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Saltburn director Emerald Fennell is working on a film adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
The director teased her next project on X/Twitter on Friday (July 12) with a graphic that reads, “Be with me always – Take any form – Drive me mad,” a line from Emily Brontë’s famed 1847 gothic novel.
Citing insiders, Variety reports that the filmmaker will reteam with MRC, the studio behind Saltburn.
No further details about the production have been disclosed.
The tale of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff and their tormented union has inspired numerous adaptations over the years.
William Wyler’s 1939 production for United Artists starred an up-and-coming Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Cathy.
More recent interpretations have included a 1992 feature starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche. Andrea Arnold’s gritty 2011 take on the book cast Black actors Solomon Glave and James Howson as the child and adult Heathcliff, posing an interesting question about the character’s origin as an orphan of the Liverpool docks.
“I’ve always been obsessed with the gothic,” Fennell wrote in a January 2024 column for the Los Angeles Times. “Whether it was Edward Gorey’s children who are variously choked by peaches, sucked dry by leeches or smothered by rugs; Du Maurier’s imperiled heroines or the disturbing erotic power of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, the gothic world has always had me in its grip. It’s a genre where comedy and horror, revulsion and desire, sex and death are forever entwined, where every exchange is heavy with the threat of violence, or sex or both.”
Fennell is hot off the success of 2023’s Saltburn – her Brideshead Revisited-adjacent thriller starring Barry Keoghan as an Oxford University student who is taken under the wing of an aristocratic peer (Jacob Elordi).
While The Independent praised Saltburn upon release, it received mixed reviews elsewhere – and the audience reaction proved equally as divisive, with many questioning the film’s depiction of class via scenes designed to shock.
However, it was agreed that Keoghan’s performance, as well as Rosamund Pike’s supporting role, was deserving of praise. Both received Golden Globe nominations.
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Published by Brontë under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, a year before her death, Wuthering Heights is set in the Yorkshire moors and revolves around two warring families: the Earnshaws and the Lintons.
Reflecting on the book’s legacy, Melissa Jones wrote for The Independent: “By attempting to soften, humanise, explain the lovers, screen adaptations have failed to capture the book’s power. Self-destruction is a feature of tragedy rather than romance; Wuthering Heights is a tragedy in the purest sense, the tragedy of self-betrayal and transgression. The lovers experience the essential only through one another. Divide them, and the rest of the world, as Cathy so memorably puts it, means nothing.”
