Emerald Fennell will open her latest feature, Wuthering Heights, in IMAX at the BFI in London alongside an extended programme of films she has curated, featuring titles that inspired her adaptation of the classic Emily Brontë novel.
Wuthering Heights will screen at BFI Imax from February 13. The film will screen from laser prints. Fennell has curated a list of thirteen films that inspired the film for the BFI. Of the thirteen titles, four will screen at BFI Imax alongside Wuthering Heights. Those titles are David Cronenberg’s Crash, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, the director’s cut of Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, and Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled.
These films will screen from digital prints every Sunday at BFI Imax throughout February. Fennell’s full list of thirteen titles, which she says complement and give context to her adaptation of Wuthering Heights, is listed below.
- Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942),
- A Matter Of Life And Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946),
- Far From The Madding Crowd (John Schlesinger, 1967),
- Peau d’âne (Jacques Demy, 1970),
- The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)
- Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)
- Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)
- Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann, 1996)
- The End Of The Affair (Neil Jordan, 1999)
- Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999)
- Bluebeard (Catherine Breillat, 2009)
- The Handmaiden Director’s Cut (Park Chan-wook, 2016)
- The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola, 2017).
“Since its publication 200 years ago, critics have challenged Wuthering Heights’s validity as a love story,” Fennell said, writing for the BFI.
“It is too shocking, too cruel, too narratively strange to slip neatly into the world of romance, but it is a love story nonetheless. While researching it, I rewatched many of my own favourite ‘love stories,’ ones that challenged, subverted, even obliterated the conventions of the genre. These are stories which put the love story under duress, which stick a needle into the strawberry trifle, which show love in all its freakish, gory detail.”
Fennell will also take part in an in conversation session at BFI Southbank on February 4 ahead of the Wuthering Heights release, where she will discuss her experience shooting the project.
The synopsis of Fennell’s adaptation reads: Set against the desolate beauty of the Yorkshire moors, the all-consuming love between Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and the foundling Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) has captivated readers for centuries. When forces of class and society tear them apart, Heathcliff embarks on a bitter quest for vengeance that threatens to destroy two generations of the Linton and Earnshaw families.
