Wuthering Heights director defends significant changes made in adaptation of beloved classic

Emerald Fennell has addressed the major differences between her film adaptation of Wuthering Heights and Emily Brontë’s beloved classic novel, citing time constraints as the main reason for the changes.

The Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman director’s new period drama, based on the 1847 gothic romance novel, features Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie as adoptive siblings Heathcliff and Catherine, who engage in a decades-long love affair that damages two generations.

Similar to the numerous film adaptations that have come before it, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights primarily focuses on the first part of Brontë’s novel and the tumultuous relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine.

“Because I think that’s really the moment that draws to an end in the book,” Fennell explained in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly.

The Saltburn director would have loved to do a mini series to “encompass the whole thing over 10 hours.” But, she acknowledged that “if you’re making a movie, and you’ve got to be fairly tight, you’ve got to make those kinds of hard decisions.”

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In order to keep the storyline tight, Fennell cut characters like Mr. Lockwood, Heathcliff’s nosy new neighbor, who learns about his and Catherine’s turbulent romance from the housekeeper, as well as Catherine and Heathcliff’s rageful and jealous brother, Hindley.

Fennell, however, believes a version of Hindley still exists in her adaptation, “but in the form of Earnshaw,” she noted, referring to Catherine and Heathcliff’s father, portrayed by Martin Clunes.

“I tried to, wherever I could, gather people together in the same way that we don’t have Lockwood, either. It’s such a complicated structure, the novel, that really it would have been very, very difficult to turn that into a coherent movie because it would just be much more time,” she added.

Earnshaw plays a much more significant role in Fennell’s movie, portrayed as a drunken, abusive antagonist rather than a kind father.

“It was [about] taking, ‘What is it about Hindley? What is it about his relationship with his sister and his half-brother, I suppose, in Heathcliff? And how does it shape their lives? How did the love of their father shape their lives?’” Fennell explained.

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“And so what we have instead is a character who is both, who is like, I think, a lot of people who know alcoholics… extremely, deeply loving and charismatic, and on the other hand, extremely abusive and cruel.”

Wuthering Heights, out in theaters now, has left critics heavily divided. Some have lauded it for being “oozy and wild,” while others have gone as far as to call it “pseudo-romantic.”

The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey was a part of the latter camp, declaring it an “astonishingly bad adaptation” in a one-star review.

“Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s performances are almost pushed to the border of pantomime,” she argued, “while Fennell’s provocations seem to define the poor as sexual deviants and the rich as clueless prudes.”