A bold and original interpretation of one of the greatest love stories of all time, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is an intoxicating epic tale of lust, love and madness. Fennell directs from her own screenplay based on the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
On the impact this story had on you and why you felt compelled to bring it to the screen…
I have always had a physical response to this book. I think the thing that is endlessly wonderful about Wuthering Heights, really, is Emily Brontë and who she was as an artist. She was a poet, a transcendentally genius poet, and her work connects to people in a way that very few things do. So really what I wanted to do was acknowledge my connection to it, to the way that it made me feel, and know that it wouldn’t necessarily be the way that it made every reader feel. I wanted to make something that was an approximation of the feeling it had given me the very first time I read it, boiling down the things about the book that I found exciting and subversive, the things that are still making people feel something two centuries later. Because I love the book so much, it felt exciting to see if I could make a version that I would accept as a fan. And then obviously it was a shameless excuse to work with everyone I love, both on the crew and this incredible cast.
On what you want audiences to take away from the movie…
This is not a didactic film; it takes no moral position. The book itself is radical in its refusal to judge its characters—that’s what made it so disturbing to people when it was first published, and it’s still shocking to them now. What I’m really interested in as an audience member, and in life in general really, is: What are the things that we do when nobody else is watching? What’s the dynamic that’s the most surprising or troubling? Where is the power in the room, who’s got it, and what happens if we invert that power? As a director I’m looking to get into a space where you are looking at the most interesting, the most alive, the most complicated version of everything. The book is extraordinary because it absorbs you into it, it swallows you up, so that is the feeling we endeavored to recreate for a movie audience.
On what Margot Robbie brings to the iconic role of Cathy…
Margot is absolutely extraordinary. The thing about casting is finding the root of this person and what do they make you feel and how can that be used and subverted in an interesting way as this character? For me, Cathy is like Estella from Great Expectations, or Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind. She’s spoiled, capricious, fierce, a “belle dame sans merci,” a movie star stuck in the middle of nowhere with no audience. She’s deeply feeling, funny, her emotions are gigantic, but Brontë is very specific and says again and again in the book that Cathy likes to hurt people, she enjoys pushing to see how far she can get away with something and still be forgiven: she’s something of a sadist.
So she’s got this dangerous charisma and willfulness, this interest in cruelty, and this vanity, and the only thing that makes her forgivable in many ways is her love for Heathcliff. Margot is able to encapsulate all of this. Cathy needed to be played with someone with their own dangerous, life-ruining beauty and charisma. The moment Margot first read Cathy’s words you immediately understood who this person was, and why everyone around her would forgive her anything. Margot is so deeply talented, and she’s also wild in many of the same ways as Cathy: she’s deeply feeling, she’s naughty, she’s clever, she’s powerful, if she wanted to she could be fucking scary. That’s a woman you want to spend time with.
On what Jacob Elordi brings to the iconic role of Heathcliff…
Heathcliff is the archetypical, Byronic hero, a despicable love interest. He’s defensive, angry, cruel, dangerous, but he’s also one of the most devastatingly moving characters in literature. Gathering all of those things together is tough and, like Cathy, it required an actor who could make us love the unlovable. Jacob is extraordinary in that way, I knew he could communicate the tenderness, the depth of feeling, the loneliness of Heathcliff as well as his copious flaws. His work is so detailed, so specific, and it’s also so effortless. In Saltburn his brief was similar: make this boy—who on paper we should hate—the most loveable person in the world. It’s not easy to do, and both Margot and Jacob had to walk the razor thin line that Brontë set out, with villain on one side, and hero on the other.
On the rest of your terrific ensemble?
Hong Chau—I’ve just been completely and utterly obsessed with her forever, but in Kinds of Kindness, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her work is so seamless. She’s funny and clever and detailed. Nelly is one of the most complicated characters in the film—also walking that line between good and bad—so it required someone with Hong’s genius to pull us in all those different directions.
It was the same with Shazad Latif. I saw him in What’s Love Got to Do With It, this amazing British romcom, and he was just extraordinary. He was just such a credible romantic lead—funny, gorgeous, un-cheesy, which is one of the hardest things to do. Edgar Linton needed to be a real threat to Heathcliff, someone who made the audience instantly recognize Cathy’s predicament. Edgar isn’t only rich, he is kind, he’s patient, he’s educated and he is pulling Cathy towards the modern world. Shazad makes Edgar so instantly delightful, but also so relatable, and so heartbreaking; he’s a romantic hero in his own right. Alison Oliver is sublime, just so deeply talented, and her Isabella is showstopping: so funny, so complicated, so frightening, so vulnerable, so unbelievably relatable. I don’t think anyone could have played the part but her. And Martin Clunes—one of the greats, an impossibly good actor and an impossibly difficult part. I think he’s a master craftsman.
On your amazing creative team…
I’ve just been so lucky to work with people like Jacqueline [Durran] and Suzie [Davis] and Linus [Sandgren] and Siân [Miller], and everyone who has worked on this movie. It’s magical to find the kind of connectedness that makes you all able to translate an idea visually. On every aspect of production, we were constantly feeling out where the edges were, where the pleasure centers were, where the cliff edge was (and often going off them!). Does a scene have the “squeal factor,” does it make us swoon, or recoil? If we have a physical response to a room, or a fabric, or mis en scene, then so will the audience. Pushing boundaries, putting things under just the right amount of duress, just before they break, that’s where the interest is for all of us. Drama is friction. Love is friction.
On the benefits of going “old school”…
Everything is handmade and shot in-camera. The fun of making something from scratch, and why we wanted to make a kind of old school studio movie, is that you can decide everything, even where the windows go so you can control the light and create your shots from early on, and so on. And when you know who your cast are really early, you can start thinking about the little details of their costume well in advance.
On the minutest details costume designer Jacqueline Durran and production designer Suzie Davies deliver…
Oh, they are simply brilliant. Cathy’s costumes are just mind blowing. Jacqueline and I started with hundreds—possibly thousands—of images, until we started to feel the repeated elements: the shapes, the textures, the details that made us feel for the characters. For Cathy, she was sharper, bolder, a femme fatale in silhouette and texture; she takes up space, she is the focus of every room she is in. For Isabella she was softer, pinker, frillier. Isabella’s extremely repressed. She’s been kept by Edgar in this sort of permanent girlhood, but she’s obviously absolutely throbbing with desire. And so those rosettes on her costumes, along with everything she makes, all of her crafts projects are inadvertently pornographic. You want to make a movie where every single detail speaks volumes about character.
With Suzie it was a similar process. With the house Wuthering Heights, we wanted it to feel like a place that is being taken over by a hostile landscape. It’s sliced in half by huge slate rocks. And as it ages it becomes more malignant, it starts to crack, things start to ooze out of it. In the gothic everything is alive, so we wanted that to extend to the sets.
If Wuthering Heights is a place where nature is thrusting itself into the man-made, Thrushcross Grange is a place which attempts to do the opposite: to constrain nature. Cathy’s room is made of her “skin”—we printed Margot’s skin (veins and freckles included) onto padded fabric with a sheer latex overlay, and trapped it inside panels. The drawing room is made of the inside of a geode, the library is Edgar’s “collectors” room, where all of nature is tastefully encased. This was a very Victorian preoccupation: taking the wild and attempting to tame it. We spent a lot of time looking at hairwork, flower pressing, taxidermy. Natural things made grotesque by human intervention, which is really the central idea of the book.
On what global music artist Charli xcx brings to the soundscape of this film…
I’ve been obsessed with Charli xcx since I first knew about her, when she was I think like 15 and making stuff in her bedroom. I just think she’s so unbelievably talented. Her song “Boys” is the first song in Promising Young Woman, which I had written into the script, I love it so much. To me, music is especially important if you want to elicit a physical reaction, to get people to feel something, and on this film we wanted audiences to feel so deeply. But it can be quite difficult to make music for something that is set in a certain period. You have to decide what your boundaries are. I sent the script to Charli with a view to asking her simply if she had an emotional response to it, would she like to make a song about it? It wasn’t even like, “here’s the scene.” It was just, “what does this make you feel?” And she called me and asked if she could do an album. Of course I said yes. And then she just started sending me just the most incredible things that were new, sexy, emotionally engaging. I think that’s the thing that’s so wonderful about getting to work on a movie like this—you are just looking for people to collaborate with you, to give them a lot of space to make stuff and to have a response and not to be too prescriptive. It’s just been the most thrilling thing in the world, and it’s now my favorite album of all time.
On what you hope audiences—whether they’ve read the book or not—will experience when they see the film…
Nobody should be sitting in silence watching this movie. Our “WUTHERING HEIGHTS” is a period romance but it’s not niche. It’s a grand, epic, multi-plex movie based on what I believe is the greatest love story ever written. The cinema is a place to connect, and we’re giving audiences a way to feel something, to unleash any emotions they’ve been stifling. To reclaim romance via a devastatingly sexy film from a sexy book—as sexy a book as could’ve been at that time, and it still is today. Emily Brontë’s story gets under your skin. No matter how many times I’ve read it I find things that are new, or remember something that I can no longer find, and that destabilises me as much as it did when I first read it. It has, for all these years, stirred my imaginings in ways nothing else has, and I hope when people see the film—whether they know the book or not—they feel destabilised, disoriented. I hope it gets under their skin in the very best way and that they leave the cinema feeling electrified.
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