Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights was met with a lot of people having very strong opinions. On the one hand, people loved what she did with Emily Brontë’s work. On the other, people were furious about the liberties taken with the source material. One thing we can all agree on though is that it looked beautiful.
Much like Fennell’s work in Saltburn, her own take on stories like The Talented Mr. Ripley, her version of Wuthering Heights was a sweeping film filled with colorful rooms, a bedroom made of Margot Robbie’s skin, and the broken down home that is Wuthering Heights. And a lot of this vision came from Fennell’s set decorator, Charlotte Dirickx. Dirickx, who also worked with Fennell on Saltburn, had to find balance in large rooms painted red with no other furniture present or the large strawberries that Cathy (Robbie) indulged in. Which Dirickx did share was her department.
But more impressive was Dirickx’s ability to make empty rooms feel captivating which wasn’t an easy feat. “It’s just like when you’re paring everything down, then you’ve got to actually be really disciplined,” she said. “It might not look like it, but you’ve got to make sure like all those pieces are gonna work with each other and they sort of have like a life where they have a click sort of mechanism. So whether the Dutch tall boy will work with the sort of two Regency sofas that we upholstered.”
She went on to talk about how every piece of the set had to come together to really bring Fennell’s vision alive in stunning detail.
And then the chess set at the back and then all the chairs we had completely upholstered, so all the wood is all upholstered in satin and, and so that was also to kind of make it feel all quite claustrophobic, so the tables were all completely covered in fabric and then again you know we went with satin cos there were a lot of night scenes in there so it would glisten a little bit. And then at one point I had a carpet and then Emerald was like, no, let’s do wall to wall, and that just brought it all together, yeah, wall to wall powder blue carpet.
You can see our full conversation here:
Wuthering Heights is now streaming.
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