ComingSoon Senior Editor Brandon Schreur spoke to Wuthering Heights cinematographer Linus Sandgren about Emerald Fennell’s romantic period drama movie. Sandgren discussed how they approached the film’s visuals in a way that expresses characters’ emotions, how rain and weather factor into the look of the movie, 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 will be available to own on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD on May 5, 2025. It is currently available on digital platforms, including Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, and more.
Brandon Schreur: Linus, you’ve worked with Emerald Fennell before on Saltburn, which is another incredible-looking movie. I’d love to know what your reaction was when she came to you with this. She comes to you and says she’s adapting Wuthering Heights, and she wants you to do the cinematography for it. Is that daunting at all, at first, given that it’s such a well-known book and the visuals have so much to do with telling this story? Or is that a challenge that makes you excited to dive in and get started?
I think, for some reason, the book is like a mandatory read in England, and maybe in the States as well, where everyone reads this book. Actually, in Sweden, where I’m from, a lot of people have read the book, but it wasn’t like we read it in school. So I hadn’t actually read it. So, when she told me about it, I was obviously very excited to work with her again. She’s just going to do great films, I think. I love working with her; she’s amazing to work with, and she’s a great storyteller. And she always has a twist.
I think, in this case, I was excited to obviously read the script. It was very important…apparently, the book has more than the film. It depends on which part of the story, how you tell it — you can tell it in different ways. So, for me, it was most important to listen to [Fennell’s] vision and her idea for the film to be sort of the greatest love story, as she knows it, ever told. Her take on it was much more important to me than anything else. Which is always the case. It’s always the director’s vision that matters.
I didn’t read the book to get ideas, because sometimes that’s also confusing. You remember things, and you think that’s in the movie, but that was actually in the book. It’s actually quite good to be fresh that way, in these situations, I think. But I was very excited to do something she felt was going to be driven by the emotional story, and then sort of her images of how she saw how the house looked like, how everything played out, the relationship between things, how people looked, and how the world looked. It very much comes from her mind, really, and it evolved from that with the creative team of [production designer] Suzie Davies, me, [costume designer] Jacqueline [Durran], and everybody.
Also, I loved the idea that she wanted it to be shot on stage to design it just in a specific way. The majority of the film is shot on stage, also exteriors. The challenge became, for me, to — first, we worked out the visual language and how we should dramatize the visual language. But then, to adapt it to being only on stage, but still have enough variety or enough intimacy with the characters. The ability to sort of tell the story, but that’s the benefit of building, where you can actually build it to the story. You can have him look at her through those glass windows. You could, on one hand, build it as you want, but we also wanted to build it so you can go in and out without moving the walls. It’s like a real house.
So, it was built like a real house, on a stage. [The stage was on] an elevated hill where we had weather of rain, snow, thunder, lightning, wind, or fog all the time, sort of available to the different scenes. But it is about, obviously, nature and humans in combination. We wanted to use the weather and those kinds of looks from that dramatic landscape. Which is already, I’m sure in the book, why it’s situated in that landscape, so you can work dramatically with the emotions of the characters, visually. In your mind, when you’re reading it, that is what the story does already.
When you light the film, you kind of ‘paint with light,’ that’s sort of a saying. It’s really what we kind of did with this film, I think. Usually, you’re quite restricted in some sort of realism because you have decided that, in the morning, they wake up. So, now it’s morning, and it’s summer, because it is summer. But we could take the liberty — we were allowed to take the liberty in this film — that it doesn’t matter. It could have been night after night, day after day, in the scenes, as long as they served the emotions for the storylines of obsession or sensuality. Whatever felt important emotionally for the story should be expressed at a certain level of [drama].
‘How far should we go?’ was the question. But it was always like, I must say, more allowance for doing what we felt was right with the scenes in terms of emotions and less about reality or realism. Other films would much more feel the urge to somewhat compromise between those two in a more subtle way. Which can still be beautiful too, obviously.
Saltburn had the realism, I think, in it, but we played with the Baroque language of beauty and ugliness — you can depict something in a gorgeous way while it’s still really unpleasant to watch. But you can’t help yourself because it’s irresistible imagery. There’s that kind of combination. This lives here as well, but I think we went more for looking at each shot, almost — really, shot-by-shot — to do what the romantic painters did with the landscape and the humans. How you combine the weather and the light with the characters to dramatize the situation, or enhance the emotions.
So, it’s raining when the father is sort of miserable, he’s on the horse, and he’s drunk. The rain doesn’t make that situation better. At the same time, he has to help her not get rain in her eyes when she looks up at him. It’s, like, something that happened when we rehearsed between Jacob and Margot that was just so sweet and tender…He’s holding his hands over her eyes so she can look at him without getting rain in her eyes, which was such a beautiful thing for him to do. It really helped the tenderness of the scene that it was raining. That was sort of our approach in the film, all the way through. It’s really following the heart of the story and the characters.
Thanks to Linus Sandgren for taking the time to discuss Wuthering Heights
