ComingSoon Senior Editor Brandon Schreur spoke to Wuthering Heights production designer Suzie Davies about Emerald Fennell’s romantic period drama movie. Davies discussed working with Fennell to design the look of the movie, the experience of designing the Wuthering Heights Estate compared to Edgar’s mansion, and more. “A bold and original interpretation of one of the […] The post Wuthering Heights Had to Feel ‘Wet, Sweating, or Dripping,’ Says Production Designer | Interview appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
ComingSoon Senior Editor Brandon Schreur spoke to Wuthering Heights production designer Suzie Davies about Emerald Fennell’s romantic period drama movie. Davies discussed working with Fennell to design the look of the movie, the experience of designing the Wuthering Heights Estate compared to Edgar’s mansion, and more.
“A bold and original interpretation of one of the greatest love stories of all time, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights stars Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, whose forbidden passion for one another turns from romantic to intoxicating in an epic tale of lust, love, and madness,” the synopsis reads.
Wuthering Heights is now available to own on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD.
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.
Definitely. I’m curious to ask how, if at all, your vision for the production design changes when you start working on the movie. I’m sure you go into filming with a plan for how it’s going to look and you’re building the sets and everything, but do you find that plan changing at all when you actually get there and the cameras start rolling? How does the end result of what Wuthering Heights looks like compare to what you were picturing in your mind when you were reading the script for the first time?
Well, it took a beat to actually find the visual language, as much as I had that discussion with Emerald. When we landed on the sort of broader structures — the actual shape of Wuthering Heights with that sort of gothic arch tunnel, that was sort of defined because we were going to be filming on a sound stage. I wanted to have as many layers between the walls and rocks before we got to the light. I just didn’t want it open to the Moors; I thought that was too scary. It had to be sustained in quite a few scenes.
I guess what’s great is when you build something of that scale, it took about ten or twelve weeks to build that. And we were all on site. All of our offices were there. Emerald’s office was there. So, we could daily go watch the build happening. We could see the paint colors and things like that. It gave us all the opportunity to be like, ‘Well, can we make that bit of rock a bit further back?’ We were able to change the build as we went on.
I also had such a great team. I’ve got a great construction crew who was up for that as well. A lot of the painters and carpenters who work for me are sort of fine artists on the weekends who paint and sculpt. They could bring that element of their work to this as well, particularly for the rocks. Or, just about anything. Even the doors we designed for this stable block, we built it one way. But as we were building, we realized it was too wooden. I think you just catch it for a beat; there’s all this red leather that’s been pinned onto the inside of it to give it that weird feeling. God knows, it’s not necessarily period correct, but it’s not period incorrect, either. Who knows why they would put red leather on the back of stable doors? But it made sense to us. Those things sort of evolve because we were all there during the build process, and that was great to be able to do that.
Sure. I love that. 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.
Thanks to Suzie Davies for taking the time to discuss Wuthering Heights.
The post Wuthering Heights Had to Feel ‘Wet, Sweating, or Dripping,’ Says Production Designer | Interview appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
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