"Not a straight biography. I let my imagination go wild"

Several websites interview Frances O'Connor, director of the upcoming Emily film:

With her fresh new imagining of the life of Emily Brontë – ‘it’s not a biopic’ – featuring fast-rising star Emma Mackey in the lead role, the British-Australian creative is realising an ambition she’s held for over a decade to helm her own project.

O’Connor has also been an Emily Brontë fan for years.

Speaking exclusively to Metro.co.uk ahead of the releasee of Emily’s trailer, she recalled: ‘I read Wuthering Heights when I was about 15 and just fell in love with that book. And when I was shooting a film in London, a long time ago, I went to Yorkshire for the first time and went to Haworth [the Brontë family’s home village] and it was so evocative – I arrived there on a train and there was mist and it was just picture perfect.’ (...)

What you shouldn’t expect from Emily is an historical account of her all-too-short life.

‘I’ve taken inspiration from certain elements from Wuthering Heights, and also the biographies that I read, and put those pieces together to create a narrative, which is not a biopic. It’s more like its own thing.’

Discussing the appeal of Brontë, O’Connor added: ‘She’s a mystery, we know so little about her – and I’m an introvert and this character is an introvert! She died when she was 30 and yet she wrote this gargantuan piece of work and there’s so much in it. You can kind of feel who she was through the novel.

‘She was somebody who suffered from things that just seemed very modern – she had social anxiety and she struggled with her sense of who she was, and her relationship with her sisters feels very real.’ (...)

The production was also able to shoot in genuine locations – although mostly in Dent in order to film ‘virginal landscapes’ and ‘get that same kind of feel that they [the Brontës] would have experienced’.

‘But we did shoot on the same streets of Haworth that the Brontës would have walked, which was great. We did a scene in the apothecary where they had gone and Branwell probably got his drugs from.

‘The house that we shoot in the film actually was inspiration for Emily to write Wuthering Heights as well, which was kind of cool. We didn’t know that until after we had secured that location.’ (Tori Brazier in Metro)

Emily Brontë historians will be “p----d off” at a sexy new literary biopic, the film’s director has said. (...)
The new film will show the shy writer embroiled in a love affair, in a deviation from history that its director has already conceded will infuriate Brontë experts.
“I know there’ll be some people that are p----d off about it,” said O’Connor said. “People like Brontë historians will probably say, ‘Well, that didn’t happen’.” (...)

Ann Dinsdale, the principal curator at the Bronte Parsonage Museum, said: “We certainly have no evidence for her ever having a love affair in her life. And she, of course, never married.

“I think people love to try and guess at her inspiration. A lot of people believe that Wuthering Heights, with all of its passion, could not have been written by someone who had not had a love affair.

“But she was a solitary person, and there is no evidence she ever had a romance, or really had any interest at all in ever having a romance.

“She grew up with stories and imaginary worlds. And really, you could say she spent her life in the world of her imagination.”

She added: “It’s not a new suggestion, but certainly today, she would likely have been considered somewhere on the autistic spectrum.” (...)

Speaking to Total Film, she said: “I think you have to take courage in your hands when you’re telling a story about a real historical figure. But I was very clear in my mind that I didn’t want to do a biopic. I really wanted to speak to the younger audience.”

O’Connor said that the film would not only do away with biographical accuracy, but also period film tropes, with actors acting in a less “proper” way than in many literary adaptations. 

“I’m pretty sure no one acted like that back then,” she added. (Craig Simpson in The Telegraph)

Part of the appeal of the Brontës – and Emily in particular – is the mystique around them. As O’Connor explains, her fascination with the writer comes from her being somewhat of an unknowable figure. “I read their books when I was a teenager, and I particularly loved Emily and Wuthering Heights. She’s a fascinating character – she died when she was 30, she was very introverted and private, and we don’t really know much about her,” she explains. “She created this novel, this ferocious piece of literature that’s full of atmosphere and deep dark feeling, so it just makes you think – well, who was she? That was my starting point.” (...)

 The Invisible Man’s Oliver Jackson-Cohen plays William Weightman, a factual figure both in thrall to and confounded by Emily’s literary prowess. “He was a real curate that lived with the Brontës, and he turned up and everyone fell in love with him,” O’Connor explains. “He was a bit of a flirt, and they named him ‘Celia Amelia’ because he was like a girl in a ribbon shop – he could never decide which girl he liked. In my story, I create a narrative where he represents the masculine, and Emily’s the wild feminine, these opposites.”

In imagining what Emily’s life would have been like, O’Connor not only soaked up all the information that exists about the author (“I read everything that had been written about her, some amazing biographies”) but blended it with the evocative environments and thematic elements that come through so strongly in Wuthering Heights. “I did it sometimes in a conscious way, sometimes in an unconscious way,” she says. “I was reading the novel constantly, and then letting my imagination take off. There are things that are literally in Wuthering Heights, and others that are a little bit more esoteric. There’s the normal world – the domestic world of Haworth where they lived – and then there’s the Wuthering Heights world in the film, and they kind of intermix. We create this sense of reality, and then have the atmosphere of Wuthering Heights on top of that.” (...)

For all the imagination and invention at play in O’Connor’s telling, Emily looks set to be an authentic Brontë tale through-and-through. “Walking on the street and seeing Emma walk out of the apothecary which the real Emily would have walked out of, we were all saying how amazing that was,” the filmmaker recalls. The journey back to a literary icon begins here. (Ben Travis in Empire)

As you were saying earlier, there's not a lot of information about Emily out there, but a lot of what we know about her comes from Charlotte and what Charlotte wrote about her. Did you take that into account? And what kind of role does Charlotte play in the film?
I've read pretty much everything on [the Brontës] and there are some amazing biographies, like Juliet Barker's one is brilliant. Lucasta Miller wrote this [book] called The Brontë Myth that is in itself a fantastic read. So I read around all of that, and then I slightly push the narrative for Charlotte. I think she very much edited Emily, but it was coming from a sense of protection. When you read the early reviews of Wuthering Heights, people were horrified. Somebody said, 'Why this author didn't commit suicide within the first three chapters, I do not know.' It's like, this is a savage piece of work. So I feel like she comes from a good place, but she always curated who Emily was, so I wanted to tell a story where [Emily]'s in the center of the story, and she gets to kind of be the hero of the story. It was quite fun playing with these historical figures and making one of them the protagonist, one of them the antagonist. I think that's quite fun. (...)

The Brontës lived in Yorkshire and the trailer's got some really stunning scenery shots in it. Did you film on location, and what was that like?

We mainly shot in a place called Dent, which is in Yorkshire, it's a little bit wilder than the real Haworth now. We did also shoot in Haworth, on the streets of Haworth and near the parsonage, but the moorland there has been flattened a little bit and there's a lot of telephone poles and things. We went up to the virgin Yorkshire countryside. It's so beautiful, so it was very inspiring to shoot up there. And the house that we shot in actually was the inspiration for Emily to write Wuthering Heights. It was rumored that they had a slave there. She took that for inspiration for Heathcliff when she wrote her book, and then we got to shoot this. (Emily Garbutt in Total Film)

The reason for this is that the film is not simply a straight biography of the author, but rather draws inspiration from other sources as well.
"It's inspired by Wuthering Heights and her life and things that happened to me, so it's kind of like a combination of all those things," she said.
"When you see the film, it's clearly not a biography. Like we have the atmosphere of Wuthering Heights, and there's this event with a mask. And so it's kind of inspired by true events, but it kind of... I let my imagination go wild." (Patrick Cremona in Radio Times)

Emma Mackey Is A Moody Brontë Sister In The First Trailer For Emily. (...)

It’s a less-than-straightforward biopic – but there’s more fact to it than you might assume at first glance

Rather than a purely historical account, director Frances O’Connor takes the opportunity with Emily to fantasise about what might have led the middle Brontë sister to write Wuthering Heights. Her wild theory? That the reclusive Emily had an affair with Weightman, an assistant curate who worked with her father, Patrick, a rector in the Yorkshire town of Haworth. (Hayley Maitland in Vogue)

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e-flux presents the short film Two sisters 1991 by Caroline Leaf:

She wants things to go back to the way they were, that is, her sister to go back to her room. Like the “madwoman” wife locked in the attic in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Mr. Rochester, Jane’s love object, is married to Bertha Rochester, the Creole daughter of a wealthy merchant in Jamaica. We know this from Mr. Rochester, who tells his wife’s story to Jane as an explanation of why they can’t be together. Jane Eyre is a first-person account of Jane’s life, still, the other woman’s narrative is left to be described by her (disenchanted) husband. Following some misfortunes and misunderstandings and two fires at Rochester’s grand home—one mysterious (and started by the “mad” wife); the second also sparked by the wife, and ends in her death and Rochester’s disfigurement (he loses an eye and a hand)—Rochester is free to marry Jane. (...)
Viola and Marie, Jane and Bertha, Brontë and Rhys and Woolf; there are also the closed room, the disfigured face, the arrival of someone from another world. In a series of stories of isolation, all these points of contact endure. (Orit Gat)

The Guardian shows a moorland walk to the Pack Horse Inn pub:

Were we to climb a little higher, we’d find ourselves on the southern fringes of Wadsworth Moor, which is effectively Wuthering Heights country – just a few miles north of here lies Top Withens, supposedly the setting for Emily Brontë’s novel. (Alf Anderson)

Even in Montana mountaintop, in the cabin of a fire lookout, we read in the Christian Science Monitor:

Beyond those special days, Ms. Duffey fills her time – when not operating the radio or actively looking for smoke – knitting or reading. Along the northern cabin wall, there’s a stuffed shelf that includes “Brave New World,” “Jane Eyre,” and “Of Mice and Men.” (Noah Davis)

The wonders of Brockley, London in The Times:

The world’s new favourite pop star, Kate Bush, was living in a flat on Wickham Road in Brockley when she wrote and recorded Wuthering Heights 45 years ago. (The flat above is under offer with The Modern House.) (Matthew Davis)

Hollywood Insider publishes a tribute to Jane Campion:

Perhaps because of her penchant for reading and writing, her films often feel like novels. As a matter of fact, Campion adapted the Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady in 1996, chose the poet John Keats and his lover Fanny Brawne as the subjects of the film ‘Bright Star’ (played by Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish, respectively) wrote a gothic tale on par with the works of the Brontë sisters for ‘The Piano,’ and adapted Thomas Savage’s novel The Power of the Dog to make the award-winning movie that won her Best Director. (Kevin Hauger)

Vulture interviews the comedian Kate McKinnon: 

The way that Colleen Rafferty talks is very basic. It has a timeless, mid-century quality. Like, “We’re not dealing with the top brass” — these are sort of old phrases, yet she uses them in a way that is very poetic. So though “coot coot” and “prune shoot” are coarse and base things to say, it has its own Brontë-esque majesty to it. I think that’s one of the great comedic juxtapositions about the character as well.  (Jesse David Fox)

Apparently, paleness is a Jane Eyre thing. We read in Metro:

 So I’m happy to slap on the SPF, embrace my shady side, channel my inner Jane Eyre and celebrate my whiter shade of pale. (Rachel Woollett)

La Información (Spain) lists Wuthering Heights among the ten books to read before turning 40:

'Cumbres Borrascosas' - Emily Brontë
'Cumbres borrascosas' es la gran novela romántica que ha dado lugar a películas, óperas y hasta canciones. Charlotte Brontë definió la obra de su hermana como "árida y nudosa como la raíz del brezo".
Tensión, incertidumbre, noches sin luna, confinamientos desesperados, crueldad sin medida y una atmósfera de pesadilla se dan cita en este referente del género gótico. (Ágata Candela Millán) (Translation) 

El Universo (México) and celebrities' favourite books:

La elección de Taylor Swift: Rebecca, de Daphne du Maurier

Dos álbumes de Taylor Swift, Folklore y Evermore, están repletos de referencias literarias, desde Peter Pan y múltiples guiños a Jane Eyre de Brontë, por lo que es obvio que Tay Tay a menudo recurre a los libros en busca de inspiración para sus letras. (Translation)

Broadway World publishes pictures of the Edinburgh Fringe show cast of Classic! visiting the National Library of Scotland.