‘Wuthering Heights’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Hello, I’m Emerald Fennell, and I’m the screenwriter and director of “Wuthering Heights.” “Wait till you see your dresses, Cathy.” So in this scene, we have a tour of Thrushcross Grange, which is Cathy’s marital home. It is Edgar Linton and his ward, Isabella, played by the incredible Shazad Latif and Alison Oliver. And they are showing around Cathy Linton, now, played by the wonderful Margot Robbie. The sequence is shot in a single take by our incredible camera operator, Ossie McLean, who is one of the best Steadicam ops in the world. And so the hallways in Thrushcross Grange are all in this kind of arterial blood red. “I said it should be the most beautiful color in the world. The color of my wife’s sweet face. Here, look the freckle from your cheek.” I think the thing about Thrushcross Grange is it’s designed to be at once kind of beguiling and grotesque. So it was always about talking to Suzie Davies, the incredible production designer, about how to have of uncanny feeling that was subconscious rather than overbearing. In the end, what it was made out of was padded panels with photographs of Margot’s actual skin and veins and freckles printed onto fabric, and then with an overlay of this very thin latex. And so what you find in the Victorian era was there was a huge preoccupation with containing nature. So here we have this lamb that is taxidermied. “Nelly. Nelly. Nelly. Nelly!” “Yes, Cathy.” “Well, you have been quiet.” “Quiet?” Nelly Dean is played by the unbelievable Hong Chau. This is the library, which is a kind of collector’s cabinet. So you can see these hands everywhere holding natural artifacts which have been lacquered. And it’s all about, containing nature and what happens when you do that, which really is the kind center of the book. It’s why Cathy’s necklace is enormous and almost choking, and why her dress is corseted extremely tightly. “As for the rest, this is good.”