a lot of music that moves me in that way, but I’ve listened to that song and watched that video over and over again. It doesn’t have to do with the fact that he’s my child, even though I’m a proud mama for sure!”

The song I can’t get out of my head

Willow Smith – ‘And Contentment’

“Funny enough! I told her the other day, ‘Between you and your brother, I’m sick of having these songs in my head!’ It’s my joy to watch them budding in all their creative endeavours – music, fashion, acting, storytelling. They both have so much going on. It’s the thing I always wanted – I wanted to have a creative family, and that’s what I’ve got.”

The artists that made me want to perform

Prince/Axl Rose

“Somewhere in between Prince and Axl Rose. That combination of rock ’n’ roll and R&B flavour I’ve always loved. I’ve incorporated it into my style in [my band] Wicked Wisdom – it’s a heavier sound with R&B melodies.”

The song that reminds me of home

MC Shan – ‘The Bridge’

“It’s a really old-school song and it reminds me of my teen years, running the streets of Baltimore.”

The post Soundtrack Of My Life: Jada Pinkett Smith appeared first on NME.

Vanessa Kirby was recently watching a cut of her new film, Napoleon, with her best friend. As kids, they would star in school assembly plays together. But this – a film with hundreds of extras – was something else. “She turned to me at the beginning,” says Kirby, her voice dropping to a whisper, “and said, ‘What would your 16-year-old self say, right now?’” It’s a good question: for the past eight years, Kirby’s career has accelerated into overdrive ever since she was cast as Princess Margaret in the early seasons of The Crown.

Winning a BAFTA for her regal-but-real turn as the Queen’s sis, she’s since gone from blockbusters like the Mission: Impossible franchise, playing the alluring arms dealer, White Widow, to indie gems like Pieces Of A Woman, which won her an Oscar nomination for her searing portrayal of a grieving mother facing unfathomable loss. Now she’s Joséphine to Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon Bonaparte in Ridley Scott’s epic – and we do mean epic – historical humdinger.

So what would the teenage Kirby have said if she’d known where her destiny lay? “I don’t think she would have believed it, not for one second,” says the actress, when we meet in a hotel suite at London’s Corinthia shortly after the SAG-AFTRA strike has ended. “I think if that little girl has thought about the fact that I got to do it professionally, [she would have been amazed].” She allows herself a moment of reflection. “God, I’m just so grateful.”

All morning, she’s been doing interviews with Phoenix, and time has run on a little. “I’m sorry you had to wait,” she says, initially, before enquiring if we’ve managed to get some lunch. “I was really worried about that.” That’s the first thing you notice about Kirby, aside from the black nail polish, is just how unfailingly polite she is. Raised in Wimbledon, the daughter of a retired surgeon and former writer on Country Living magazine, her ascent through the Hollywood ranks hasn’t dented her British reserve.

Despite all her talents, Kirby speaks like someone bewildered by her good fortune. “I couldn’t believe it, really, and it came up nowhere,” she says, when we ask about winning her role in Napoleon. “My agent called and said, ‘Oh, Ridley Scott’s gonna give you a call about something.’ And so I answered and straightaway he said, ‘You know, I’m doing this film with Joaquin about Napoleon, and Joséphine, I don’t know if you know her, but would you like to play her?’ And instantly, I said, ‘Absolutely, I would love to.’”

“My agent said, ‘Oh, Ridley Scott’s gonna give you a call…'”

Of course, Kirby had heard of Joséphine, the first wife of Napoleon until their marriage was annulled in 1810, and had picked up details “over the years” in school and elsewhere. “So I knew the feeling I had when I heard her name. And it’s funny that then you get to go so deep into this character and learn so much about this real person, her extraordinary life. My first instinct about her proved to be right, I think because… my association with her name. It just deepened as I then did all the research and learnt as much as I could about her.”

That research consisted of a wealth of reading, undertaken without any preconceptions. “I wasn’t sure I was ready for her to tell me anything. I was so open minded to go: ‘You tell me who you are.’ Because I played one real person before in The Crown. And I absolutely loved it. So I was really excited to have the same process of learning. It was a different thing with Joséphine, weirdly, because with Princess Margaret and The Crown, there was grainy footage, and the Desert Island Discs [radio broadcast]… that really helped because it was her. Joséphine, I didn’t have any of that material.”

Although there are books, they’re rather dwarfed by the sheer volumes written on Napoleon, the French emperor whose aggressive campaigns across Europe turned him into one of the most powerful figures in world history. “But what I found was, this most incredible life. And every account was extremely different, which made me think that she had a mercurial quality of adapting to her environment… [she] survived this lifetime of right at the epicentre of this empire, behind closed doors for a lot of it with this leader who wanted to conquer land and instigate war.”

For all his warmongering, Phoenix’s Napoleon is smitten with Kirby’s Joséphine, even glimpsed in one moment wiping the sweat from his brow on a letter he sends her. When he discovers she’s taken a lover, while he’s on a foreign excursion conquering Egypt, he’s apoplectic. Although not everyone seems persuaded – French critics have been up in arms with the film, with French newspaper Le Figaro saying it could have been called “Barbie and Ken under the Empire” – Kirby’s turn as the resolute Joséphine is compelling.

The film spans from their first encounter, via Napoleon’s exile in Elba, to his famed defeat at the Battle Of Waterloo. Again, Kirby marvels at her character’s fortitude. “Me personally, I would have collapsed, I would have been out on day three! Taken out! [Like] most people of the 21st century! And in those times to be a woman… I just thought the nature of that strength is very particular. And despite her immense pain and grief throughout her whole life, she remained the course and that told me that she must have this kind of quiet power.”

Kirby speaks fondly of the intense bond she forged with Phoenix, which frequently spilled over into hilarity. “We laughed all the way through the shoot,” she says, which presumably included the animalistic sex scenes, with Napoleon’s rather rustic attempts to get her pregnant. What she didn’t get was a chance to witness the film’s remarkable battles, vividly orchestrated by the remarkable 85-year-old Scott, who surpasses his work even on Gladiator and Kingdom Of Heaven here.

“I would have loved to be on the battle lines. I did ask!”

Most of her work was early in the shoot, which meant she missed out. “The battle scenes were [filmed] towards the end,” she says. “But I felt very connected to the production. I was checking in with Kevin Walsh [the producer] and Ridley and Joaquin all the time and I’d text them, going, ‘Hey, how’s it going today?’ I felt very much like Joséphine would have felt, which was kind of removed from that. And yet always invested. And I would have loved to be there on the battle lines. I think I did ask!”

You can imagine that’s the case. The middle child of three, Kirby has wanted to be an actress ever since she saw a production of The Cherry Orchard with Vanessa and Colin Redgrave in her early teens. The Bristol Old Vic told her to come back in a year, when she auditioned aged 17. Instead, she took a year out, volunteering in Africa, before returning to study English at the University Of Exeter. In her spare time, she did plays and still romanticises those early days with her friends. “Night after night,” she reminisces, “we’d be rehearsing and we’d go out all night and the next day, go to lectures.”

Then, in 2010, just as she was offered a place at acting college LAMDA, she auditioned for a trio of roles in All My Sons, Ghosts and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all at Bolton’s Octagon theatre. The Olivier-winning director David Thacker told her it’d be a big mistake if she didn’t take the parts. So she did. “I remember my first paycheque, when I was doing [the] three plays up in Bolton and I got paid… and it was something like £180 for the week. And I couldn’t believe that you got paid for the hours that you did this job for. And I still feel like that.”

A year later, Kirby was on television in the BBC’s drama The Hour and an adaptation of Great Expectations. Small roles in prestigious films soon came, including Queen And Country by acclaimed director John Boorman and the survival drama Everest. And she even popped up in the Wachowskis’ (who made The Matrix movies) batty space opera Jupiter Ascending. But it wasn’t until she starred opposite Claire Foy’s Queen Elizabeth II in the first two seasons of The Crown, essaying her sister with exquisite detail, that audiences fully took notice.

Now eight years on, the 35-year-old Kirby is ready to give back. She recently set up a production company, Aluna Entertainment, with former Film4 executive Lauren Dark. “Stuff’s now really about ready and we’ve landed at certain places. And we’re about to make some of those things soon. And that has been an incredible journey because I realise there’s so many characters and so many female experiences we haven’t seen yet on screen. And that has been my biggest motivation over the last couple of years: just to create those projects.”

She and Dark recently boarded Thunder, a Swiss period drama which will be the nation’s official entry for the Oscars next year, written and directed by Carmen Jacquier. You can bet it won’t be the last female-driven movie they exec, as Kirby wants to use her standing in the industry. “I feel like it’s my responsibility now to create those things,” she says, earnestly. “But it’s always about what you want to explore at that point in your life.” 

Right now, there’s talk she will play Sue Storm in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot, which would mark her first foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But the lure of indie cinema still remains. “I mean, I’m always looking to be challenged,” she says. “I always want the stuff that makes me feel most scared and that I could be perhaps bravest in. I wait for those projects a lot. And they’re rare. But that’s really my main thing. Does it feel unfamiliar and scary? And could I possibly do this? I don’t know. And then I want to try it. As scary as it is to fail massively.”

‘Napoleon’ is in cinemas from November 22

The post How Vanessa Kirby became Napoleon’s empress: “Joaquin Phoenix and I laughed all the way through” appeared first on NME.

American director Todd Haynes was one of the first filmmakers to experiment with Barbie dolls on-screen, releasing his 1987 art school project Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story 36 years before Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster phenomenon.

A 43-minute short film made at Bard College in New York State, Superstar depicts scenes from the life of the 1970s pop star using the children’s toys instead of real-life actors.

Charting the rise and fall of Carpenter, who died from the eating disorder anorexia nervosa in 1983, Haynes’ controversial film uses the stick-thin dolls to emphasise Carpenter’s frailty and was banned after a copyright claim from the Carpenter estate. It contains uncleared Carpenters tracks throughout and also makes claims about the sexuality of Karen’s brother Richard.

Superstar has become a cult curio since then and Haynes, though he hasn’t seen Barbie, told NME in an exclusive interview that he’s pretty sure Gerwig is familiar with it.

“I love Greta Gerwig. I’m such a huge fan. And I have no doubt in my mind that she knows my film Superstar quite well,” he said. “It’s just a pretty well-known movie. Even though it’s banned, it’s a movie that a lot of people, especially her age, [would have seen]… If you went through feminist film studies… most likely somebody showed it to you at some point. So I’d be kind of surprised if she hadn’t seen it but I haven’t had this conversation [with her].”

Haynes is currently promoting his latest project, the award-winning psychological comedy drama May December. Starring Natalie Portman as an actress researching her next role as the subject of a tabloid sex scandal, played by Julianne Moore, Haynes’ movie has been described as “a strange film… veering between black comedy and zoned-out melodrama”. Haynes said Portman was interested in how people would react to her character, Elizabeth, who is deliberately confrontational and provocative when visiting the family of the woman she is booked to portray.

“[Natalie] didn’t really do research,” he said. “She was sort of mischievously interested… in what people might project onto the character… She wants to entice people and confuse and confound them that way. So everything about how the script does that to you, how the movie does that to you, is what excited her initially when she read it.”

For the film’s music, Haynes turned to 1971 romance The Go-Between and Michel Legrand’s haunting score. “I saw it when I was a kid… but it had fallen out of circulation,” he said, “and last year I was watching it on [broadcast channel] Turner Classic movies in the United States… I felt like someone just slapped me across the face. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s the kind of music that May December could make use of.”

Haynes immediately called his composer, Marcelo Zarvos, and told him about The Go-Between‘s music and they ended up playing the music on set to create an atmosphere that would help the actors get into character. “I’d never done this before in my life,” said Haynes. It worked so well that they ended up using the score as a recurring motif in the final cut of the film. “It breaks every rule of what scores are supposed to be,” he added.

‘May December’ is in cinemas now and and on Sky Cinema from December 8

The post Todd Haynes: “no doubt” Greta Gerwig saw my banned ‘Barbie’ film appeared first on NME.

This interview first appeared in a February 2017 issue of NME magazine

The first song I can remember hearing

Michael Jackson – ‘Billie Jean’

“I must have been five or six years old. I became a huge Michael Jackson fan, he’s got so many great songs, but ‘Billie Jean’ stuck out for me.”

The first song I fell in love with

Tracy Chapman – ‘Fast Car’

“It’s a bit of a driving song and I love driving. I was in my first decent car and I was 17, 18 and I remember this song coming on and I thought ‘this is a buzz!’ I always have the CD in my car.”

The song I wish I’d written

Ian Brown – ‘F.E.A.R’

“My friend got me into him – I’d never heard of him before. We were in the car, driving to the UK Championships and he said ‘listen to this song’. Every sentence starts with F-E-A-R. I thought ‘this geezer is a lyrical genius’. He’s really thought about that one – or maybe he hasn’t, maybe it’s instinctive!”

The first gig I went to

Oasis at Knebworth Park, 1996

“There were so many people there and everyone looked like Noel Gallagher! I went with my friend Stuart – he was a good lad. We went there and had a laugh.”

The song I do at karaoke

“I did it once at a club when I’d had a few drinks. I said to myself, ‘You will never, ever do that again’. It was embarrassing. I actually can’t remember what I sang, but I’m not a very good singer anyway because whenever I sing people say ‘you’re a terrible singer’. So that’s why I don’t sing. Once I tried playing guitar but for me it was like learning another language – I thought, ‘I ain’t got time for this!’ It didn’t really float my boat.”

The musician that reminds me of home

Rod Stewart

“He’s lives not far from where I live in Essex and when I was younger I remember my dad being into Rod Stewart and also Deacon Blue and people like that. My mum and dad were quite into their music; Tina Turner, Simply Red, Phil Collins. They were quite funky my mum and dad, they were always out – social animals!”

The song I want played at my funeral

Eminem – ‘Lose Yourself’

“Sometimes you have to get so lost in something that you go into autopilot and start doing amazing things, but you have to be in the zone to do it. That’s what that song really means to me – if people can get to that space in their life where they experience that, then they’ve had a good life.”

The post Soundtrack Of My Life: Ronnie O’Sullivan appeared first on NME.

Emerald Fennell doesn’t want to give us subtle. She knows it’s seen as the hallmark of “good art”, but her own taste is bolder and more bombastic. “When I think of all of the filmmakers that I love – and all of the things I love: music, books, everything – none of it is subtle,” she says. “Kubrick is not subtle. Hitchcock is not subtle. Britney is not subtle, but my god can ‘Everytime’ kick you in the cunt.”

Saltburn, Fennell’s second feature film as writer-director, definitely isn’t subtle. Like 2020’s Promising Young Woman, for which she earned three Oscar nominations – and won one, for Best Original Screenplay – it’s spiky, audacious and wildly entertaining. Fennell blends and bends genres to tell stories that make us confront unresolvable problems and question our own moral code. Promising Young Woman follows traumatised coffee shop worker Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) as she turns vigilante to avenge her best friend’s rape. It brilliantly captured our post-#MeToo need to have uncomfortable conversations about sexual assault.

Now Fennell is turning her lens to the equally provocative topics of wealth, class and privilege. “I’m interested in power dynamics,” she says when we meet at a London hotel where she is putting in a 9-to-5 stint as her film’s primary ambassador; a few hours after this interview, SAG-AFTRA will end the actors’ strike that has kept Saltburn’s A-list cast off the promo circuit. Fennell is pouring herself a coffee when NME enters the room, and kindly asks if we would like a cup, too. Saying yes proves to be the right decision because listening to this fiercely intelligent director dissect her work is riveting. “Class is such a specific and mad power dynamic,” Fennell continues, “and it’s kind of a fixation in this country.”

It’s a fixation that Saltburn explores ferociously. Fennell’s second film follows ambitious scholarship boy Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) as he becomes obsessed with and befriends Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a magnetic aristocrat who glides through life at Oxford University with blithe entitlement. Felix is moved by what he hears about Oliver’s difficult home situation, so he invites him to spend the summer with his own family at Saltburn, their historic country estate. It’s a place so opulent it has a maze in the grounds.

Felix’s feckless parents, Sir James (Richard E. Grant) and Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), welcome Oliver with ostensible warmth, but also view him as a lower-class curiosity. Keoghan’s interloper, though, is far cleverer than any member of the Catton clan, even catty cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), and soon his infatuation with Felix transmutes to them and the house itself. “I wanted to tell a gothic love story and a gothic horror story, I suppose,” Fennell says. “And I wanted to make something about the relationship we have with the things that we desire and how that makes us feel.”

Fennell also wanted to “interrogate the Gothic British country house” trope familiar from books and films such as Brideshead Revisited and Atonement. “That kind of world is all about restraint,” she says. “And I felt like I’d love to see what happens when you un-restrain it to reveal the stuff underneath, which is grubby and fascinating and sexy and troubling.” The results are very funny and very shocking, often at the same time. One of the film’s most scandalous set-pieces, which requires Keoghan to show off his dance moves, is soundtracked by Sophie Ellis-Bextor‘s effervescent pop banger ‘Murder On The Dancefloor’. It’s so wrong it’s genius.

“Saltburn’ is me trying to come to terms with what an embarrassing person I am”

Fennell says this scene reflects her willingness to shun subtlety in favour of cranking things up “to the point where they feel ridiculous or a bit cringe”. “So much of being a director is like, ‘Do I like this? Do I get it? Does it make me feel something?'” she says. “And [that scene] makes me feel something every time. When I watch it, I just feel ready to go outside and murder someone… or have sex with them.”

Saltburn‘s period setting – the film begins at Oxford in 2006 – also lets Fennell look cringe right in the eye. “Wherever you are in time, roughly 15 years ago is never cool,” she says. “And if you’re talking about the richest, most beautiful people in the world and the most beautiful places in the world, you have to find a way of reminding [the audience] that they’re human and live in the same world as the rest of us. You know, that they’re susceptible to terrible tattoos and Livestrong bracelets and bad fake tan and all that stuff.”

The director selected indie bangers from the era carefully: Bloc Party‘s ‘This Modern Love’ and MGMT‘s ‘Time To Pretend’ feature in key scenes, but Arctic Monkeys were vetoed because they’re still “so huge” today. “It was such an interesting time for music, because a lot of the huge bands [back] then did not outlive the time,” Fennell says. “And so it was [a matter of] looking at those bands who are beloved and still make great music, but maybe their big moment was then, so it really fixes you in that time.”

Fennell has a keen feel for the sights, sounds and smells of mid-2000s student life because this was when she completed her own Oxford degree, in English. She describes herself as “absolutely the person [at her college] with a Brideshead fetish” because like “a basic bitch” she fully embraced the romantic Oxford fantasy. “I would be wearing a pair of men’s 1930s trousers and braces,” she says with a laugh. “So much of this film, and so much of everything I make, is me trying to come to terms with what an embarrassing person I am [and] what embarrassing people we all are.”

Though she may wince at her style choices, Fennell can look back at her student persona with a healthy sense of perspective. “I wanted desperately to be thought of as sexy and clever,” she says. “But that’s all any of us ever want, right? For somebody to describe you as sexy and clever. And none of us are – you know, not really. We’re all just kind of cringe.” Fennell relished the famously intense and combative Oxford teaching style, but also enjoyed the baser aspects of student life. “I mean, I was throwing up in my sink a lot like Oliver and just felt a lot of shame,” she says.

While acting in a student play, Fennell was spotted by talent agent Lindy King, who also represents Keira Knightley. She duly launched her professional acting career in 2007 and now has around 20 screen credits, including a cute cameo in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as heavily pregnant Midge. Perhaps most notably, Fennell played (future Queen) Camilla Parker Bowles in seasons three and four of The Crown, a role which earned her an Emmy nomination.

“Being rich and living in London gives you a deeply unfair advantage”

However, over the last five years, Fennell has focused her energy behind the camera. She was head writer on season two of Killing Eve and wrote the book for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella musical. With Promising Young Woman, and Saltburn especially, she has developed what her producing partner Josey McNamara calls a “completely singular” voice. “She is completely fearless and always trying to think of new ways to emotionally connect with people,” he says. “I always want people to walk out of a film and have a conversation about how it makes them feel. Emerald is such a genius at pulling that out of people.”

What Saltburn pulls out of people is sure to be confronting, especially because its examination of privilege comes as we’re grappling with an increasingly pernicious cost-of-living crisis. Does Fennell think this makes it even more timely? “Yes and no,” she replies. “I mean, things exist in and outside of their time. For me, of course [the film is] about absurd privilege, but it’s also about our relationship with that. You know, none of us can stop looking [at wealth and privilege], no matter what the circumstances of the world are.”

Candidly, Fennell admits she is “kind of cautious” when it comes to discussing Saltburn‘s exploration of privilege, partly because she is so conscious of her own. The daughter of top jewellery designer Theo Fennell, she grew up in a loving and financially comfortable household in Chelsea, a neighbourhood that is now synonymous with posh reality stars. “In this industry particularly – but in yours too [journalism] – one of the only ways of being able to make anything at all is if your parents live in London and you’re able to basically work for free for years,” she says. “That gives you a deeply unfair advantage and I’m constantly aware of that.”

But equally, Fennell doesn’t think it’s “useful” to over-explain her work. “This film is a years-long interrogation of all the ways I think about this stuff, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s straightforward or the ‘last word’,” she says. So, much like Promising Young Woman, it’s a 360-degree examination of issues we can never fully have a handle on? “How can anyone have a handle on this stuff?” she says. “It’s absurd and completely demented to think you could. Every single person’s relationship with everything [like this] is so personal.”

Fennell also believes we’re quicker to presume that a female filmmaker’s work is essentially a “memoir” or “diary” rather than an “exercise of imagination”. “People want to know what you think, and my answer is always the same: I don’t know,” she says. “The cost-of-living crisis is a fucking nightmare. The way men treat women is a nightmare. How do we live in a world where these things exist? I don’t know. And so I make things because I want to talk about them, and because I want other people to talk about them.” There’s no doubt she has succeeded with Saltburn: a film that will make you question your own privilege – and how you feel about people who appear to have it all.

‘Saltburn’ is in cinemas on November 17

Lead image: Alexandra Arnold

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