Yet for all the furore around this loose approach to the source material, countless acclaimed films over the years have played fast and loose with historical accuracy, creating something new and exciting in the process. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette come to mind as two unconventional, distinctly modern takes on historic stories that possess an over the top visual sensibility, something that they share with Wuthering Heights.
Millennial teenagerdom was not the only reference on hand. The film was always going to be impressionistic, dreamlike and full of visual contradictions, and so the research and references in the early stages of production were suitably disparate: German Expressionism, Brutalism, Breughel, Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick to name but a few. Real fires and candles were used for lighting the sets, in a nod to the same technique famously employed by Kubrick for his period epic Barry Lyndon in 1975.
Theatrical, stylised lighting is another nod to the studio films of old Hollywood.
Gone with the Wind was another important reference: the poster for the film is a clear indication of the 1939 film’s influence, and it was particularly influential for the sets. Emerald was keen that both the interiors and building exteriors, where the majority of the action happens, should exist together on a soundstage as composite sets, as they would have been on sweeping epics and technicolour musicals from Hollywood’s Golden Age. This approach means that elements such as the weather and lighting can all be precisely controlled, and helps to create an overall feeling of artifice that is also present on films from that era. ‘We knew there was going to be this sliver of liminality between reality and surrealism, and we were aiming for this little sliver’, explains Suzie.
Heathcliff on the moors.
Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
While the turbulent landscape and weather are a huge force in the original story, and the film features scenic shots of the rolling moors of Yorkshire, the dark and imposing set of Wuthering Heights is one of the composite sets, built entirely at Leavesden Studios. Suzie and her team nonetheless managed to create the feeling of ‘nature taking over and having such a powerful influence on the characters’. Rather than directly lifting the description of the house from the novel, Suzie remembered a mine in north Wales that she’d considered for a different project a decade ago, and based the design for Wuthering Heights on it, recalling that Emerald really resonated with the image of ‘this massive structure on top of a hill… concrete, very heavy and strong’.