‘Saltburn’ director Emerald Fennell teases ‘Wuthering Heights’ movie adaptation
Saltburn director Emerald Fennell has hinted that her next project could be a film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
The British filmmaker, who also made 2020’s Promising Young Woman, posted an image on social media on Friday (July 12) that includes the lines, “Be with me always – Take any form – Drive me mad”, which are lifted directly from the original novel.
At the bottom of the image, which Fennell has credited to Katie Buckley, it reads: “A film by Emerald Fennell”.
— Emerald Fennell (@emeraldfennell) July 12, 2024
It would be the latest cinematic adaptation of the classic story, including William Wyler’s 1939 version with Laurence Olivier and the 2011 incarnation, which was helmed by Andrea Arnold (American Honey, Fish Tank) and starred Kaya Scodelario and James Howson.
Fennell has not directly confirmed that she will be directing a new film version, but Variety reports that she will be re-teaming with MRC, the studio behind the viral hit Saltburn.
Wuthering Heights was Emily Brontë’s only novel, published in 1847, and tells the story of two gentry families in the West Yorkshire moors. It is considered one of the great examples of gothic fiction, a genre that Fennell has expressed admiration for in the past.
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Writing for the LA Times in January, she said: “I’ve always been obsessed with the gothic. Whether it was Edward Gorey’s children who are variously choked by peaches, sucked dry by leeches or smothered by rugs; Du Maurier’s imperilled heroines or the disturbing erotic power of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, the gothic world has always had me in its grip.”
“It’s a genre where comedy and horror, revulsion and desire, sex and death are forever entwined, where every exchange is heavy with the threat of violence, or sex or both.”
Saltburn is one of the most talked-about films of the last 12 months, and it starred Barry Keoghan as Oliver Quick, a middle-class interloper who poses as a scholarship student from a working-class background in order to strike up a friendship with Jacob Elordi’s wealthy aristocrat Felix Catton at Oxford University. Oliver is eventually invited by Felix to spend the summer at his family home, called Saltburn – a large mansion in the British countryside.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ soundtracked the memorable final sequence of the film, and enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity as a result of its inclusion, reaching Number Two on the UK Singles Chart.