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Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell is defending the book-to-screen change she made in the new film.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights It’s not a traditional adaptation of the 1847 Emily Brontë novel, but as the director explained in an interview on Friday, February 13 entertainment weeklyher own “interpretation” of the gothic classic.
While writing the script, the Oscar-winner said she challenged herself to recall as many memories as possible of reading the book as a teenager, which meant she remembered moments that were “both true and unreal.”
“So there’s a level of wish fulfillment in it, and there’s some whole characters that I kind of forgot about or solidified,” Fennell, 40, told the outlet.
It’s not quite the Wuthering Heights you read in high school. The new film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel starring Margot Robbie (Katherine) and Jacob Elordi (Heathcliff) hits theaters on Friday, February 13, and it’s already causing a lot of controversy, from its casting choices to major plot changes. This video currently has (…)
Fennell said she wanted to pay special attention to Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw (courtesy of Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elord), which prompted her to make significant changes. The film largely follows the first half of the Brontë novel (no ghost Cathy here!), and certain characters are absent, such as Cathy’s brother Hindley.
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in Wuthering Heights.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures“I thought, really, I would make a miniseries and do the whole story in 10 hours, and that would be beautiful. But if you’re going to make a movie, you have to be pretty intense, you have to make these hard decisions,” the director explained.
Perhaps the most significant change is the ending of Fennell’s film, which ends with Cassie’s death. (In the second half of the book, Cathy appears as a ghost in the fictional Wuthering Heights, seeking to reunite with Heathcliff, while the plot revolves around the next generation of residents of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.)
“It picks up where it ends and ends where it begins. That’s the thing about love, that’s the thing about the book, right?” Fennell said of her conclusion. “It’s timeless and it’s cyclical, so there’s no stopping — even if there’s a terrible, sad, tragic stopping, it’s not really stopping — because that’s what the book is about.”
She added, “It’s about the depth of human emotion and how it exists in a profound way that’s not just physical. So, I don’t know, it was the right way for me to end it.”
Perhaps the most anticipated new film of February is Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Emily Bronte’s classic 1847 novel, which has already caused controversy. Starring Margot Robbie as Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, the film has generated a huge response and is expected to break box office records when it opens on February 13. if(…)
Fans of the Brontë novels will also note that Hindley and Mr. Lockwood, one of the book’s narrators, are not included in Fennell’s interpretation of the text. However, Cathy’s father Earnshaw (Martin Crulles) plays a larger role in the film and inherits some of Hindley’s traits.
“I believe Hindley still exists, but in the form of Earnshaw,” Fennell said. “I tried to bring people together as much as possible in the same way as we would have without Lockwood. The structure of the novel is so complex that actually it would have been very, very difficult to turn it into a coherent film because it would have taken so much more time.”
“It’s about, ‘What is Hindley’s story? I guess, in Heathcliff, what is his relationship with his sister and half-brother? How has it shaped their lives? How has their father’s love shaped their lives?'” Fennell shared. “So what we have is a character who is a little bit of both, who is, I think, like a lot of people who know alcoholics… extremely deeply loving and charming, but on the other hand, extremely sadistic and cruel.”
Wuthering Heights Now playing in theaters.
