Director Emerald Fennell discusses filming ‘primal’ novel

The director of a much-anticipated new film version of Wuthering Heights has said she wants it to convey the “primal” feeling she had when she first read the book as a teenager.

Emerald Fennell spoke about her adaptation for the first time on Friday in author Emily Brontë’s home town of Haworth, West Yorkshire.

Her film will star Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and the release of an erotically charged trailer this month fuelled the fevered debate surrounding the film, months before its release.

Fennell said: “I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it, which means that it’s an emotional response to something. It’s, like, primal, sexual.”

The writer and director won an Oscar for Promising Young Woman in 2021, but is best known for last year’s psychological thriller Saltburn, which gained cult status for a succession of provocative and confrontational scenes.

Her uncompromising and unsettling tastes are on show again in the Wuthering Heights trailer. It gives a glimpse of the film’s heightened and highly stylised gothic approach, and is full of pent-up tension, shots of bread being suggestively kneaded, and a finger being put into a fish’s mouth.

Fennell told the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival on Friday that she felt a “profound connection” with the book when she first read it at the age of 14. “It cracked me open,” she said.

Emily Brontë’s story of turbulent and tragic romance, written in 1847, is “difficult, it’s complicated, it’s just not like anything else”, she said.

“It’s completely singular. It’s so sexy. It’s so horrible. It’s so devastating.”

When it came to making the film, Fennell, 39, said: “I wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14.”

She suggested that some of her risqué additions are things she thought she had remembered from reading the book as a teenager – but weren’t actually in there when she returned to it.

“It’s where I filled in the gaps aged 14,” she said with a smile, adding that the film had allowed her to “see what it would feel like fulfil my 14-year-old wish, which is both good and bad”.

Fennell had always wanted to adapt the novel throughout her career, she told the audience in Haworth, and was “extremely lucky” that after Saltburn she had the freedom to choose what she did next.

Wuthering Heights was the thing she wanted to do “most desperately”, the writer and director said.

“I’ve been obsessed. I’ve been driven mad by this book,” she said. “And of course now I’m even madder than I was before because I’ve thought of little else now for two years.”

Adapting it is “a terror as well, of course, because it’s a huge responsibility”, she added. “Because I know that if somebody else made it, I’d be furious. It’s very personal material for everyone. It’s very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private, I think.”

It has also felt like “an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you”, she explained. “I’ve actually found it quite harrowing, in a really interesting way.

“There’s an enormous amount of sado-masochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published].

“But it’s been a kind of masochistic exercise working on it because I love it so much, and it can’t love me back, and I have to live with that. So it’s been troubling, but I think in a really useful way.”

The choice of casting raised eyebrows because Robbie, at 35, is older than Catherine Earnshaw, who is a teenager in the book; while Heathcliff is described by Brontë as being “dark-skinned”.

Speaking about Australian actor Elordi, Fennell said that she asked him to play Heathcliff after seeing him on the set of Saltburn and he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”.

“And it was so awful because I so wanted to scream. Not the professional thing to do, obviously.

“I had been thinking about making it and, it seemed to me he had the thing… he’s a very surprising actor.”

Robbie, meanwhile, is “not like anyone I’ve ever met – ever – and I think that’s what I felt like with Cathy”.

The Barbie actress, also from Australia, is “so beautiful and interesting and surprising, and she is the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything”, Fennell said.

“I think honestly she could commit a killing spree and nobody would mind, and that is who Cathy is to me. Cathy is somebody who just pushes to see how far she can go.

“So it needed somebody like Margot, who’s a star, not just an incredible actress – which she is – but somebody who has a power, an otherworldly power, a Godlike power, that means people lose their minds.”

Despite taking some liberties, Fennell said she had retained much of Brontë’s original dialogue.

“I was really determined to preserve as much of her dialogue [as possible] because her dialogue is the best dialogue ever,” she said. “I couldn’t better it, and who could?”

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights will be released in cinemas on 14 February – Valentine’s Day – next year.