Emerald Fennell has made a ‘primal, sexual’ version of Wuthering Heights that her 14-year-old self could connect to.
The Saltburn filmmaker is working on an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, featuring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the lead roles, which has already stirred up controversy with its raunchy trailer.
But the 39-year-old director, who thinks there is an ‘enormous amount of sadomasochism’ in the book, recalled how she has felt a ‘profound connection’ with the story since she first read it as a teenager.
Speaking for the first time about her upcoming movie at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival in Yorkshire, she explained: ‘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. It’s, like, primal, sexual.
‘It cracked me open [as a teenager]. It’s difficult, it’s complicated, it’s just not like anything else. It’s completely singular. It’s so sexy. It’s so horrible. It’s so devastating.’
According to the BBC, she added: ‘I wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14.’
As well as backlash to the casting of Robbie and Elordi, fans have been shocked to hear reports of the film’s contents, as well as glimpses of suggestive scenes in the first trailer.
Heavy breathing, sweaty skin, and fingers in mouths – including that of a dead fish’s – as well as a fractured version of Charli XCX’s Everything is romantic thrumming on the soundtrack, saw the film dubbed ’50 Shades of Brontë’ from its trailer.
A preview screening also leaked details of reported scenes in the film, including a nun fondling a corpse and a ‘BDSM-tinged encounter’, as well as a condemned man ejaculating during an execution.
But Fennell disagrees with backlash to the erotic undertones (and overtones?) of her film, 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.’
And Fennell revealed that some of her risqué additions to the story came from her early memories of the book, and things she thought she remembered reading – only to realise they weren’t actually explicitly on the page when she went back.
‘It’s where I filled in the gaps aged 14,’ she said, while sharing that making the film allowed her to ‘see what it would feel like to fulfil my 14-year-old wish, which is both good and bad’.
The promising Woman Oscar nominee – who told Metro in 2023 about the ‘extreme place’ the Saltburn cast had to access to perform some of that movie’s controversial scenes – also joked she is ‘even madder than before’ after working on the film because she’s ‘obsessed’ and ‘thought of little else now for two years’.
Acknowledging the dauting task at hand – as well as some of the criticism already levelled at her with the film still almost five months away from release – Fennell confessed: ‘I know that if somebody else made it, I’d be furious. It’s very personal material for everyone. It’s very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private, I think.’
Wuthering Heights has faced criticism because 35-year-old Robbie is older than Catherine Earnshaw, who is a teenager in the book, while her lover Heathcliff is described as ‘dark-skinned’.
However, Fennell knew Elordi was the right person for the role in her adaptation after seeing him on the set of Saltburn one day and realising he ‘looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read’.
She added: ‘And it was so awful because I so wanted to scream. Not the professional thing to do, obviously.
‘I had been thinking about making it [Wuthering Heights], and it seemed to me he had the thing… he’s a very surprising actor.’
And as for Robbie, the director felt the Barbie actress is ‘not like anyone I’ve ever met – ever – and I think that’s what I felt like with Cathy’ and could ‘get away with anything’.
She added: ‘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.
‘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 is set for release in cinemas on February 13, 2026.
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