EMERALD FENNELL
An audience with the Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman writer-director.
IIT FEELS LIKE A BORDERING-ONTHE-ABSURD understatement to say that it’s been *quite* the few years for Emerald Fennell. For since 2019 she has somehow squeezed in writing and showrunning the second season of Hbo-smash Killing Eve; starring in Netflixsmash The Crown; and writing, producing and directing her first film( the Sky Cinema distributed smash ), Promising Young Woman. Oh, and landing a Best Director nomination from the Academy (the first year two women were nominated — Fennell and Chloé Zhao), before winning an Actual Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
It’s perhaps unrealistic to ever expect to be prepared for that moment, when the golden statuette is slipped inside your palm. But that might be particularly true if you’re making your debut feature and it’s an independent film that you convinced people to work on for “pretty much a bag of crisps” (flavour undisclosed). So yes: *quite* the few years. We’re slightly terrified about what else she might have achieved by the time you’ve finished reading this magazine...
First, congratulations! You’re an Oscar winner. How does that feel?
I still don’t know how to describe it. Because it’s so beyond anything you would ever dream of or expect. I don’t know what to say, except, it’s amazing. It’s ridiculous. I mean, I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to put it. It’s in the house. And I’m sort of aware of it all the time.
It must have been surreal. That moment. It wasn’t really a normal Oscars anyway, but when they said your name...
None of us had any frame of reference for what it was going to be like, so we literally just sat down and then it happened. I think my brain was about ten minutes behind my body. And so I was suddenly aware of holding it, and thinking, “What’s happening?” It was like an out-of-body experience. What was amazing about this year was it was very intimate. There were only 300 people. And it was all people that I’ve been Zooming with for months, doing Q&AS and stuff. To actually have the time and
the space to meet everyone, like to meet Chloé [Zhao] in person, it was just so amazing. And it felt lovely, to be honest. And apart from the kind of sheer terror of a moment like that, what I really felt, with all the directors and writers, was that it was a very supportive and kind group of people. It never felt like a competition. It was surprising, really inspiring.
Could you have ever really expected it? I remember you telling me that everybody had made the film for a bag of crisps. Was this ever in any scenario of what might happen?
No, of course not. I think you’d have to be pretty megalomaniacal to think that. The thing is, it’s an independent film, but obviously we did everything in our power to make it feel like a bigger movie than it was; to give it scale and detail and all that kind of stuff, but at the end of the day, you don’t expect a film like this to... reach. As well as the awards, it’s just the scope of people watching it. That it reached so much more widely than any of us expected. It’s a surprisingly diverse group of people who really want to talk about this, not just the people you’d expect.
Some people disagree on the ending, but I’ve found the conversations, and the difference of opinion, really heartening.
Yeah, I think so too. And for me, you can’t expect everyone to love a thing. Of course you can’t, especially when you’re making something so personal and difficult. It would be mad, and it would be unfair to expect everyone to feel the same way about it. And what makes it interesting with this conversation around it — and conversations certainly that I’ve had with other people — is that everyone’s response to it, no matter what it is, is kind of completely fair. Even if people find it really difficult, or if they didn’t like the ending or whatever, their reasons for doing so are completely legitimate.
What was that year like, waiting for it to come out? Because originally it was due out in cinemas in April 2020.
I look back on the whole landscape of the year, like it was so fraught; we were all so frightened in the beginning. And still are now, obviously. I just didn’t spend that much time thinking about it, because there were bigger things happening. The distributors were so great — they really, really wanted to push for a cinema opening, as I did. But of course, as the year went on, it just became more and more difficult... to make plans for anything becomes hard, so you just kind of have to let go quite early on. We were having conversations every week about what we should do, how it could go. So, it was okay, you know. I’m sad. I’m sad for movies in general. [But] more people might have watched it that might not have watched before.
So, was that almost a benefit?
I think that’s certainly true. But it’s like everything, there are pros and cons to all of it. Access was so wonderful, and people could safely watch it, but yeah, it was a film that was made very specifically to be watched in a room with lots of other people. So much of the comedy and the discomfort, the disquieting parts of it, they’re somewhat reliant on the tension in a room. There’ll never be a way of replicating that at home, but of course it’s wonderful that people have watched it.
When the first reviews landed, and it was received so well, how did it feel?
The first thing was that it was at Sundance, and reviews came out while we were there, and I tried as best as I could not to look, because you’re talking about it so much, and you feel so raw that if you read a review that isn’t nice or whatever, and you go into... you don’t want to be defensive. It’s complicated. It’s a bit like going to a party full of people and you’ve just read their emails. It’s awkward. I was lucky, I had a bit of a filter and people kept telling me little bits and bobs, but it was amazing. And also, it’s all of you — if you’re a writer/director, you have skin in the game, of course — but every single person who worked on the film really believed in it and really did take a pay cut. And it was a hard film to make in that amount of time with that budget. And everyone was on board and determined — someone like Carey Mulligan is like a major, major, major genius. It was just — I suppose my rambling answer is — I was so grateful and relieved that they weren’t wrong to come on board. You know, if it had been universally panned and slated, I would have felt sad for myself, but also for them and their time and their work.
So what have you been working on since then? I know you’re doing Cinderella now.
It’s such a pure joy. That’s opening in mid-july and then I’m going to have this baby, take some time off. And then I’ve got a couple of things I’m writing to direct. And what I’m going to do I think, because it was so wonderful on Promising Young Woman, with this one, I’m not going to tell anyone. Nobody knows about them. So I’ll just deliver the scripts and see if anyone likes them and wants to make them.
Mark Millar said you just finished the Nemesis script and you’ve been linked to Zatanna. Is it important to keep an open mind in terms of genre?
I mean, I’m doing Zatanna, I’m not doing Nemesis. I think that’s been a slightly bum steer — a while ago I did some... but I certainly haven’t written the new script. There’s been a mix-up somewhere there. But Zatanna, yeah. The thing about Zatanna that’s so interesting is firstly, working with Bad Robot and J.J. [Abrams]. If you grew up loving things like Jurassic Park and Spielberg and all the kind of Hollywood Hollywood movies,
J.J. is just so exciting. And then Zatanna is really interesting... what Warner Bros. are doing, they’re letting people be — or at least wanting to be — led by the story. And there are lots of things about her that felt like they could be really, really interesting. And it’ll be an opportunity to make something really quite dark. And that appealed to me, to make something big and scary. I love that stuff. And these are the movies... the scale of them is so massive and so thrilling. Like, why wouldn’t you want to write something like that when you can write huge, massive, crazy sequences and fights? Normally you’re like, how can I show this in the smallest, cheapest way [laughs]? To have complete freedom to really let your imagination run wild is such a joy. To be honest, I very rarely say yes to things. It’s so easy to say yes because things are so tempting. And then actually doing the work is so difficult and so time-consuming. So really this year, I’m doing Zatanna and Cinderella and my own thing and that’s it. I won’t take anything else on until I’m satisfied that those are good enough.
But first, a rest for a bit.
First, a fucking rest.
PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN IS ON SKY CINEMA NOW