“There’s a kind of wet heat in there that you can feel”: Emerald Fennell on 7 films that influenced her version of Wuthering Heights

The list of 13 ‘Love Stories’ recommended to the BFI by Emerald Fennell, director of Promising Young Woman, Saltburn, and now her explosive “Wuthering Heights”, is a carefully considered programme certainly not designed for the faint of heart. 

She says that she did not want to choose anything which would not provoke a reaction, be that good or bad. What matters to Fennell is that an audience feels something rather than nothing. 

David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) is emblematic of these films for her. She gleefully wishes that she could witness the undoubtedly enormous response in the audience at the BFI. “I’m absolutely gutted I can’t go. I just want to be there in the lobby after the IMAX screening of Crash!” 

She is a filmmaker who takes pride and pleasure in us howling with laughter, retching at the sight of bodily fluids, and, of course, breathing heavily when we are aroused. 

Here Fennell talks through some of her favourite picks and why they mean so much to her.

Director: Park Chan-wook

Emerald Fennell: It’s literal perfection. I loved the book, I love Sarah Waters, so I was already coming to it as an avid fan. It’s such a great example of an adaptation which is an emotional response to the book as much as a literal one. It takes the themes and the feelings and it puts them into a different place. I’m interested in movies as pleasure, and it’s so pleasurable. It’s visually the most masterfully directed film out there. But it’s not alienating, it’s not a thing of beauty only. It is an immersive, sensual experience. 

I love it when I feel a filmmaker is invested in an audience’s good time. It came out in a moment where there really didn’t feel like many sexy movies were getting made. And it’s sexy, but in a way that felt beautiful. It felt emotional. I love Stoker [2013], it’s fantastic, but I think Stoker’s a little colder in temperature. And I love things that are cold. But I chose The Handmaiden in relation to “Wuthering Heights” because it was damp. That steam, there’s a kind of wet heat in there that you can feel.

Director: Baz Luhrmann

That film is in my DNA. It came out at a similar time to when I read Wuthering Heights. It gave me the same feeling; there are works of art that define your life and are part of you forever. I did a school presentation on Romeo + Juliet and made paintings based on Romeo + Juliet. What Baz Luhrmann did and why he’s so unbelievable is that it is simply William Shakespeare. I think at the time there was a certain amount of pearl-clutching about it not being faithful, but it couldn’t be more faithful because it is William Shakespeare’s words. 

So for me with “Wuthering Heights”, it was like, “Well, you can’t make Romeo and Juliet in the same way that you can’t make Wuthering Heights because they’re too good.” You can only make the thing it made you feel. You can just make this one thing specific to you and understand that it won’t be for everyone. I have always looked to Baz Luhrmann and I’ve been very lucky that he’s been so kind to me. 

Director: Sofia Coppola

Every female director owes such a debt to Sofia Coppola. When I first saw The Virgin Suicides [1999], I had never felt so immersed in a world of the feminine. It’s given such care, such beauty, such danger. It just felt like being in a girl’s bedroom and nobody had ever done that. I could smell it. It was so familiar to me. She shows what happens when female desire turns. For a lot of my life I’ve been in all-female spaces and knowing how dangerous it is when it turns, it’s like Lord of the Flies. I

t’s always thrilling to me when a man comes into a space and thinks he’s going to have the best time of his life and then he finds out he’s in a nightmare. [In The Beguiled] Colin Farrell goes to a house full of gorgeous blondes and it turns out to be the worst mistake of his life! I just loved every second of it. Of course it was the year of the mushroom poisoning, which we all lived for! I love the softness with which she pads these razor blades. And her work is funny, but people always deliberately misunderstand. I feel like my life is reading reviews of the work of women or queer artists, and it’s a constant, deliberate misunderstanding. 

I chose this film because I wanted to look at one of her movies that isn’t part of the canon. But I think it’s everything that she has, the boa constrictor pressing that she does, where you don’t realise until it’s too late. I love her so much. 

Director: John Schlesinger

Terence Stamp! Oh my God! When I was talking to Jacob [Elordi] about Heathcliff, I said we are looking at Richard Burton. We are looking at Dirk Bogarde. We are looking at Terence Stamp. We are looking at a time when these leading men were dangerous, were scary. When they had a sexual charisma, and an almost subtextual threat. Bogarde’s is slightly different, but it’s no less malevolent. There’s a sharpness and a prickliness to him that I think was really important for Heathcliff. 

I always think of Julie Christie in Far from the Maddening Crowd when talking about the faithfulness of period drama, because she has a 60s beehive and false lashes. You cannot escape the time in which you make something. And that’s really fun. We can’t escape who Terence Stamp and Julie Christie were at the time and what they meant to audiences. You are working with that space between a film and a person watching it and what they’re bringing. So let’s enjoy that space. Let’s enjoy that suspension of disbelief. And I think that adaptation is a perfect example.

Director: Catherine Breillat

It’s in my core. It’s so interesting that the Bluebeard story is a touch point for so many women. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Anna Biller, Paula Rego. What an interesting tension there. Because it is not a safe story for any woman inside it. It’s like somebody throwing a rock in a pool, and then we see the ripples. It’s interesting to me that there are so many women who respond to certain stories. What I love about Emily Brontë is that she’s not didactic, she doesn’t make any moral judgment, she just presents. I try as much as I can to do that. That’s still extremely subversive. 

Directors: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

There was a time when making a movie, it was expected that it would be a visual spectacle, that it would be expressive. That’s true of all of [Powell and Pressburger’s] work. Even Peeping Tom [1960] is a visual film, and an extremely dangerous film. It’s the way that it’s shot, the way that they worked is transcendent. Nobody could dream of making something like that now. Because they wouldn’t let you.

Director: Catherine Breillat

Catherine Breillat’s work is explosive. For better or worse. Her scripts, her dialogue, is devastating. I think she shares a world with Cronenberg’s Crash, and I would say with early Yorgos Lanthimos too. There is a coldness that is so disconcerting. There’s a bit in Romance in which a character says beauty thrives on degradation. I think about that every second of the day when I’m making something. That was the centre of Saltburn too. There’s always a tension between disgust and arousal. And that’s where I like to live. That’s what the gothic is. Oliver in Saltburn is fastidiously clean and phobic of a runny egg, but the deep centre of him is something that turns the stomach. That’s the thing that’s also really troubling about Wuthering Heights too, the book itself lives in that very, very dangerous space. 

A lot of it is about how I can make people feel. What’s the texture of desire? What can we all relate to? We all know what the whites of eggs feel like and what that might remind us of. We all can understand that about the slapping of wet dough. When you are in the grip of debilitating desire, everything is consumed by that. And that’s the wonderful thing about making a movie. It is sensual, it is visual, it is aural. 

At Wuthering Heights, there’s hair on everything. There are these hairy throws, it’s pubic and grisly in there. And at Thrushcross Grange, the underside of everything is hair. The underside of all the chairs is hairy, the underside of the staircase is hairy. What’s underneath everything is this bristle. That’s what I want to get at. And so it does mean you have to give yourself permission to be a little bit expressive. 

”Wuthering Heights” is in cinemas from 13 February.

Emerald Fennell curates ”Love Stories” is currently at BFI IMAX.