Emerald Fennell (Stormwind): “I don’t do Pinterest cinema!”

Express interview with Emerald Fennell, director of the latest, flashy and rowdy adaptation of Wuthering Heights, with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

After Promising Young Woman (which won him the Oscar for best screenplay in 2021), and Saltburnin 2023, in which she directed Jacob Elordi for the first time, Emerald Fennell attempts everything with her hyperbolic adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Meeting in Paris, on the eve of the film’s release.

First: Let’s start with this title: “Stormwind“, with quotation marks…

Emerald Fennell: Whatever work you’re adapting, I feel like it’s more honest to say up front that it can’t be a faithful adaptation. Especially in the case of Wuthering Heightssuch a masterpiece! But I’m not inventing anything with these quotation marks, I’m only reviving a tradition: before, cinema adaptations of great books often had quotation marks in their titles, to emphasize, precisely, that it was an adaptation, a point of view offered to the viewer on a literary work. I am thinking, for example, of certain Hitchcock films, or of Gone with the Wind.

Is the project of this adaptation to explain the SM dimension of the book?

In part, yes, even if it is already very explicit! This is one of the reasons why the first readers were so shocked by the novel when it came out. Many of the film’s dialogues come directly from the book. Everything about Isabelle’s humiliation, for example, is pure Brontë. But my film is much softer than the book, you know. It’s such a violent novel, really merciless… I’ve toned down the most “complicated” things.

You explained that you fell madly in love with the book at 14 years old. We have the impression that the film wants to express your feelings at the time, to rediscover the adolescent sensations that you experienced while reading it…

It’s an unforgettable memory, still very vivid. The first thing I did when I embarked on this adaptation, even before rereading the book, was to write down everything I remembered. Then I reread the novel and realized that I had invented, almost deliriously, certain passages in the book! Since then, I have of course reread it several times, very carefully, but if I engaged in the same exercise today, I would undoubtedly continue to invent passages that are not there! Because this book has a sort of magical, shape-shifting quality to it.

You had a favorite adaptation of Wuthering Heights before that?

The one we often watched at home when I was little was the one with Laurence Olivier (William Wyler, 1939). I was also struck by those with Ralph Fiennes (Peter Kosminsky, 1992), then Tom Hardy (in a two-part TV movie from 2009). That of Andrea Arnold (2011) is magnificent too. I love the idea that this book is inexhaustible, that it inspires so many artists. Not only filmmakers, by the way, but also cartoonists, or Kate Bush, with her song Wuthering Heights.

Speaking of songs: those in the film are by Charli XCX, who we already heard in your first film, Promising Young Woman. You would describe your cinema as the musical movement of which it has become the emblem: hyperpop?

Yes, maybe a little. In the sense that there is a physical dimension. I make films that want to excite, to provide strong sensations. But it’s mainly the emotion that interests me. The heads of the artistic departments who worked with me on “Stormwind” used the term “the inch” to designate what I’m looking for. Or a very thin gap, an interstice – between splendor and disaster, beautiful and ugly, good and bad. This is what interests me, and it is of course a place where I take the risk of failing. I try to bring antagonistic elements into dialogue, in order to maintain constant visual tension.

We sometimes have the impression that you design certain shots of your film for the impact they will have on the Internet, when we see them in a trailer, like clippesque cinema but reimagined for a post-Internet world…

Hmm. People sometimes talk to me about “Pinterest cinema”. However, it is quite the opposite that interests me. All the shots in my film fit into a cinematographic grammar, they are never disconnected from each other. I love that the Internet can take certain images from my films, that they in turn inspire a creative approach, but for me, with this film, I am at the same time in a very English tradition, that of the films of Ivory and the Messenger by Losey, but also in a lineage of very visual filmmakers, whose influence I claim, such as Powell and Pressburger, Ken Russell, the Coppola of Dracula…Filmmakers who are interested in the visual expression of an emotional universe. Filmmakers who probably wouldn’t have been told that they were making Pinterest cinema!

Your previous film, Saltburnwas released directly on Amazon, and it was undoubtedly thanks to streaming that it had so instantly permeated pop culture. “Stormwind” was the subject of a fight between Netflix and Warner to acquire the rights, and Warner won. Was it important to you that your film was released in theaters?

Essential. I want it to be a collective experience. When you sit in the dark with lots of people around you, emotions are stronger. We are excited, or disgusted, we laugh nervously, we are disconcerted, and the discomfort can be all the greater because we are not alone watching the film… Everything is more intense in a cinema.

“Wolfwind”by Emerald Fennell, with Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau… Currently in cinemas.