Emerald Fennell has spoken for the first time about her already controversial film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel “Wuthering Heights.”
During a panel at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in England on Friday, the “Saltburn” and “Promising Young Woman” director said she wanted the movie — starring Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff — to convey how she felt reading the book for the first time as a teenager.
“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,” Fennell said, according to the BBC. “It’s, like, primal, sexual.”
The first trailer for “Wuthering Heights,” which released earlier this month, certainly portrayed that. It features shots of bread being kneaded suggestively, sweat dripping down Elordi’s back, a finger being placed in a fish’s mouth and plenty of bodice-ripping, all set to a remixed version of Charli xcx’s “Everything Is Romantic.” The teaser continued to fuel fervent debate about the film, with some calling it too erotic.
But Fennell disagrees, saying: “There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism in this book. There’s a reason people were deeply shocked by it [when it was published].”
She added, “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.”
Fennell said that she recognizes the “huge responsibility” of adapting the book, which has been brought to screen several times before, perhaps most notably with the 1992 version starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes.
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“I know that if somebody else made it, I’d be furious,” she continued. “It’s very personal material for everyone. It’s very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private, I think.”
Though she’s taken some liberties elsewhere, Fennell — who also wrote the screenplay for the film — asserted that she kept 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?”
Beyond the film’s apparent eroticism, Fennell has also faced some heat for casting Robbie and Elordi. Cathy is a teenager in the book while Robbie is 35, and Heathcliff is described as being “dark-skinned” while Elordi is not.
However, Fennell enthusiastically stood by her casting choices during the panel, telling the crowd she knew Elordi was her Heathcliff when she met him on the set of “Saltburn.”
Elordi “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read,” Fennell said. “And it was so awful because I so wanted to scream. Not the professional thing to do, obviously.”
She added, “I had been thinking about making [‘Wuthering Heights’], and it seemed to me he had the thing… he’s a very surprising actor.”
Of Robbie, the director said she is “not like anyone I’ve ever met — ever — and I think that’s what I felt like with Cathy,” adding that the “Barbie” star is “so beautiful and interesting and surprising, and she is the type of person who, like Cathy, could get away with anything.”
“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,” Fennell continued. “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.”
“Wuthering Heights” releases in theatres on Feb. 14.
From Variety US