How 'Saltburn' pulled off its shocking bathtub and graveyard scenes

• Warning: Major spoilers ahead for "Saltburn."
• The movie has had fans talking about that bathtub scene.
• Here is how director Emerald Fennell and her cast tackled the most shocking moments in "Saltburn."

"Saltburn" may have ruined graveyards for Barry Keoghan.

In the Emerald Fennell-directed movie, Keoghan plays seemingly poor Oxford student Oliver Quick, who is obsessed with his rich classmate, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). When Oliver is invited to spend the summer with Felix's wealthy family at their country estate, Saltburn, he quickly conspires to ingratiate himself with the Cattons.

Since the movie dropped on Amazon Prime Video over the holidays, fans on social media have been raving about its shocking, and graphic, sexually-charged scenes.

In one scene, Oliver strips naked and humps his former friend's grave. Yikes.

"I can't look at graves anymore the same way. Do you know what I mean?" Keoghan joked to Entertainment Weekly. "They won't allow me into graveyards actually. They'll see me coming. They'll be like, 'Nah, nah.' Especially if I arrive with no clothes on."

Here is just how Fennell, Keoghan, and the rest of the cast, pulled off the movie's wildest moments — including that bathtub scene.

Oliver's intimate moment in the bathtub was one of the first scenes Emerald Fennell came up with

One of the most talked about scenes in "Saltburn" is when Oliver spies on Felix masturbating in a bathtub, and then proceeds to consume his friend's dirty bathwater after Felix has left the room.

Fennell, who also wrote the screenplay for "Saltburn," told Entertainment Weekly that the scene establishes Oliver as an "unreliable narrator."

"It was a boy saying, 'I wasn't in love with him,' and that same boy licking the bottom of a bathtub," she said. "So that was the very center of the film for me, this kind of unreliable narrator, somebody who was clearly in the grips of extreme desire and who hasn't yet come to terms with it or who has had to find another way of coming to terms with it or explain it."

In another interview with Time, Fennell defended the scene, saying she finds it titillating.

"I don't think it's shocking; it's incredibly sexy," she said. "To me, the bathtub is just an incredibly erotic scene. It is all the things that something stirring should be, which is funny and intimate and shocking and revolting and unbelievably sexy."

To film the scene, the bathtub was sliced in half so that the camera, and viewers, could get into the tub with Keoghan, Fennell told Entertainment Weekly.

The director also said the tub was placed in the center of the bathroom because it's "designed to be watched."

"These houses are built for voyeurism because the staff need to be able to see but not be seen," she told Time. "There's such erotic tension to that but also kind of horror because you're being seen doing the wrong thing."

Meanwhile, Keoghan told The Ringer that he believes Oliver is "confused and lost" in the scene.

"The moment where he rubs his face along the plughole and wants to be in it, it's sort of like, 'I want to feel it, I want it to be part of me, I want it to change me,'" Keoghan said. "I don't think he knows what he's actually chasing."

Fennell says the oral sex scene between Oliver and Venetia is all about control

Later in the movie, Oliver turns his attention from Felix to his sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), and the pair have a moonlit tryst behind Felix's back.

After learning Venetia is a masochist with an eating disorder, Oliver seduces Venetia by performing oral sex on her while she is on her period.

Both Keoghan and Fennell believe that Oliver's actions are all about control.

"He's abusing her, and he's a master manipulator," Keoghan told The Ringer. "He wants to see how far he can take it: 'I own you. You're going to do what I say.'"

Fennell described the moment as a "vampire scene" in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

The director said Oliver is fully clothed in the scene, while Venetia is in a nightgown, to show who has the power.

"Actually, what he's doing is not just what she wants in order to manipulate her, but actually because it's gratifying to him, too, because I don't think he knows what he wants really," Fennell said.

The graveyard scene was changed on the day of filming

Oliver's next shocking deed comes following Felix's death, when he strips down and desecrates his friend's grave.

Fennell told Entertainment Weekly that in the initial script, Oliver was meant to kiss Felix's grave, and penetrate the newly laid soil with his fingers. However, once on set, she and Keoghan decided to go in a different direction.

"On the day, I was like, 'Can I try something?' I wanted to see what the next level of obsession was," Keoghan told Variety. "If you're taken over with grief and horror and love and sadness, people do crazy things. And that's what this film is about."

Keoghan said he specifically asked for a closed set for the scene, and also told The Ringer that he only shot one take of it, saving him the embarrassment of repeating the action.

"The awful length of it is what makes it so powerful," Fennell told Entertainment Weekly. "'Watching it is the point! Not cutting away is the point. You have to sit in your discomfort — you can only understand it if you sit with it.'"

Barry Keoghan isn't wearing a prosthetic in the final scene

At the end of the movie, Oliver's true intentions are revealed as he kills the final living member of the Catton family, Felix's mother, Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), and inherits the family's fortune and Saltburn itself.

Fennell leaves audiences with one final shocking scene: A fully nude Oliver dancing brazenly around Saltburn to "Murder on the Dancefloor" by Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

Keoghan told Entertainment Weekly that he is actually nude in the scene.

"The initial thing was about me having no clothes on. I'm a bit, ehhh," the actor said. "But after take one, I was ready to go. I was like, 'Let's go again. Let's go again.' You kind of forget, because there's such a comfortable environment created, and it gives you that license to go, 'All right, this is about the story now.'"

Keoghan also said that the scene reflects Oliver's ownership of Saltburn.

"It's full confidence in, 'I can do what I want in this manor. I can strip to my barest and waltz around because this is mine,'" Keoghan said.

Fennell told The Ringer that Oliver's outlandish dancing is meant to be the inverse of a tour Felix gives Oliver of Saltburn at the beginning of the movie.

Oliver was originally meant to walk through the manor, but Fennell told Entertainment Weekly that she changed her mind.

"A walkthrough didn't have that post-coital triumph," the director said. "If we all did our job correctly, you are on Oliver's side."

Fennell added that Keoghan filmed the entire dance 11 times because it had to be done in one take.

As to why she picked "Murder on the Dancefloor" for the scene, Fennell told Variety that she loves the song.

"It was the only song that seemed fitting to tie the end of the film together," she said.

Watch: Acting coach breaks down 17 iconic death scenes in movies

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