'I wanted it to feel wet, sweating, or dripping with water or some sort of bodily fluid'

Wuthering Heights 2026 was released on bluray/DVD yesterday in the UK and the US and many sites are mentioning it: Awards Radar, Live for Films, Nuke the Fridge, etc.

So coinciding with that we have a couple of interviews with two people who were highly involved in the film. Coming Soon interviews production designer Suzie Davies (you can also actually watch the interview here).

Brandon Schreur: Obviously, this movie is based on such an iconic book that so many people grew up reading either in school or just for fun. I know that you’ve worked with Emerald before, but she comes to you and says that adapting Wuthering Heights into a movie is going to be her next project, and she wants you to do the production design for it. What’s going through your head at that point? Is that an exciting challenge to dive into, or is it more of a ‘Uh, how are we going to pull this off?’ kind of feeling?

Suzie Davies: It’s a bit of a combination of both. I literally had that exact feeling — like, I cannot wait to read this. How are we going to do it? And, now, I can’t wait to actually make it. Yeah, it was like that whole roller coaster. I think the joy of working with Emerald for the second time was that we already had a sort of dialogue. We already knew each other.

She actually spoke to me before I read her screenplay to let me know what her ambitions and desires were. So, I went in and read it already knowing she wanted me to build everything on a sound stage. She said she just wanted to never leave the studio. Everything we see was going to be on the sound stage.

Being able to read her script with that in mind, it meant my first thoughts — which are usually your strongest, but they’d already been defined in that direction. So, off I went. It was one of the best scripts that I’ve ever read, as a production designer. Her stage descriptions; there is nothing better than reading, for instance, the skin room. The description of that skin room was just like, ‘Let me at it! Come on!’ But it was, like, everything. I kept going, ‘Hang on a minute, a doll’s house! Oh, it’s raining in Wuthering Heights!’ It just kept going on and on and on. It was brilliant.

Totally. There are so many different scenes or different locations in this movie that I loved. As you said, the skin room really stuck out to me. Seeing that in the theater for the first time, that was just, like, something I haven’t seen before.

Yeah, it’s exciting. If we could do Smell-O-Vision or Touch-O-Vision. Because you almost want all the other senses to be involved, especially for things like that. None of us could stop touching that wall. There’s something really — you just want to squeeze into it. It was amazing. [...]

Getting into some of the specifics, the design and the look for the titular Wuthering Heights estate, I’m so in love with how it conveys feeling without ever actually having to say anything. Just the way it’s filmed, the way it looks — it’s so oppressive and ominous. Can you talk about the process of figuring out how the estate was going to look and how you went about making it feel so gloomy from the visuals alone?

I think we knew that every surface, I wanted it to feel wet, sweating, or dripping with water or some sort of bodily fluid. It just needed to feel alive. Whenever you have surfaces that have reflections on them, I think it will give something uneasy — is it breathing, is it moving, what made it happen? There’s something else that’s happening.

That was like, across the board, every surface is going to reflect or be able to take water as well. A little bit to what I alluded to before, because we’re on a sound stage and I had a certain size of stage to work with, everything is sort of built within a circle. So we get the horse and carriage in and out without turning around; it’s a circuit, basically, on the sound stage. Once you start getting some things you need to have, you begin to design outwards from those boundaries. Which, it’s really helpful to have boundaries, otherwise you sort of don’t know where you’re going.

We were able to put, like, the tiles on the wall, which are sort of high-glass tiles. That’s a little bit of a nod to what’s really used in that part of the UK. They do build houses with big, brick tiles, but not black shiny ones like we had. But the proportions are right. That was enough of a broad brushstroke to say that we’re making a period drama, but it’s going to be in this weird, heightened version of a 14-year-old’s dream or imagination of what she thought when she read this book. It’s great when you have a writer/director to do things like that; to show the concepts of what we’re doing. We made models, and we had loads of different runs of what that color should be and the size of those tiles. Again, the workshops are all there, so Emerald could come and have a look. 

When you have a director who has also adapted the screenplay, you get the immediate answer of either ‘Yes, that works,’ or ‘No, that doesn’t.’ That just cuts through everything. You don’t have to phone someone up, wait, and go, ‘What do you mean?’ I just take her to the workshop and go, ‘This is what we’re going to put on the wall, does this work?’ 

Then we had a big discussion about why we’re changing it for white in the gothic arch; at one stage, we were going to do it the other way around. But, actually, the house doesn’t look that dirty until we get later [into the movie] when it gets destroyed a little bit. But that also gives the great opportunity to see red splattered on the wall in that wonderful moment.

And bouncing off that, you have Wuthering Heights, but then you have Edgar’s mansion, and it’s so different. Like, that’s a house I would actually want to live in, it feels so alive. How did the process of making that one differ from Wuthering Heights? Did you have to basically start from scratch doing that?

Yes and no. Again, the brilliant stage description that comes very early in the description of Thrushcross Grange is actually the doll’s house. I did it the other way around — we built and designed the doll’s house, and then built the life-sized version of the doll’s house rather than the other way around. The doll’s house was slightly out of proportion because we knew we wanted that hand to come in with the model of Margot’s character into the shot. That’s where we started, from that little bit of detail. That made the windows [a certain size], which on a real house would then be [another certain size].

What’s great, then, is that all of the characters in Thrushcross Grange, for real, are slightly too small. Because our original is slightly out; it’s a quarter-scale model. Which is a good scale, but it’s slightly off what it should be. So, the ceilings are a little bit taller, and the windows are a little bit bigger. So, once you start on that version, doing it that way, it just gives you that slight unease — like, I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s not quite right. That’s the feeling we wanted for the whole film. There’s just something hovering between reality and unreality. (Brandon Schreur)

Fresh Fiction interviews cinematographer Linus Sandgren.

It’s your second time working with Emerald Fennell and Jacob Elordi (both on SALTBURN) and third time working with Margot Robbie (BABYLON and SALTBURN). Is there anything different in your collaborative experience with them this time around?

[...] There were a lot of things from Emerald, like how [Heathcliff] lives in this barn and how he could see [Cathy] brush her hair in the window and how things were related – and then this rock that came through and all these things grew all over the house to take over. How it was suddenly winter seeing her father in misery. It was just more dramatically visualized than normal, which is fine because it’s so different and felt appropriate for this film to become heightened, letting you cry and letting you feel. [...]

I listened to the commentary track on the disc and learned that some of the days were sunny outside and you needed to make them rainy and overcast?!

“The biggest challenge for me is always weather on films. It’s rarely the way you want it to be, honestly. I could be particular in how i think it should look and I’m disappointed. On Bond [NO TIME TO DIE] in Matera [Italy], it was cloudy, which doesn’t at all look as brutal as it does in hard sun, so we actually came back and shot again to get a hard sun there. But that was the only thing that mattered that day was that it looked hard.

In this case, we obviously had worked on soundstages first and established scenes. We decided scenes should be foggy and rainy. And then you come to the real world, which we were promised that in March, end of March, in the Moors, it’s gonna be miserable… in a good way. So we come there and it’s sunny and windy. If it’s sunny you can fog it up and make it look miserable, but if it’s windy, the fog disappears. But we did it. That was one of the few tools we had to tame nature was to add fog where we want, like when [Cathy and Heathcliff] walk amongst the rocks. That was important, because he’s finding her there and it should be obscured and not so clear.

Same when she finds him returning and he’s invisible in the fog. That’s shot on location. There was no fog. It was sunny that day, but we had so much atmospheric smoke to be able to do that. Our genius special effects department was able to turn on a cue to make him invisible and become visible in a few seconds. It was like everything was in a play – like improvised jazz. It was cool how that eventually worked. On stage, that’s much easier because you can just do what you want.”

I’m curious, you had said earlier you love learning. What did you learn that you were able to put into practice on WUTHERING HEIGHTS?

“I guess what I mean is that you learn so much from the people around you, especially intelligent directors that take you on this journey and develop a film together. It’s in all the small details that you learn from a director. It evokes situations that creates challenges that you have to figure things out that you don’t know how to do yet, and then you learn your own work.

That happened, for example, on this film. I felt there was a certain amount of theatricality Emerald wanted. It’s sort of like these fantastical devices in the sets, like a rock [juts] out into the kitchen and the house is grown over by these cancerous [tumors] that are weird fabrics. There was always a level for allowance for that. At the same time, we felt that, instead of shooting on a green screen, or build a massive, super expensive Volume, I love the soft drop textiles that you print on and then you can light them for different looks – for a flat look or backlights through the clouds for a dramatic look. And that’s what we did on this film, which I’ve done before and isn’t what I learned.

The thing was we were trying to get the sense, in the stage, that it was gonna be very real feeling. We knew it was going to have a stage look, but make it as realistic as we could make it. So we decided to paint the imagery so that it would have dark clouds on the top of the backdrop. On the ceiling, normally, you put white silks to create the skylight. But that bothers you if you shoot these big VistaVision shots indoors and you see the ceiling, it would have to be replaced by the visual effects. So we figured out, with that challenge, I recalled that I had seen gray silks. We did a gray silk that was the same color as the clouds in the photographed backdrop that went seamlessly together on the ceiling so the trans light kept going into the sky. With enough atmosphere, you could not see it wasn’t sky. I learned that the look of that, when you have that big gray sky, it looks so much more realistic  than a white silk. So from then on, for every movie now, I’m gonna use that for sky. If you want to have light, it’s still soft, but if you pull out the lights, it doesn’t reflect lights, which would look fake.

The beauty of working with interesting people is that you always learn so much. In the directing, it’s interesting to learn how directors work with actors. The actors are so important for the story and the cinematography, for me, is the tool – with the light and the lensing and the closeness or distance from the actor and the composition – that should do similar things that sound and music does with the audio.

I think the cinematography should serve the emotions. It could be subtle, but it should rather serve the emotions than the plot. I’d rather feel the right feeling with the characters, if I just see an image, than if I understand what’s going on with the plot. It’s really important to focus on that. I feel like I want to be directed like Emerald’s directing actors. I want her to tell me what she tells the actors, because it’s about those things. That’s how we get the images in our heads. It’s better than coming in with visual images to show. I like to work with her telling me how to feel: like say ‘miserable.’ Well, how does that look in this world? Stuff like that.” (Courtney Howard)

The Times asked writer Geoff Dyer all sorts of bookish questions.

What is your favourite book by a dead author?

Wide Sargasso Sea is the book that revived Jean Rhys’s fortunes — brought her back from the dead while she was still alive, as it were — and it’s great, of course. 

Brussels Brontë Blog has a post on the talk Sharon Wright gave in Brussels about her and Ann Dinsdale's fabulous book Let Me In. The Brontës in Brick and Mortar.