Emerald Fennell Defends Making Controversial Changes To Wuthering Heights In New Film

Emerald Fennell is speaking out about the changes she made to the story of Wuthering Heights as part of her new film.

The Oscar winner’s new adaptation of Emily Brontë’s gothic novel hit cinemas late last week, and while critical reception was initially mixed, fans of the original book have spent the past few days voicing their issues with changes that have been made in this latest iteration.

As is often the case with screen versions of Wuthering Heights, Emerald’s adaptation focusses solely on the first half of the book, but the Saltburn director made a string of other changes, too.

These included the full removal of Cathy’s brother Hindley and more explicitly villainising characters like Nelly and Linton, as well as the decision to make Heathcliff and Isabella’s relationship more consensually submissive than the coercion and abuse outlined in the novel.

Oh, and there’s also a whole lot more sex in the movie, too.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Emerald began by admitting that she started scripting her new film by seeing how much of Wuthering Heights she could remember just from memory, having first encountered the book as a teenager.

“I think the things that I remembered were both real and not real,” she explained. “So there was a certain amount of wish fulfillment in there, and there were whole characters that I’d sort of forgotten or consolidated.”

As a result, the film is more inspired by her “response and interpretation to that book and to the feeling of it” than a faithful adaptation.

“I think, really, I would do a mini series and encompass the whole thing over 10 hours, and it would be beautiful,” she added of the many changes made compared to the source material.

“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.” 

Of course, before the film was even in production, Emerald’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights faced backlash over her casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, a character who is heavily implied in the book to be a person of colour.

Responding last month to these “whitewashing” accusations, the two-time Bafta recipient said: “The thing is, everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so, you can only ever kind of make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.

“That’s the great thing about this movie is that it could be made every year and it would still be so moving and so interesting.”

She previously claimed she was first inspired to cast Jacob as Heathcliff after noticing while working with him on Saltburn that he “looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff” on the first copy of Wuthering Heights that she read.