Emerald Fennell reveals stupid real reason Wuthering Heights is so different from the book

After watching Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights film, loads of people were confused about why so much of Emily Brontë’s original book was changed or cut altogether, and now Emerald Fennell has explained the real reason the new film is so different.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the writer-director made it clear from the start that she wasn’t trying to recreate the book word-for-word.

“It was funny, you know, I think the things that I remembered were both real and not real,” she said. “So there was a certain amount of wish fulfilment in there. And there were whole characters that I’d sort of forgotten or consolidated.”

She also said she “wanted to make something that was my response and interpretation to that book and to the feeling of it” rather than a direct adaptation.

‘If you’re making a movie, you’ve got to make those kinds of hard decisions’

via Warner Bros

Fennell admitted the book’s structure just doesn’t work easily as a two-hour film. She said, “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.”

She even said that, ideally, she would go much bigger. “And I think, really, I would do a mini series and encompass the whole thing over 10 hours, and it would be beautiful,” she said. “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.”

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Instead of tackling the entire multi-generational story, she focused mainly on Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship, the first half of the novel. And that meant cutting characters like Mr Lockwood completely, and reshaping others like Hindley.

Rather than keeping Hindley as a separate character, she folded parts of him into Mr Earnshaw. Explaining that choice, she said, “I tried to, wherever I could, gather people together in the same way that we don’t have Lockwood, either.”

About Earnshaw’s expanded role, she added, “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?’”

She said the character becomes “both… extremely, deeply loving and charismatic, and on the other hand, extremely abusive and cruel.”

She firmly believes that Wuthering Heights is a love story

via Warner Bros

Emerald Fennell also believes the story is, at its core, a love story, even if it’s messy and dark. “There’s a lot about the book, and probably the film, too, that is transgressive, complicated, difficult, dark. It’s why there’s still so much argument about whether it is a love story or not,” she said.

She added, “Of course, I believe firmly that it is a love story. Which is why I think it’s endured for so long. That’s not to say it’s a love story that’s easy or healthy. But it’s extremely potent nonetheless, like a lot of love affairs.”

Well, it feels like the whole point of the book was completely missed, and that’s all I’ll say.

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