Emerald Fennell Announces ‘Wuthering Heights’ Adaptation
Samantha Bergeson
Emerald Fennell just announced her third feature film, and this time, it’ll be an adapted screenplay.
Fennell is set to direct the latest adaptation of Emily Brontë’s beloved “Wuthering Heights” novel. Fennell tweeted a logo for the feature, along with the tagline, “Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad.”
IndieWire reached out to Fennell’s representatives for confirmation.
The Oscar winner made her feature directorial debut with “Promising Young Woman” and released “Saltburn” in 2023. Fennell deemed “Saltburn” a “fully Gothic” twisted love story, and now, “Wuthering Heights” will lean into both of those genres. The feature will also reunite Fennell with MRC on the production side, which she collaborated with for “Saltburn.”
“Wuthering Heights” centers on the tortured romance between Cathy and Heathcliff that is rife with revenge.
Fennell previously told Vanity Fair that her filmmaking passion is telling stories of darker desires.
“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.”
As for her projects, Fennell added to IndieWire that she always has a few scripts in the works.
“I usually have a few things going on, but I don’t write them down. I just write them in my head,” Fennell, who won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for “Promising Young Woman,” said. “So I’ve been visiting ‘Saltburn’ for maybe seven, eight years.”
“Saltburn” also was part of the “Gothic British country house” lineage, with Fennell citing “Brideshead Revisited,” “The Go-Between,” “Atonement,” and “Rebecca” as inspirations.
“Wuthering Heights” was most recently adapted by “Bird” director Andrea Arnold in 2012. Arnold told IndieWire that adaptation was “difficult” to make due to its “dark and disturbing” storyline.
Both Fennell and Arnold have also collaborated with actor Barry Keoghan, who starred in “Bird” and “Saltburn.”
