Rachel Handler: Tell me about the first time you met and what you remember about your first impressions of the other.
Ralph Fiennes: I remember we were brought together by Ileen Maisel and Mary Selway, the two producers of Wuthering Heights, and director Peter Kosminsky. It was in a room in Mayfair and we read together. I was in awe of her, because I’d seen you in Unbearable Lightness of Being. I was very excited and a bit fluttery. (...)
Juliette Binoche.: And we went on a journey of Wuthering Heights. It was a difficult shoot.
R.F.: It was difficult.
J.B.: It was six days shooting per week and I was playing two roles, a mother and a daughter.
R.F.: Is that the first time you were performing in English?
J.B.: No, but it was the first time that I had to transform my accent to British, and in a month and a half. I moved to Yorkshire and all of that.
R.F.: Also there were reasons that perhaps there’s no point unearthing, but the production was not entirely coherent. The way it was being run was a bit tricky.
R.H.: How so?
R.F.: It was being produced by what was then British Paramount. If you look at the book, it’s a brutal love story, and Heathcliff is a brutal figure. He’s not romantic. It’s traumatic, it’s full of shadows and darkness, and stuff that’s quite ugly. Which makes it rich. We both wanted that to be in the film, and we could feel the forces of production and the studio wanting something more “marketable.” But it is the first and only film that shows Cathy’s story and then the daughter’s story; all the other Wuthering Heights adaptations tend to focus just on Heathcliff and Cathy. (...)
R.H.: Now that you’ve made your third movie together, The Return, what’s your favorite scene you’ve filmed together?
J.B.: If I may pick one of each? In Wuthering Heights, we were toward the end of shooting and we couldn’t bear working on the film anymore. I felt I was on the verge of losing it. And I could feel Ralph going, Don’t do that. Don’t go there.
R.F.: On Wuthering Heights, you lost it in a way that was great and brilliant. There were marks on the floor, and your frustration came out: You kicked this wooden mark with colored tape on it. And you said, “I hate limits.” I never forgot that. I thought, That’s what I want to be.
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