Romance Without Limits: The Cinematography of ‘Wuthering Heights’

When cinematographer Linus Sandgren reunited with “Saltburn” director Emerald Fennell for her maximalist take on Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic “Wuthering Heights,” he immediately felt liberated by Fennell’s passionate, fearless approach to the material. “Normally in a film you always have some sort of realism that you feel bound to,” Sandgren told IndieWire. “But in this case, the realism is Emerald’s world — it was very inspiring because it felt like there were no limits to how expressive we could be with this love story. You really could go all the way, having free rein.”

Having free rein meant Sandgren was able to help Fennell find a cinematic corollary for the visceral experience she had as a teenager when she first read the book. “ I wanted to make something that felt like the world of a 14-year-old girl reading this book for the first time,” Fennell told IndieWire, “which meant that things are a little more heightened, or a little more anachronistic.”

The key for Fennell, Sandgren, and collaborators like production designer Suzie Davies, was to create a self-contained world with its own internal logic and guiding principles — principles informed not by literal reality but by the emotional states of the characters.

“You should be able to pause the movie and understand what the characters are feeling inside that frame,” Fennell said. “Whether it’s foreboding, whether it’s dread, whether it’s lust.” For Sandgren, that often meant taking advantage of — or, for the scenes shot on stages, creating — extreme weather conditions. “In Yorkshire, where the story takes place, you have dramatic weather to work with,” Sandgren said. “It’s a great metaphor.” For example, when the filmmakers wanted to convey the humiliation of heroine Cathy’s father (Martin Clunes), they relied heavily on rain to give him the appearance of, as Sandgren put it, “a sad dog.”

Because even many exteriors were created on stages, Sandgren and Fennell had extreme control over their palette; the result is some of the most striking color imagery since the glory days of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, whose studio-bound flights of fancy like “Black Narcissus” and “A Matter of Life and Death” were key reference points for Fennell. “When heartbreak occurs, the sky can be blood red,” Fennell said, adding that Thrushcross, the estate Cathy (Margot Robbie) moves to in the middle of the film, exists in a state of everlasting spring. “Except when it’s Christmas — then it always snows.”

The desire to give the audience an immersive emotional experience informed each of Sandgren’s choices, including what format to shoot on and what aspect ratio to select for the framing. As has come to be Sandgren’s usual practice, “Wuthering Heights” was captured on film — primarily 35mm, with some sweeping landscape shots photographed in VistaVision. At one point, Sandgren and Fennell considered shooting the movie on 65mm, but the grain was too fine and the detail too sharp for the textured, romantic look they desired.

“Film is an organic format,” Sandgren said. “If you have a digital camera and the camera is still, and there’s a wall, then it’s actually a still image, and it’s not moving. But film moves, and that automatically helps with the suspension of disbelief. It also really helps with the richness of the colors and the skin tones. It’s much more emotional.” Although Sandgren and Fennell leaned into the grain for most shots, for wide shots, they used the higher resolution VistaVision so that the viewer’s eye could go to small figures in the frame without being distracted by grain that was nearly as large as the actors.

For Fennell, shooting on film added to the tactile quality of the movie, something she tried to embrace on every level. “You want the feeling of hands that make things,” she said, “whether it’s Charli XCX’s music or the film itself or the skin wall.” Fennell wanted viewers to buy into the reality of her very unreal world, which played into both the decision to shoot on celluloid and the choice of a 1.85:1 aspect ratio as opposed to the 1.33:1 frame she and Sandgren used on “Saltburn,” or a wider anamorphic frame that might have showcased the landscapes.

“It could have been a 1.33 movie, and it could have been a 2.40 movie,” Sandgren said, explaining that he and Fennell had a lot of discussions about the pros and cons of various aspect ratios. Ultimately, he felt 1.85 would be the most enveloping format simply because it’s the one most cinemas are currently built for. “Unfortunately, most screens now are built for 1.85, and if you see a 2.40 movie, it has matting just like on your TV. When you go to a cinema, you want to see it as big as possible on the screen, and today 1.85 screens are the larger format.”

Fennell noted that the different aspect ratios indicate the different approaches taken to “Saltburn” and “Wuthering Heights.” “‘Saltburn’ is a portrait and this is a landscape,” Fennell said, adding that if they had gone wider, it would have been more difficult to compose in the painterly fashion to which she and Sandgren aspired. Sandgren also felt that the 1.85 frame lent itself to the many scenes in which he wanted Cathy to appear isolated. “The movie is often about her being lonely,” Sandgren said. “She’s lying on a rock, or sitting alone in a room, and I think you can do those lonesome compositions more powerfully in a taller format than 2.40.”

Ultimately, Sandgren and Fennell agreed that these decisions and others were guided largely by instinct; although they began each day with a shot list, they didn’t lock themselves into it or create detailed storyboards that would restrict the actors. “It’s a long process where things slowly evolve,” Sandgren said. “Some scenes might be very clearly planned, while others evolve and finalize on the day. You really can’t know the shots for an emotional scene until you see the actors and work with them together.”

“We plan really rigorously,” Fennell said, explaining that careful shot-listing then liberates her and Sandgren to explore in the moment. “We have it already, and then you see something more interesting. We’re always looking for something intimate and exciting. And you can really only do that on the day.”

The sense of playfulness and experimentation extended to Fennell and Sandgren’s influences and reference points, which went beyond other films and even paintings and into more unorthodox areas. “We looked at a lot of disgusting stuff,” Fennell said. “The interior structure of the heart, and its relationship to a tree. That’s the real fun… then you get to open all sorts of little doors.”

A Warner Bros. release, “Wuthering Heights” is now in theaters.