Emerald Fennell on Channeling Emily Brontë’s Radical Vision for Wuthering Heights

Emerald Fennell has a theory about Emily Brontë. The writer, Fennell tells W, "was radically amoral. She absolutely refused to make judgments, and that's still really disconcerting, especially when it comes to female characters." Nearly two centuries after Wuthering Heights was published, the novel’s questions remain unresolved: is it a toxic love story or a transcendent romance? A feminist text or a Gothic nightmare? The lack of consensus, Fennell says, is both the point and the fun of it all. “Wuthering Heights is the ultimate book club book,” she says, “because everyone can argue about it ’till the cows come home. And so I'm always just like, ‘You tell me.’"

Fennell was fourteen when she encountered Brontë’s first and only novel, published in 1847 under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell. "I thought, Oh, you can go there. You can make something really disturbing and sexy and nightmarish,” Fennell says. “It just got me in its grip."

That grip, it turns out, never quite let go. Like the Brontë sisters themselves, who famously invented elaborate stories inside the walls of their Yorkshire parsonage, the British filmmaker has been world-building in her head since childhood. Her vision for Wuthering Heights is just one such fantasy manifested for the screen. "Lots of women writers that I know do this," she says. "The things that I make come from the imaginary worlds that I live in."

Fennell's Wuthering Heights is absolutely not a faithful literary translation; like most adaptations, it cuts the book’s third act entirely and excises much of its sprawling, multi-generational story in service of her dreamlike vision. It arrives after William Wyler's Laurence Olivier-starring 1939 epic and Andrea Arnold's wind-scoured 2011 interpretation, two films among several that cemented the novel's place in cinematic history.

In true Fennell form, it refuses to conform to the conventions of a period drama, or any genre, really, with a pulsating soundtrack by Charli xcx and sumptuous, Jacqueline Durran-designed costumes for its leads with contemporary touches. In one scene, Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw wears tiny, orange-framed sunglasses with her Victorian gown. In another, Jacob Elordi’s heartthrob version of Heathcliff returns from his continental travels sporting a gold earring and a gold tooth.

Though the film looks and feels downright feral—bodice-ripping sex scenes collide with surrealist touches like melon-sized strawberries and wallpaper made to look like Robbie’s skin—much of it was constructed in the most old-fashioned way possible: on analog soundstages, with meticulously built sets by production designer Suzie Davis. Like Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, her Wuthering Heights is unapologetic and, like Brontë's novel itself, sure to polarize.

There have been many adaptations of Wuthering Heights. What did you want your version to say that hasn't been said before?

All of the adaptations that have come before it are amazing. That's absolutely why the title is in inverted commas. I’m aware of how personal the book is to so many of us, so I wanted to communicate as early as possible that it could only ever be an attempt to take a tiny piece of the book and make sense of it. It’s vast, the book. It covers generations. It’s at odds with itself. It changes depending on the time of day that you read it. It was like looking at a Shakespeare play or Milton's epic poems. I could only take my experience of it and try to translate it.

Everything in the film is very tactile, from the sets to the costumes. What were some of your inspirations?

The starting point is imagining you’re a young girl who doesn't really know what the Victorian or Georgian eras look like. We asked: if we were aliens given this text, how would we recreate this world? If the Gothic is about pathetic fallacy, then it can’t just be the weather: it has to be the food, the costumes. That’s a particularly feminine thing, to acknowledge that what you're wearing or how your hair is styled has a huge bearing on your emotions.

It’s also all of those Victorian obsessions: flower pressing, taxidermy, and hair work. Everything in Wuthering Heights is covered in hair. At Wuthering Heights, you get these goat-skin throws that are kind of pubic and horrible, and skin drying on walls, but then you go to Thrushcross and the underside of everything is hair: the underside of chairs or staircases is furry. It’s the tension between the real, the hyperreal, the surreal, and the primal.

We’re having a Gothic moment in culture. Why do you think it’s resonating right now?

I think we’re all reaching out a little for connection. The Gothic is subconscious, and it is visceral, and we're all looking to physically feel. The wonderful thing about Frankenstein—or even If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which is the most alive and brilliant contribution, for me, to the Gothic canon—is that it is felt as much as understood.

The film is billed as “the greatest love story of all time,” but it’s a century-old debate as to whether Catherine and Heathcliff are soulmates or just toxic. Where do you land?

You can't make a didactic film out of a book that is not didactic, really. You can only make an approximation of how it makes you feel. I felt this, maybe with all the films I've made: the disagreement or the lack of consensus about something is valid and important. Therefore, I'm the least useful person to wade in on the nature of the romance.

Do you think it's a feminist text?

Yeah, oh my goodness. I don't know that any transcendent art made by a woman couldn't be feminist. I love the Brontës, but I'm particularly obsessed with Emily. She made something that was and remains disturbing. Her sisters did make things that had troubling Gothic elements, but Wuthering Heights is destabilizing. And if you make something destabilizing, then it transcends time. She lives in the same world as a Paula Rego or a Kate Bush. There are people making work that isn’t like anything else.

The emotional core of the film is built on Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s chemistry. What was it like to watch that develop?

I'll talk about Margot and Jacob all day—and actually about all of them, Alison Oliver, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, and Martin Clunes—because these incredibly talented people are under such scrutiny, and yet they will work with me on something like this that is unknowable and complicated. I love working with people who want to come and risk doing something deranged or terrible, and then, in the process, find something really special.

Your reputation as a filmmaker precedes you. Did you want to subvert or meet expectations with this film?

The thing for me is always trying to make something that approximates what I hope the audience will feel. When I look at the kind of filmmakers that I admire, they tend to operate on an operatic level. I like movies where you see something different every time you watch them. And I like working in a way that is hyper, hyper-detailed. To a psychotic degree.

Wuthering Heights is now playing in theaters.