ON SCREEN FILMMAKER INTERVIEW PROMISING YOUNG WOMEN Emerald Fennell Directs Carey Mulligan in Focus Features’ Candy-Colored Thriller, <strong>Pro</strong>mising Young Woman BY REBECCA PAHLE 80 <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2020</strong>
Carey Mulligan has an eye out for trouble in <strong>Pro</strong>mising Young Woman “Every week I go to a club. I act like I’m too drunk to stand. And every week a ‘nice guy’ comes over to see if I’m OK.” So speaks Cassie of <strong>Pro</strong>mising Young Woman, the debut feature of writer-director Emerald Fennell. Years ago, Cassie dropped out of med school following the assault of a friend; now her weekend hobby is showing an endless parade of dudes how very, very wrong they are in taking a “drunk” woman home and trying to get into her pants. But there’s a twist: the arrival into her life of ex-classmate Ryan (Bo Burnham) brings the possibility for healing, along with unresolved feelings about the event that left her traumatized. A new mission emerges. Candy-colored and unabashedly girly in its aesthetic, <strong>Pro</strong>mising Young Woman offers a welcome take on the revenge thriller, switching out the raw violence common to the genre for a more nuanced interrogation of the pervasive culture of sexual harassment. In advance of the film’s December 25 release from Focus Features, Fennell took the time to speak about her debut feature—starting with an unabashed love-fest for her lead actress. Congratulations on the film. I’ll see Carey Mulligan in just about anything. So I was excited for this, and it didn’t disappoint. Oh, she’s amazing. I read somewhere that you thought there was no way in hell you’d get her for this film. Oh God, no, of course not! She’s Carey Mulligan! She’s incredibly selective about what she does and who she works with, so I really didn’t think I stood much of a chance. Luckily, I somehow managed to persuade her. And I’m so, so glad, because I really do think she’s the backbone of all of this. She grounds the characters in such truth. It’s a heightened movie, and it’s a heightened experience, and it needed that. That’s one of the things I like about the film: its groundedness. You see Cassie wrestling with her trauma and trying to get better, as opposed to just going on a killing spree. The revenge movie is a genre that I absolutely love, but I think it’s also ripe for subversion. Also, I don’t know any women who resort to violence, really. It’s very rare. And so I wanted to write a revenge movie that was honest about the process of grieving and the process of trauma. And also honest about how a woman might teach lessons or frighten people. What she does is still very dangerous to herself, and I think possibly that might even be part of why she does it. It struck me that I’d never seen a movie like this with a character who felt like she might do something that a real woman might do. So many revenge movies are escapist, in a way. Men get away with awful things all the time in the real world, and in revenge movies, they get brutally murdered for it. It’s escapist, and it’s cathartic. And it’s effective. But it’s not honest or real. This movie was about taking those things that are so appealing to us as audience members—so neat and tidy—and pulling them apart and looking at them. For me—the same as in “Killing Eve”—if you’re going to have violence in a movie, you need to be honest about what violence looks like and what it is. You have an obligation to show it in a way that feels real. We’re so immune to violence. When you show what it looks like, really, it’s much more uncomfortable than the almost titillating violence that I think we’re used to on TV and in film. [Fennell was the show runner and head writer for season two of the acclaimed BBC show “Killing Eve.”] There’s a scene in “Killing Eve” when Eve kills for the first time with an ax. It’s kind of horrific. I just didn’t want it to be a moment that was like, “OK, gun, fine.” Imagine actually killing someone with an ax as a woman who’d never killed someone before. It’s always looking at these things that we’re used to and saying, “OK, what actually would you feel like?” I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that when there is violence in this film, it is troubling. As it should be. Some of the things that Cassie does are uncomfortable to watch. You’re like, “No, no, what are you doing?” The power that women have is to frighten. That’s what she does. She is frightening. I didn’t want to shy away from that, from the fact that some of the decisions she makes aren’t nice or good. Because she’s so angry. But it was important to me nevertheless that things aren’t quite what they seem, that she’s very particular and careful about the smoke and mirrors that she puts in place. <strong>Winter</strong> <strong>2020</strong> 81