Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell is defending the book-to-screen changes she made in the new movie.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights isn’t a traditional adaptation of the 1847 Emily Brontë novel but, as the director explained in a Friday, February 13, interview with Entertainment Weekly, her own “interpretation” of the gothic classic.
Writing the script, the Oscar winner said she challenged herself to recall as much as she could from reading the book as a teenager, which meant that she remembered moments that “were both real and not real.”
“So there was a certain amount of wish fulfillment in there, and there were whole characters that I’d sort of forgotten or consolidated,” Fennell, 40, told the outlet.
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Fennell said she wanted to pay particular focus to the doomed romance between Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw (played by Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), which prompted her to make significant changes. The movie largely follows the first half of Brontë’s novel (no ghost Cathy here!) and certain characters, like Cathy’s brother Hindley, are absent.
“I think, really, I would do a miniseries and encompass the whole thing over 10 hours, and it would be beautiful. But if you’re making a movie, and you’ve got to be fairly tight, you’ve got to make those kinds of hard decisions,” the director explained.
Perhaps the most significant change is the end of Fennell’s movie, which concludes with Cathy’s death. (In the second half of the book, Cathy, as a ghost, haunts the fictional estate of Wuthering Heights, wanting to be reunited with Heathcliff, while the plot follows the next generation of inhabitants of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.)
“It begins where it ends and ends where it begins. And that’s the thing about love, and it’s the thing about the book, right?” Fennell said of her conclusion. “It’s that it’s forever and it’s cyclical, and so there’s no stop — even when there’s a terrible, sad, tragic stop, it’s not really a stop — because that’s what the book feels so much about.”
She added, “It’s about the depths of human feeling and how it exists in a profound way, not just a physical one. And so that, I don’t know, that felt like the right way to end it for me.”
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Fans of Brontë’s novel will also note that Hindley and Mr. Lockwood, one of the narrators in the book, are not included in Fennell’s interpretation of the text. Cathy’s father, Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), however, plays an expanded role in the film and takes on some of Hindley’s characteristics.
“Hindley still exists, I believe, but in the form of Earnshaw,” Fennell said. “I tried to, wherever I could, gather people together in the same way that we don’t have Lockwood, either. It’s such a complicated structure, the novel, that really it would have been very, very difficult to turn that into a coherent movie because it would just be much more time.”
“It was [about] taking, ‘What is it about Hindley? What is it about his relationship with his sister and his half-brother, I suppose, in Heathcliff? And how does it shape their lives? How did the love of their father shape their lives?’” Fennell shared. “And so what we have instead is a character who is both, who is like, I think, a lot of people who know alcoholics… extremely, deeply loving and charismatic, and on the other hand, extremely abusive and cruel.”
Wuthering Heights is in theaters now.
