May December and Saltburn aren’t original movies – why won’t their directors admit it?

Bad artists copy and good artists steal, said Dali. The influences in the new films by Emerald Fennell and Todd Haynes are so potent they practically become co-directors, writes Xan Brooks. But the reality of modern filmmaking is that most new cinema is old cinema cannibalised, borrowed and endlessly adapted

Taking notes: Rosamund Pike in Emerald Fennell’s ‘Saltburn’, and Natalie Portman in Todd Haynes’s ‘May December’ (Warner Bros/Sky)

Film itself is the subject of Todd Haynes’s May December, a rambunctious drama-about-drama that follows the making of a Hollywood biopic. Natalie Portman is Elizabeth, the actor who’s preparing to impersonate Gracie (Julianne Moore), a scandal-struck Southern belle. Elizabeth wants to get Gracie’s story just right – or at least just right for the screen, which isn’t quite the same thing. “I feel that I’m getting close to something real, something true,” she says, although pensive Gracie is altogether less sure. Performance is a fiction. Every script warps the facts. These creative collaborators, it’s clear, aren’t really on the same page.

Ironically, perhaps fittingly, May December’s air of dissonance appears to have bled out of the screen, too. When Haynes’s film premiered at the Cannes film festival in May, most critics saw it as I did: a playful cymbal-clash of high art and trash culture; a psychological chamber-piece in the guise of a lurid daytime soap. The director, however, couldn’t disagree more. “This term that came out of the reviews at Cannes was of the film being camp, quoting tabloid television movies, or soap operas,” Haynes said in an interview with Variety last month. “No. That was not anything I was trying to do at all.” He seemed bemused by the confusion and our lack of understanding. Just as Elizabeth misreads Gracie, the critics had misread his damn film.

Neither position is the wrong one, exactly. The director sees their film one way, the viewer sees it another. That’s the thrill of the exchange; the magic of cinema. But there are other complicating factors here, too, because May December isn’t simply a conversation between Haynes and his audience; it’s a conversation between Haynes and his audience and a range of imported film styles. The picture nods to the arthouse severity of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). It basks in the humid melodrama of Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (1971), with its themes of sex, class and family scandal. But it also takes its lead (whether knowingly or not) from the sort of tacky TV biopic that reduces real life to shrink-wrapped entertainment. Each of these references leave a thumbprint on the film. The influences are so potent they practically become co-directors.

May December is merely one of many pictures defined by other pictures, the latest member of a genre so broad that it barely counts as a genre at all. “I like to think that I invented cinema,” says Werner Herzog, a director who prides himself on never having sat through a film until deep into adolescence and therefore came to the craft like some unsullied vestal virgin. As for the rest, they’ve been around; they’re flaneurs. Today’s directors were raised on cinema, schooled in the work of the great directors and gorged on popular entertainment to the point where their output is – unavoidably, exuberantly – the result of everything that they’ve seen. We may baulk at the prospect of generative AI data scraping – and rightly so, because it’s exploitative and indiscriminate. In other respects, though, this is simply the creative process on a more industrial scale. Filmmakers scrutinise and cannibalise; borrow, quote and adapt. Ideally, they then cobble their second-hand goods into a successful standalone work.

Bad artists copy and good artists steal, Dali said. To which he might have added that the really shrewd artist owns up to the theft. May December, for instance, lifts Michel Legrand’s piano theme from The Go-Between only to deploy it as a jarring counterpoint to the action, so that it explodes like a bomb when Gracie opens the fridge, or Elizabeth ambles unhurriedly across Main Street. Released alongside May December, Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn spins the tale of an Oxford undergraduate’s adventures at a posh stately home. It’s Brideshead Revisited revisited, of course, except that Fennell heads the critics off at the pass by having a character mention that Evelyn Waugh was a regular guest at the house. This, incidentally, is quite the flex on her part. Saltburn, Fennell tells us, isn’t inspired by Brideshead. If anything, it was the other way around.

Not ‘Brideshead’: Emerald Fennell directs Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi on the set of ‘Saltburn’ (Chiabella James/Prime Video)

Currently loitering on Netflix is David Fincher’s The Killer, a chrome-cool revenge thriller that’s one part Point Blank to two parts Le Samourai. I caught the film at a press screening in September and found it empty and old hat. Recently I saw it again on TV and worried that I’d missed the point. The Killer’s not original, nor has any wish to be. Instead it’s a repeat, a homage, a cinematic form of karaoke in which the film sings along to the lyrics and the drama comes from the slight changes in rhythm and the occasional deliberate missed note. This kind of picture may even improve on second viewing, when its in-built familiarity becomes an asset, not a con. Certainly The Killer looked a lot better on the rewatch. I now half-suspect that May December will as well.

‘May December’ and ‘Saltburn’ are in cinemas, and ‘The Killer’ is streaming on Netflix