Emerald Fennell, who wrote and directed Saltburn, will adapt Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights as her next movie.
Emerald Fennell, who wrote and directed Saltburn, had set her next project, an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights.
The novel, which was first published in 1847, deals with “Heathcliff, an orphan-turned-foster-son who falls in love with the daughter of the family who owns the estate on which he now lives, Wuthering Heights. After running away, Heathcliff rises up through the ranks of the gentry and exacts revenge on the families — the Earnshaws and the Lintons — who kept him from his true love.” Although some early reviews didn’t quite know what to make of the novel, it has since been accepted as one of the greatest English-language novels of all time.
Fennell tweeted a logo for the Wuthering Heights movie with the caption, “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad.“
Wuthering Heights has been adapted numerous times, including in 1939 with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, 1970 with Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall, 1992 with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, and 2011 with Kaya Scodelario and James Howson.
While speaking with Vanity Fair last year, Fennell said that she’s always been drawn to darker stories. “For that completely overwhelming carnal desire to take hold, there has to be an element of revulsion, there has to be an element of transgression,” she said. “My favorite thing in general is sympathy for the devil. The sorts of people that we can’t stand, the sorts of people who are abhorrent — if we can love them, if we can fall in love with these people, if we can understand why this is so alluring, in spite of its palpable cruelty and unfairness and sort of strangeness, if we all want to be there too, I think that’s just such an interesting dynamic.“
Fennell was also once slated to write a script for DC’s Zatanna movie, but due to all the changes at the studio, the project was scrapped. “I don’t know a huge amount about the superhero genre. It’s not a genre that I naturally gravitate towards. I was like, ‘How do I make a movie like that for people like me, who maybe don’t know so much and wouldn’t necessarily buy a ticket the first time around?’” Fennell said last year. “It was sort of that kind of thing and I was like, ‘Okay, this is interesting.’ Zatanna is just a really, really cool character. I think, just like everything — I did write it. It was complicated. It’s the classic studio stuff, classic studio stuff. J.J. is incredible, his team is incredible. I wrote, in the end, a script that I think is reasonably demented. In a good way, I think. In the end, I think the whole universe was changed.“