Andrea Arnold's deadline ~ BrontëBlog

Friday, May 28, 2010

Andrea Arnold's deadline

Friday, May 28, 2010 2:17 pm by Cristina in Anne Brontë, Dance, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Opera, References, Wuthering Heights No comments

We reported yesterday that Jane Eyre will be released on March 11, 2011, and today TeenHollywood posts an interview with Mia Wasikowska made before Jane Eyre started shooting and mainly focused on Alice, but which finishes with this question:

TeenHollywood: You must like a challenge because after playing an iconic figure like Alice you are playing Jane Eyre?
Mia: That’s right. I have kind of started preparing. I have re-read the book and want to be knowledgeable about all things connected to Jane Eyre. (Note: the film is now in post-production). (Lynn Barker)

And while on the subject of forthcoming movies, The Age gives an update on the status of Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights in an article about her previous film, Fish Tank:

It's a Friday night in London and Andrea Arnold is sitting in her garden, still revelling in the first warm day of the nascent northern summer. ''It's like honey after the cold winter,'' says the 49-year-old filmmaker, who has spent the entire week at her computer trying to finish a draft due on Monday morning of her adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
''It's a crazy, silly thing to do,'' Arnold says of her next project, a sigh turning into a burst of laughter as she ponders her predicament. A few hours earlier, when she'd begun to feel besieged by pressure, Arnold put on a mix-tape she'd made for an old friend living in Spain - Dizzee Rascal, Pulp, Jamaican ska, Rolling Stones, Happy Mondays - and danced around her kitchen. [...]
Both Red Road and Fish Tank sprang from Arnold's people watching. A passer-by will catch her eye and from that image she'll begin creating a story in her head for them - if it takes root it becomes a script. Wuthering Heights, a 19th-century gothic romance, is of a different stock but Arnold isn't certain that it will invoke change in her private, nurturing methods.
''The reasons I'm attracted to having a go at it is that it doesn't start in the same place as my previous films,'' she admits. ''But when it comes down to it I do have one image in my mind that keeps me going on Wuthering Heights when things get tough. It's kind of the same thing with everything I do - I latch on to something I can't let go of. Even when I'm miserable and cursing that thing that started me, I can't let go of it.'' (Craig Mathieson)

Previous adaptations of the novel are mentioned elsewhere too. Comic Book Movie actually comments on the number of adaptations:

One particular movie that has been refilmed more than twice is Wuthering Heights. I can't remember how many versions of the story I have seen. But why? I don't know. (Scorpioxfactor)

And the Spenborough Guardian mentions the 2009 adaptation in an article about Oakwell Hall and the forthcoming The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (May 31, 9 pm on BBC2):

OAKWELL Hall Country Park will once again be the star of the small screen this bank holiday weekend.
It's been less than a year since the Birstall manor house adorned our screens as it was one of the many locations used to film Wuthering Heights.The two-part drama, starring Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley, was broadcast over the August bank holiday last year.

But of course there's more to Wuthering Heights adaptations than just the screen. The Herald (Scotland) talks to ballet dancer Hannah Bateman.

“She [Dangerous Liaisons' Marquise de Merteuil, in a choreography by David Nixon for Northern Ballet Theatre] [i]s definitely very different from the other female roles I’ve danced,” laughs Bateman, who – as the smitten Isabella Linton – has recently been on the receiving end of some bruising, abusive treatment from Heathcliff in NBT’s Wuthering Heights. (Mary Brennan)

Opera, too. The Baltimore Sun covers the vocal competition at the Annapolis Opera.

Third prize, the $1,500 Hughes Award, went to bass Adam Fry, who sang a delightfully comic "La calunnia" from Rossini's "Barber of Seville" and a pleasing "Man that is born of a woman" from Herrmann's "Wuthering Heights." (Mary Johnson)

And don't forget that that opera will be on stage at the Minnesota Opera next year.

Then there's also the could-be's, as in this review of George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead from the Boston Herald:

Transmuting a youthful seminal experience into his cycle of zombie movies probably sounded like a good idea, and it inspired his film’s singularly poetic image: the sight of a beautiful zombie woman (Kathleen Munroe) riding on horseback like something out of a Wild West version of “Wuthering Heights.” (James Verniere)

The Winnipeg Free Press has a couple of articles on the film Black Field, which we mentioned several times last year. First article:

Shot near Tyndall, Man., Black Field is largely set on a ramshackle homestead in the late 19th century where two sisters subsist, two years after the deaths of their father and brothers.
Maggie McGregor (Sara Canning of The Vampire Diaries) is the elder, distressed by the hard life in which she finds herself, but stoic in her resolve to maintain the family farm while caring for her 14-year-old sister Rose (played by the ethereally lovely young Winnipeg actress Ferron Guerreiro). [...]
In making this movie, Esterhazy attempted to transplant the gothic genre of the Brontë sisters to a desolate Canadian prairie setting, and she succeeds most spectacularly in the look of the film. In collaboration with gifted cinematographer Paul Suderman and production designer Ricardo Alms, Esterhazy saturates the frame with striking images -- diffused, lantern-lit interiors and the gorgeous, bare-treed desolation of an early prairie spring. (Randall King)

Second article:

"As soon as we wrapped on Black Field, she had to fly to Atlanta and start shooting a TV series," says Winnipeg director Danishka Esterhazy, 40. "We got her at the perfect time. We were so lucky."
The feeling was mutual for the Gander, Nfld.-born Canning, 22, although the combination of the dark romance of Vampire combined with the Brontë-esque trappings of Black Field put Canning at risk of being pigeonholed as a gothic girl. (Randall King)

And Uptown reviews the film as well.

Inspired by the dark romance of the Brontë sisters — whose novels she calls “early feminist literature” — Esterhazy started writing the screenplay for Black Field in early 2008. (Kenton Smith)

Does the 'whose novels she calls “early feminist literature”' bit sound sceptical to anyone else?

In the Guardian, author Helen Simpson also admits to having been influenced by Wuthering Heights... to get her first job.

... she entered a competition for a work experience placement at Vogue. She'd always liked clothes. "You had to write the story of your life in 700 words," she explains over coffee, sitting opposite me, neat and handsome in a cool green dress. "My first try was straight – lots of homework, lots of helping my mother – and boring as hell. So I made the whole thing up. I had us living in Yorkshire" (Simpson grew up in Willesden, north London) "and my father was a market gardener who used to leave every day at 2am to take narcissi down to Covent Garden. I had four brothers who were paratroopers. It owed a bit to Wuthering Heights. Lots of savagery and drama." When Vogue kept her on, she spent a year or so blushing through awkward encounters with people who stopped to ask how everything was at home. (Sarah Crown)

The PCC Courier reveals how author Jamaica Kincaid got to read Jane Eyre:

Brought up in the island of Antigua, Kincaid spoke about her gradual interest in writing, which sprouted from her rebelliousness in school. It is through the school's punishments that Kincaid would be exposed to literature works such as Paradise Lost and Jane Eyre. (Neil Protacio)

Novelist Jay McInerney writes in The Telegraph about his love for Jane Austen's heroines and of course can't help but mention what Charlotte Brontë thought about Jane Austen's work:

“Critics have remarked that there is no real delineation of true love in Jane Austen and that is true enough,” David Dachies claims in an influential and otherwise sensible essay entitled “Jane Austen, Karl Marx and the Aristocratic Dance”. “Austen knew only too well that in that kind of society genteel young ladies cannot afford true love. The only object must be marriage, and marriage with someone eligible. In Jane Austen, only the poor can afford passion.” It’s hard to believe a reader of sense could be so preposterously obtuse and misguided, although Charlotte Brontë made a similar argument a hundred years earlier (“The passions are perfectly unknown to her”). For all of their differences, a belief in true love, with passion as its signal component, is precisely what distinguishes Austen heroines from most of their contemporaries.

The Telegraph also suggests 'fun things to do with kids' in Yorkshire and the North East. The Brontë Parsonage Museum is a recommended stop:

Brontë Parsonage Museum
Misunderstood teens and romantic souls reading the Brontës get a fascinating insight into one of the world’s most literary families who lived here in Haworth amidst the brooding moors. Don’t take small ones, though – Charlie played havoc running into roped off areas. We took solace in Branwell Brontë’s local pub The Black Bull, where we pretended to Phoebe that we hadn’t heard the barman mention the pub was haunted.
Church Street, Haworth, Keighley, West Yorks (01535 642323)
Adults 6.50, five-16s £3.50 (Ben Hatch and Dinah Hatch)

Voxy informs about another sort of literary travel in Australia and New Zealand:

Escape from the cold and cosy up by the fire with a free gift of Penguin classics at Peppers Resorts and Retreats this winter.
From Rotorua to Tekapo, Peppers is offering the ultimate winter indulgence for book lovers. Guests staying at any of the four premium resorts will be treated to a set of six popular classics including some of the most talked about titles of all time, from Wuthering Heights to The Great Gatsby, for both him and her.
The Winter Classics package includes two nights luxury accommodation, full breakfast each morning, a delicious afternoon tea, a set of six Popular Penguin classics and a steamy hot chocolate or glass of red to relax and unwind by the fire.
Indulge your inner bookworm this winter at select Peppers Retreats and Resorts along with superb food and wine and impeccable service while enjoying total mind and soul relaxation in sumptuous surrounds.