The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Wuthering Heights.

I understand you’ve been obsessed with this novel since you were fourteen. I love what you said about how the book never judges its characters, despite their actions. How did that inform you as you began to adapt the book?
Emerald Fennell: I think everyone in this book is kind of deeply troubling. That’s what makes it such a masterpiece, you know? The sum of its parts and the sum of their parts are so much more. Before I looked to adapt it, I wrote down everything I remembered. Some things were real and some weren’t real. And there were some aspects that were complete wish fulfillment, pervy, a sort hopefulness. When it came to adapting it, it was always going to be difficult to translate these characters that are… hard going a lot of the time. But then I love hard going characters because I’m hard going. And the people that I love are hard going. I like characters that makes your sympathies change, depending on the scene, depending on the moment. That’s how life feels sometimes. So, for example, I’m obviously going to be attracted to Nelly as a character.

they can feel safe to have terrible ideas

Nelly’s fascinating and her machinations are foreshadowed quite well. She’s complicated, and she has that really touching scene with Cathy towards the end. It feels like these characters are just trying to do their best in the moment.
And I think that’s the thing with Nelly. There’s this great piece of criticism from the fifties, which is called something like “The True Villain of Wuthering Heights is Nelly Dean.” She’s this untrustworthy narrator, an innocent bystander who’s not quite so innocent and you can never quite trust. But I’ve always felt like Nelly is kind of us shouting at the movie screen in a theater. You know, when you watch somebody go down to a basement in a horror movie and you yell, don’t go down to the basement! That’s what Nelly is doing. She’s the older sister. She’s trying to keep things on the rails. Would you let your two most incompetent lunatic friends plan the course of your life? Of course not. None of us would. It’s important that we always understand that perspective, and that’s why working with actors like Hong [Chau], who is so deeply and profoundly gifted, is essential to giving the audience an understanding of the character. That’s what’s so heartbreaking about her scene with Cathy at the end—Nelly’s admission that maybe she did know what she was doing. Behavior and cruelty can be natural and deliberate.

The production design is extraordinary in this film. Can you talk about working with your team?
The production designer Suzie Davies is so remarkable and such a gifted artist. I’m lucky to get to work with her because she’s also fun and funny. A lot of the conversations that we have together are kind of conceptual—so many of the references that we had for this film were like, the arterial system and its relationship to trees. And how this kind of brutalism makes you feel. There are these giant sculptures in the middle of nowhere that give you an unnerving feeling, like swimming near a huge ship. We talked a lot about that uncanny feeling. But the most important thing for me was to use this base idea of how nature invades Wuthering Heights. Nature is part of it and insinuating itself into Wuthering Heights, whether it’s the rocks or these kinds of tumorous growths. And then at Thrushcross Grange, it’s an attempt to contain nature. There’s skin behind walls or taxidermy or flower pressing, all these Victorian attempts to make things clean and pleasant. And that will inevitably influence the people living in these places.

And that then extends itself into a conversation with Jacqueline Durran, who is the most brilliant costume designer, about how the walls relate to Cathy’s corsets. And then there’s Siân [Miller], the most incredible hair and makeup designer. We’ll say, the walls are sweating with crystals, and if nature can’t really be contained, then we’ll do the same thing with Cathy’s makeup. There will be similar jewels that look like kind of sweat freckles on her face. The thing about working with such an incredible team, and I’ll say particularly with a team of women, is that we all spend a great deal of time communicating with each other about how we can all be generous towards each other and make sure that everyone’s work is in tune.

I also get to work with Linus Sandgren, who’s the greatest cinematographer in the world. I’m using so many superlatives because I’m a girl [laughs]! But I can’t overstate how meaningful it is to work with and to have the trust of people that are so gifted and so experienced. Linus comes in and he’s the same way, he’s working from an emotional place, so he’s also in tune. When I think of the directors I respond to—Powell and Pressburger and Peter Greenaway—I think about how they extend their hands in a way that isn’t purely literal. They’re creating a world which might be kind of stylistic, but it should feel true in some subconscious way. Working with all these amazing people, it’s a shared endeavor.

In tune is the perfect way to describe all the production elements in this film; everything feels meticulously laid out. How do you get everyone on the same page?
Well, it’s a testament to this crew that the entire prep time was only three months. Everything was built in three months, from scratch—they fired the tiles for Wuthering Heights. There was so much joy. I think you only do this job if you’re an adrenaline junkie and you need that constraint. It’s kind of a sadomasochistic endeavor, making a film out of a book that not only you love, but that hundreds of thousands of people love deeply. There’s something joyous about just going for it. What I love about this job, and what I feel is essential to it, is saying and reassuring people that they can feel safe to have terrible ideas. To make things that are bad, to do acting that’s bad, to make a costume that’s silly. I don’t want anyone to have any shame. Because the thing about shame or fear of being silly is that all that stuff is inhibiting to art. I would so much rather make something demented that tuned into somebody or pulled them in. A lot of my job is making sure that everyone I work with—and many of them have massive reputations that far exceed mine—trusts that I won’t let them down. That they can come to me with insane ideas, and those ideas will be met with an enormous amount of grace and thought. And that’s the way that you can work fast and you can build things that are incredible as you trust each other.

First and foremost, the film does feel gothic, but you also seamlessly fold in moments of comedy and melodrama and sweeping romance. How do you communicate with your actors about what you’re going for?
It’s the same process with the actors as it is with the crew; it’s primarily an emotional conversation. We have a lot of rehearsals. We have a lot of conversations. I try to not rewrite too much until I’ve got the actors in the room and can see how everything’s working, and what things to pull out and where to apply pressure. It’s always kind of interesting, the rehearsals.

Another way I like to work with actors is to do the boring takes first.  Let’s do the rehearsal scene that we know will end up in the movie, and you know it’s going to be great because you have Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi or Martin Clunes. You do all that first, and then it’s about playing with it and seeing what happens if you, say, subvert the power in the room or if somebody plays it laughing hysterically. It’s the sort of stuff that you would do in a theater, but it’s making sure you get it on film. Some of the time it’s not usable or it’s too arch or it’s a means to an end. But sometimes you need it. And those times, it’s electric. But again, that’s what happens if you have an immense amount of trust in your actors and they have trust in you. They know that I’m not going to make them do something crazy and then put it in the film. They know there will be a process. I like a lot of choices as well. And I like them to surprise me and to surprise each other. That’s what I find really thrilling. Take the dinner table scene, when Heathcliff comes back after years away. Dinner table scenes are quite deadening because you have to get so much coverage no matter how precise you are. You just do. But they can also be the most fun because you get to whisper in people’s ears and try to destabilize them a bit. Not in a mean or aggressive kind of way, but in a playful kind of way. It’s fun and when everyone is up for playing, that can make it so wonderful.