Emerald Fennell may have got tongues wagging with her divisive drama Saltburn, but viewers also can’t stop talking about the titular country home where the film’s dramatic action takes place.
The latest film from Promising Young Woman director Fennell, Saltburn follows Oxford university fresher Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) as he becomes obsessed with aristocratic fellow student Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi).
The film divided critics and viewers alike on its first release, with audiences loving and hating Saltburn’s graphic sex scenes and twists and turns in seemingly equal numbers. The discourse surrounding the film only continued when the film arrived on Prime Video over the festive period.
But while Saltburn begins in Oxford, the majority of the action takes place elsewhere. After the pair strike up a friendship, Felix invites Oliver to visit him at Saltburn, the fictional country estate inhabited by Felix, his parents Sir James (Richard E Grant) and Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), and sister Venetia (Alison Oliver).
The film’s most talked-about and controversial moments take place at Saltburn (yes, including that bathtub scene), with the house providing a setting for parties, sex scenes and naked dances.
While Saltburn (the house) itself doesn’t exist, both the interior and exterior shots were filmed in the home and grounds of Drayton House, a 127-room Grade I listed country estate in Northamptonshire.
Drayton House is privately owned by the Stopford Sackville family, with the owners only agreeing to let Fennell and her team film there if nobody involved said the name of the property. But once there, the team were given “free rein” to make changes to the house.
Fennell with Keoghan and Elordi on set at Drayton House— (Chiabella James/Prime Video)
Speaking to House and Garden, director Fennell explained that Drayton House provided the perfect setting as they could film all the action on site.
“That’s why the house was so important,” she explained. “It needed to be something that hadn’t been used before. This hadn’t been photographed even, let alone put on film. We always wanted the exact sense that it is a real place.
“When I first went into the house the busts in the great hall had silly hats on them and I was like, ‘That’s exactly it. That is exactly what it needs to feel like. To the people who live here it’s just home and it’s just funny. These grand things are just the clutter of your everyday life. That was something I felt we hadn’t really seen before.”
Drayton House— (John Sutton/CC )
While the site dates back to 1066, the house is thought to have been built around 1328 and sold in 1361. It has been passed down via inheritance since, with the inhabitants making major changes to the property throughout the centuries. The building’s Baroque façade was added in the 18th century.
The majority of the film’s action takes place at the Grade I listed estate— (Courtesy of Prime)
For the film, a number of changes were made. These included the shared bathroom connecting Felix and Oliver’s rooms, with a bath made especially to accommodate Elordi’s 6ft 5in frame.
Smaller additions included new art and reproductions of existing paintings, sculptures, topiary and flowers.
Elordi as the aristocratic Felix— (Courtesy of Prime)
Of dressing the house up (and then down) for the pivotal party scene, production designer Suzie Davies said: “We just went for it. We had some music on and we had a riot dressing it. We planned it within an inch of its life, anyway. We had a team doing greens, a team doing sculptures, a team doing the nightclub. It was a crazy ride.”
The house had to be dressed, and then undressed— (Prime Video)
With the chapel, pond and gardens to play with, very little of the film’s action had to be shot elsewhere. However, the scenes in the maze are a combination or sets and CGI, as Drayton House and Park does not have a topiary maze of its own.
For Fennell, the house encapsulated the heady spirit of the film itself. “It was important to me that we were all in there together, that the making of the film in some way had that feeling of a summer where everyone loses their mind together,” she told Vanity Fair.
Saltburn is available to stream on Prime Video now.
