Jacob Elordi, Barry Keoghan's Bathtub Scene Is the 'Sexiest Thing I've Ever Seen,' Says Saltburn Director (Exclusive)

Emerald Fennell knows — better than anyone — that her new movie is as raunchy as they come. 

Among the provocative twists that have Saltburn audiences abuzz is a scene in which Oliver, played by Barry Keoghan, spies on the bathing Felix, played by Jacob Elordi. After seeing his friend’s moment of intimacy in the tub, Oliver proceeds to drink its leftover bathwater flowing down the drain. 

“What I'm saying with that scene,” Fennell, 38, tells PEOPLE, “is I think that scene is the sexiest thing I've ever seen in my life… And I'm saying that anyone else is safe to feel that.”

The film features plenty of other eyebrow-raising moments involving Oliver, an Oxford University student invited to the lavish estate of Felix’s family for the 2007 summer holiday. As the Oscar-winning writer-director behind Promising Young Woman tells PEOPLE, the shock value of such a scene is inherent to its design.

“I'm interested in how it makes you feel. Did you feel something you've never felt before in a movie? And if that's the case, then the movie is effective, and it's worked, and that's what we wanted to do.”

Spoiler alert: lapping up bathwater marks only the beginning of Oliver’s alarming fixation on Felix and his wealthy family (played by Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver and Archie Madekwe). With later Saltburn scenes involving late-night trysts and graveside self-gratification, Fennell says, “We wanted to present the feeling of that locust love: impossible, carnivorous, forever, impossible vampire love. I think that that is what we did and every single person making this film did the most unbelievable job.”

The willingness of her leading man to lick a bathtub drain in close-up is also part of the intended effect, she adds. Upon meeting the “incredible” Keoghan to discuss the role, she remembers, “He sat down and he said, ‘I'm Oliver.’

“And I was like, ‘I know. Me too.’ Because we are. That's the thing, Oliver's my imaginary friend, he's me. Then I meet Barry and suddenly Barry's Oliver too. And then we have this thing where — and it's the same with all the characters — you can hold hands and know. That's what's so exciting, is then you are always pushing each other to be more interesting, more complicated, more difficult, more sticky, more sexy, all of it, because you are in it with them.”

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And if some audience members aren’t “in it with them,” as Fennell says, “fine, whatever.” 

“Not everyone's going to love it,” she quips. “But for the people that do, the people that connect to it, it is such a deep connection. It's such a profound feeling of being seen — that all of us felt making it, actually.”

Two audience members who had to decide whether to feel that connection, adds Fennell, were her mother and father. “Imagine sitting between your parents watching this film,” she says with a laugh, “being the person who made it.”

As she points out, “it’s not like my imagination came from nowhere… Luckily my parents are incredibly f---ing cool. But there are a few moments in the movie where I'm like, ‘Sorry, Dad!’”

Saltburn is in theaters now.