'Anyone who gets past the mask scene and thinks they’re still watching a biopic is probably in the wrong movie'

The Guardian has interviewed Frances O'Connor about directing Emily.

Frances O’Connor was a 15-year-old pupil at an all-girls Catholic school when she first read Wuthering Heights on the hour-long bus journey to and from her home in the hills outside Perth, Western Australia. “It was the feeling of the elements, and the environment, that I recognised so strongly from my own childhood,” she says. “I remember not wanting to leave that windy, gothic, slightly supernatural place to go back to the real world.”

She also loved “just how kickass Cathy and Heathcliff were – that feeling of being misunderstood and not belonging. As a teenager, their rebelliousness really spoke to me.” Forty years later, she has brought those sense memories to a story about the novel’s author Emily Brontë, in a directorial debut that she expects to enrage some purists while hoping it will inspire a new generation of young women as the novel once inspired her. [...]

Emily is not a conventional biopic, a fact it signals early on with a creepy mask-play in which Emily (played by Sex Education’s Emma Mackey) freaks out her siblings by appearing to invoke the spirit of their dead mother. “Anyone who gets past the mask scene and thinks they’re still watching a biopic is probably in the wrong movie,” says O’Connor. The question that drives it is how the prickly recluse of historical record, holed up with her siblings in a parsonage (apart from a brief, disastrous stint as a schoolteacher), could have been able to summon such passion not only in her single novel but in her poetry.

O’Connor’s answer is to pair her up with one of the six curates who joined the Brontë household over the years: a man so beloved by the parishioners that he was memorialised by them, after his untimely death from cholera, in a plaque on the wall of Haworth church. William Weightman, it reads, was a man of “orthodox principles, active zeal, moral habits, learning, mildness and affability” – not the qualities that are brought most quickly to mind by Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s lusty portrayal.

Yes, but wasn’t it Anne Brontë with whom Weightman was thought to have had a romantic entanglement? “It is, but if you read up on it it’s disputed. There was one comment from Charlotte and that’s it,” says O’Connor, who cites a range of Brontë studies, not least one by Lucasta Miller, which argued that each age recreates the family in its own image. This may be fiction, but it has been conscientiously thought through.

O’Connor traces the seeds of the film back to the late 1990s, when she was in London as the lead in a star-studded film of Mansfield Park. Finding herself at a loose end when the writer-director went off sick for a fortnight, she jumped on a train to Haworth. “I was so in love with acting that I didn’t even think of directing. But I did think this is such an evocative place, and they’re such interesting characters. I felt a little bit close to them in a way, and there was something that was very cool about that. It just really piqued my imagination.” [...]

Emily was filmed on a shoestring, leaning heavily on the photogenically weather-racked landscapes of Yorkshire and Cumbria. A Cumbrian manor house stood in for Haworth parsonage. “There was this one windy road in and out of the house, but what’s interesting about it is that it was actually one of the things that inspired Emily to write Wuthering Heights because it was owned by a rum-trading colonist, and there was rumour that there was a slave who died there. I’m pretty sure it was haunted,” she says.

One theme that underpins the film is how hard it is for women to claim centre stage and how they edit their own lives to make themselves presentable. After the outcry that greeted publication of their novels, Charlotte Brontë devoted herself to curating the sisters’ reputation, with the result that nobody really knows the truth of them, says O’Connor. “I feel like Emily has been edited for a lot of her life. This is me taking her and putting her in the centre of her own story.”

She particularly hopes it will connect with young viewers, as a portrait of an original who followed her desires and her creativity. “In some ways this is a good time to be a woman: I see a younger generation coming up who are very forthright in terms of asking for what they want, in a way that maybe my generation didn’t,” she says. “But there’s always a gap between who women really are and who they’re supposed to be.” (Claire Armistead)

iNews features Fionn Whitehead, who plays Branwell in the film.

“We’ve had a twee, Christmas card view of classic novels for too long,” says Fionn Whitehead. “Leather-bound books in posh libraries and cosy Sunday night TV adaptations set in stately homes. But writers such as the Brontës and Charles Dickens, they were writing about real people often without any money. Poverty, muck, desperation… about what it was to be a woman without the options available to men at that time… It wasn’t that pretty.” [...]

While Mackay’s Emily has a passionate love affair with a conflicted curate, O’Connor’s script suggests that Branwell was the model for the author’s saturnine romantic hero, Heathcliff.

He’s shown encouraging his sister to shout from the hilltops and join him on elicit nighttime trips to spy through the windows of the local manor house. Later, O’Connor shoots close-ups of Emily’s pupils expanding like ink blots under the influence of the drugs that contributed to her brother’s death (aged just 31) a year after Wuthering Heights was published. 

“There’s a really famous painting of the Brontë family that Branwell did,” says Whitehead. “But in a fit of self-pity or self-hatred he painted himself out of it. Then, over the years that top paint has faded and you can see the outline of this ghostly figure coming back…”

He shakes his head. “As the only boy, he had so many pressures and privileges,” he says.

“There were so many expectations for him to go out and do something in the world. While his sisters were expected to become teachers, he was encouraged to express himself. He was allowed to go to the Royal Academy of Art to study and then to try writing. He was afforded all these luxuries and he wasted his potential, flitting from art to poetry, alcohol to opium…”  [...]

In Emily, Whitehead’s Branwell may waste his own potential, but he encourages his sister to defy the Victorian patriarchy and embrace “freedom in thought”.

Whitehead suspects Branwell’s addictions may have sprung from grief that “he was told to repress”. The pain of the 19th century’s emotional corset was relieved by drugs for so many. His research led him to “sit down with people who’d had run-ins with various opioids”. He met one person who got hooked on painkillers, “and they said it left them feeling like they could run your finger along a blade and it wouldn’t hurt. Another friend had smoked opium sitting on a boulder at the top of a cliff and felt all his worries float away. The next day he went back and realised that he’d been right on the edge of the cliff, with this sheer drop down to the sea. It would have killed him instantly if he’d fallen. But that hadn’t even occurred to him at the time.” 

He shudders. It’s not long since he lay on a bed, playing Branwell’s corpse, with Mackay clinging to his limp, grey frame.

“I read so much of Branwell’s poetry,” he tells me. “The early stuff starts off quite engaging. Then you can feel the downhill trajectory as he meanders into self-importance and endless descriptions of the rolling hills. But he just wasn’t as talented as his sisters. And he was so, so lost.” (Helen Brown)

Zawya reports that Emily will be shown as part of META Film Fest, October 27-29 at VOX Cinemas, Nakheel Mall in Palm Jumeirah, Dubai.

According to National Geographic, Haworth is one of several UK destinations to have 'inspired gothic literature greats'.

2. Haworth, West Yorkshire

The inspiration for: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

The hilltop village of Haworth and its surrounding wild moors are said to be the inspiration for Emily Brontë’s most famous novel, Wuthering Heights. The moor’s popular Haworth Moor Guided Walk (£120 for up to 12 people) takes you out of the village and into Cathy and Heathcliff’s moorland, where undulating expanses of heather and peat give way to tinkling streams and dramatic crags of gritstone rock.

The route rambles past Lower Laithe Reservoir to Brontë Waterfall, which was a favourite beauty spot of sisters ​​Charlotte, Anne and Emily. A mile further, you’ll reach Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse on the Pennine Way rumoured to be the inspiration for the Earnshaw family home in the book.

In contrast to the desolate moors, cobbled Haworth village is as postcard-perfect as they come, with a smattering of good country pubs to enjoy a post-walk pint in. (Liz Connor)

According to Her Campus, Jane Eyre is one of the 'Top 10 Books to Read to Prepare for Sad Girl Autumn'. AnneBrontë.org highlights the poetry of Anne Brontë for National Poetry Week.