‘Saltburn’ Editor Victoria Boydell Discusses Bringing Emerald Fennell’s Vision to Life
FilmSpeak had a chance to speak with editor Victoria Boydell on Saltburn, discussing her collaboration with Emerald Fennell in creating the film’s tense atmosphere.
Warning: The following interview contains major spoilers for Saltburn. Some of the quotes in this article were edited for length and clarity.
Saltburn is one of the most singular filmmaking experiences of the year. Whether you will ultimately like it or not, you can’t deny that there is no other film like it, from a visual and thematic point of view. Director Emerald Fennell made her mark in the filmmaking sphere early in 2020 with the release of Promising Young Woman, which led her to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Her sophomore effort is far more aesthetically rich than her debut feature, putting audiences head-first inside the sick and depraved world of Saltburn. FilmSpeak recently had the chance to participate in virtual press days with many of the key craft players that helped bring Saltburn to life, including editor Victoria Boydell, marking her first collaboration with Fennell.
Boydell sits down with FilmSpeak and describes the process of working with Fennell and how she discovered her directorial approach while collaborating with her:
“I discovered during the shoot that Emerald is quite focused on filming. We had a few conversations during the shoot, but I only visited the set once. They were shooting quite a long way away, and I don't think Emerald necessarily found it that useful to have me go on sets and talk about the process in depth, even if she was really open to that kind of dialogue.
Unfortunately, she had no phone reception in the big house most of the time because the place had no reception. She would sometimes have to pull the car over the side of a road on her way home, and I felt a bit bad taking up her time. Sometimes, it was really important because I had questions.
I might watch the rushes during the day, and there may be varying Oliver performances or where he's more knowing in one take, more vulnerable and passive in another take and I really wanted to get her thoughts on it.
Emerald is very open to my interpretation as I was assembling it. But what she didn't want was, in a sense, me imposing too much of my rhythm before she had a chance to collaborate with me. I think she was very happy for me to choose all the performance takes I wanted. There were very few times when she would choose what to pick. I think she was very happy to trust my judgment on what works or at least my initial instincts.”
Fennell’s approach to editing the film’s assembly cut was also different than any other filmmaker Boydell had worked with, as she wanted it to be as long as possible without any temp music creating a certain atmosphere that may influence how the movie is shaped during the editing process:
“She also wanted me to keep the assembled scenes as long, broad, and loose as possible so that she could join me in tightening the scenes. She didn't want to sit down and watch what I would normally produce for directors, which is a pretty tight assembly with all the sound effects, the temp music, and watchable film that you could watch in the cinema, with every scene stitched together in the right order. She wanted to watch the assembly loose with no music.
One of the reasons that she doesn't like to get wedded to temp music is because if I crafted four scenes with a beautiful piece of music working, everyone's a bit loath to unpick those scenes because the music works so well. And so, I think she felt if we analytically move all the building blocks around, then later, maybe two or three weeks later, when we're on our second or third pass, we put music on until a week or so before the first screening.
She was open to many of those suggestions, and I felt we were really in sync with the music, needle drops, and temp scores. A lot of it was music I'd already cut, too. So, I just unmuted the tracks, and some of it we found together as we delved into the tonal shifts that we needed in the film. She would sit behind me on the couch, often playing through stuff, or I'd listen to music on my headphones cycling home and come in to put it in the cut. It was a fantastic collaboration, and I would work with Emerald again if she would have me.”
Boydell also explained her process in editing a movie that gets darker and more twisted as Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) goes to Saltburn with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). One of their biggest priorities wasn’t to make any of the more provocative scenes feel like pure shock value just for the thrill of it:
“We tried hard not to make any moments gratuitous. A beat wouldn't turn its place if we felt that we were just going for shock value, vulgarity, or gratuity. We tried to embed every moment in the characters’ psyche and spent what someone in that position with their emotional state would do. We had to work quite hard to calibrate where these moments happened. Originally, the masturbation scene where Oliver watches Felix masturbate was sooner. It felt a bit like we were shooting our load quite early, and we've upped the ante very quickly. It felt like the law of diminishing returns. We moved it later, and then we had a different problem: his focus wasn't enough on Felix, and it became all about Venetia [Alison Oliver]. We then played around with moving it again and trying ways to tonally show that Oliver goes from being a sweet, innocent geek to being more predatory. We spent quite a lot of time considering these beats. The same goes for the grave scene. There was a lot of pressure on us to shorten it, and we genuinely tried. But we found the sequence quite emotional. It feels like Oliver is breaking down in impotence by only staying long enough and realizes it's futile that he will never have Felix that way. It felt cutting out any sooner and wouldn’t have worked for us.”