INTERVIEW BY HANNAH WOODHEAD ILLUSTRATION AND TYPE BY LAURÈNE BOGLIOMULTI-HYPHENATE ACTOR-AUTHOR-SCREENWRITER-FILMMAKER
EMERALD FENNELL SHARES HER LOVE OF PARIS HILTON AND HER
FRUSTRATIONS WITH THE WAY WE TALK ABOUT WOMEN IN FILM.
merald Fennell is an actor, author, screenwriter and
filmmaker with an enviable CV. Her 2018 short film
Careful How You Go premiered at the Sundance
Film Festival, and she returned there in January 2020 with
her debut feature, Promising Young Woman – a blistering,
candy-coloured meditation on societal complacency and
female rage. It’s a change of pace from her previous role
as head writer on Killing Eve, but Fennell achieves that
rarest of things: a debut that arrives fully-formed. How
did she do it?
LWLies: This feels like quite a radical film to have
been made in the studio system. Did you experience
any pushback? Fennell: I think what was really good is
that Focus came on board before we started shooting,
so they already knew what it was. I’ve been so lucky,
there were very few notes. And huge trust from them.
And, y’know, it was a very small budget and a very short
shoot. We did it in 23 days, which gave us an opportunity
to say, ‘let’s take this risk, let’s do something.’ I think the
film is surprising, but it’s also not surprising at the same
time. I wanted it to be real, and to also make a revenge
movie about sexual assault. So you have to be honest
about what happens. I think lots of people just felt that,
and then understood that it wasn’t maybe as risky as it
first seemed.You’ve just come from serving as head writer on
Killing Eve, which is very violent and visceral, but
Promising Young Woman only features a small
amount of violence. It feels quite different from
the rape-revenge films we’ve seen before. Well, it’s
trying to subvert them really, as best as it can.There’s such a focus in those works on the physical
suffering women endure, whereas here we’re
seeing the more emotional side of things and how,
when someone is a victim of sexual assault, it can
have far-reaching consequences. Absolutely, and this
happens so much, it’s so endemic. And when it happens
to somebody you love, that can be harder to bear. I think
women are very used to bearing things that happen to
themselves. And it was important to me that in the film
nobody would ever use the word ‘rape’ because they
didn’t want to acknowledge what had happened. I wanted
to make a film about something happening, everyoneE
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