Tox­ic Avenger: Emer­ald Fen­nell on Promis­ing Young Woman

Emer­ald 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, every­one acknowl­edg­ing that that thing hap­pened, but feel­ing very dif­fer­ent­ly about what it was, and this gap in expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge and empa­thy that can’t get breached. I didn’t want to do a hor­ri­ble, vio­lent film that focused on that stuff, because it’s com­plete­ly trig­ger­ing and horrible.

When you’re a woman watch­ing films, you know about this. And you either know first hand or you know some­one who’s been through it. You don’t need to see it. 

No, and I didn’t want it to be las­civ­i­ous or tit­il­lat­ing. I think that I had to come at it from the point of view that, nobody wakes up and thinks they’re a bad per­son, and nobody looks back and thinks they’re a bad person.

How did Carey Mul­li­gan come to the role of Cassie?

What I want­ed from Cassie was some­body sur­pris­ing, not some­body we’d seen do a part like this before in any way, so not some­one from hor­ror or com­e­dy. I want­ed some­body who felt enig­mat­ic at the cen­tre of this and who also felt slight­ly apart from it. And what I love about Carey is she’s an unbe­liev­ably tal­ent­ed actress, but I don’t know very much about her. She’s real­ly pri­vate, she’s a real shapeshifter and her per­for­mances are always well round­ed and challenging.

It helped enor­mous­ly that she’s British and every­one else is Amer­i­can; obvi­ous­ly you can’t tell in the film, but there is a sense of oth­er­ness about her. I should say, she’s lit­er­al­ly the kind of fun­ni­est, warmest, coolest per­son, but she’s just bril­liant at keep­ing her per­son­al life out of it. I’d seen Wildlife and she’s so fuck­ing good, but she’s just not like any­one else. And also, like, she fuck­ing shows up. She didn’t drop a sin­gle line in any scene. There are lots of genius­es who need space and time, but she is there immediately.

You’ve cast these arche­typ­al nice guys as the sort of vil­lains of the piece: Adam Brody; Bo Burn­ham; Christo­pher Mintz-Plasse. I feel like it’s a clever way to sub­vert the idea of what a vil­lain looks like.

Or that they think they’re vil­lains. I wasn’t inter­est­ed in mak­ing a preachy, didac­tic film because I just wouldn’t wan­na watch one myself, so I want­ed to cast peo­ple that I think are gen­uine­ly bril­liant and tal­ent­ed and fun­ny and engag­ing and charis­mat­ic. But also, part of it is say­ing, isn’t it easy to judge men we don’t know. When and if it hap­pens to some­one you love, it’s amaz­ing how much more com­pli­cat­ed it is. I said this to all the actors all the time: ​‘You absolute­ly believe you are right and you are a good per­son. If you don’t all of the argu­ments fall apart.’ And there are char­ac­ters here who have said things that I’ve heard peo­ple say, or that I might have even said, hon­est­ly. And I can’t believe the tal­ent I was able to get.

It was great to see Jen­nifer Coolidge play­ing Cassie’s mother.

Yes! There’s some­thing also very fem­i­nine about Jen­nifer. Of course she’s unbe­liev­ably tal­ent­ed, but I real­ly want­ed to empha­sise that, just because peo­ple have had a hard time of it, that doesn’t mean they don’t care, or that they don’t take great pride in the way they dress. Cassie doesn’t schlub around – she’s very par­tic­u­lar, very pre­cise, because she’s good at divert­ing atten­tion away from her­self and shapeshift­ing. Also, she doesn’t want any­one to ask any ques­tions. Any­one who’s had any self-harm­ing behav­iour them­selves, will know that the last thing they do is look unwell – they go the oth­er way. But also, often we mis­take things that are intrin­si­cal­ly female as being kind of silly.

Like the Paris Hilton song, ​‘Stars Are Blind’.

Absolute­ly. I love that song, I’ve loved it for 15 years, ever since it came out. In Steve Martin’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, ​‘Born Stand­ing Up’, he talks about liv­ing next door to Dis­ney­land and that he worked there as a teenag­er. There’s a pas­sage where he talks about going there for the last time before he moved away, and he sees a trendy pho­tog­ra­ph­er tak­ing pho­tos of the Dis­ney­land cas­tle, and he won­ders if she’s doing an iron­ic pho­to­shoot or if she feels the way he does – that it’s beau­ti­ful. Some­one decid­ed things that were cool and not cool, things that were to be tak­en seri­ous­ly and not seri­ous­ly, and it’s bull­shit. I gen­uine­ly care as much about Cassie’s man­i­cure as I do about the big­ger pic­ture. It’s all details. It’s all important.

We con­tain mul­ti­tudes, we’re allowed to care about our nails and our appearance. 

It doesn’t make you not seri­ous. And I think we’ve just been brought up so much on that, and also as part of that, mak­ing stuff, I think we’re only just now get­ting to the point where we’re allowed to say what we like and make what we like with­out hav­ing to feel that we need to make things that are to be tak­en very seriously.

When you’re a woman nav­i­gat­ing the enter­tain­ment world in gen­er­al, that cre­ative space, there’s a lot of resis­tance and a sense you have to be po-faced. But some­times I just want to watch a real­ly bad rom-com and gen­uine­ly enjoy it. The con­cept of ​’guilty plea­sures‘ always annoys me.

Fuck­ing guilty plea­sures, I hate it. It’s so pas­sive aggres­sive. And also here’s the thing: we’re allowed aliens; we’re allowed insane, unimag­in­able galax­ies of mon­sters. But we’re not allowed to fall in love in a café, wear­ing a love­ly dress. Peo­ple are like, ​‘It’s not real­is­tic’, ​‘That’s not how the world is’. And I’m like, ​’Fuck you! Why are oth­er peo­ple allowed their crazy stuff and yet things that are roman­tic or beau­ti­ful or what­ev­er are not allowed, not cool?”.

Going back to your ear­li­er ques­tion about how we got the film made, the script was very dark. So I pro­vid­ed a playlist which had Paris Hilton and ​’Some­thing Won­der­ful’, Britney’s ​’Tox­ic’, ​’Boys’ by Char­li XCX, and mood boards which were very almost psy­chot­i­cal­ly detailed – the man­i­cure was in there, the exact clothes, exact colour palette. I think that helped. Michael Per­ry, our pro­duc­tion design­er, the first thing he ever did was Sweet Val­ley High, and Nan­cy Stein­er the cos­tume design­er did The Vir­gin Sui­cides, so I went to these peo­ple and told them I want­ed the film to look beguil­ing. Cassie’s clothes are very tac­tile: soft; pink; inviting.

Why do you think we still have so much dif­fi­cul­ty believ­ing women when they come to us and say they’ve expe­ri­enced some­thing traumatic?

Because it chal­lenges us. I think a lot of peo­ple are wor­ried about them­selves in a gen­er­al philo­soph­i­cal sense, which means that, for some rea­son, our soci­ety has made assault and being accused of assault equiv­a­lent, which is fuck­ing absurd. What I find very inter­est­ing about artists is that actors, singers, direc­tors, writ­ers, what­ev­er it is, who are accused, nobody ever says, ​‘I know this per­son did this but I still fuck­ing love their work’. They say, ​‘I don’t think they did this’. I feel like this film is is say­ing, ​‘Look, we’re all bas­tards, we’re all com­pli­cat­ed, we’re all not good, don’t fuck­ing say you don’t believe some­one because you like the oth­er person.’

And there will be con­ver­sa­tions about #MeToo around this film, but #MeToo didn’t invent this. We’ve all known for cen­turies, men just didn’t know we saw them. But also like, they don’t have to be scared if they admit fault. Imag­ine liv­ing in a world where all of us felt safe enough to do that when we fucked up, and when peo­ple caused us ill of any kind. I mean that’s the ten­sion of every­thing isn’t it? Mis­un­der­stand­ing. Fail­ure to com­mu­ni­cate. Fail­ure to under­stand. Fail­ure to empathise. And I’m very aware that like I’m still com­ing from a posi­tion of enor­mous priv­i­lege. And so I think that we all just need to acknowl­edge it, at least first.

Half the bat­tle is get­ting peo­ple to acknowl­edge these things are hap­pen­ing and do the work to improve it. You can’t just say it’s some­one else’s prob­lem, I think which is the big kind of stum­bling block.

It’s also an indus­try that’s incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to get into. And so then every­one feels very vul­ner­a­ble so every­one pro­tects them­selves very tight­ly. It’s get­ting bet­ter though, I hope. It feels like it’s get­ting better.

Do you feel like it’s eas­i­er now for women on screen to be com­plex and make bad decisions?

Yeah, total­ly. But hav­ing said that, there’s still a sense that if you’re a woman you need to write about women’s stuff. I was pitch­ing a sci-fi com­e­dy a few years ago, at a com­pa­ny that makes exclu­sive­ly sci-fi come­dies, and after my pitch they said, ​‘The thing is, we real­ly want just like a real­ly hon­est raw sto­ry about what it is to be a woman now’, and I was just like, ​’No you fuck­ing don’t, you just can’t imag­ine a woman writ­ing any­thing else.’

And times that by 10 if you’re a trans actor or a woman of colour, hav­ing to always play a part where your ​‘oth­er­ness’ is men­tioned, where it’s made to be the main thing about you. These parts of our iden­ti­ty aren’t our whole lives. We’re not sit­ting around say­ing, ​‘So hav­ing tits is a night­mare isn’t it?‘ or, ​‘Bloody hell, bras eh? Peri­ods?’ We just kind of get on with our lives. That’s what needs to change. Just allow us to exist as humans.

Read the LWLies review of Promis­ing Young Woman.