What’s Up with Those Gin Bottle Mountains in ‘Wuthering Heights’? The Film’s Production Designer Explains

Editor’s Note: The following story contains spoilers for “Wuthering Heights.”

Whatever else you might think of it, there’s no denying writer and director Emerald Fennell designed her adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” to be gleefully jarring. Maybe no moment exemplifies this better than the near jumpscare of Cathy (Margot Robbie) returning to her not-so-homey childhood abode to find her father, Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), dead on the ground in basically Peter Griffin pose, surrounded by piles of gin bottles rising to the rafters. 

The two gin monoliths, like so much of the visual design of the film, gave production designer Suzie Davies and her team the chance to reach the apex of a feeling — whether anger, sadness, despair, or desire. Fennell wrote into the script that Earnshaw would meet his end surrounded by mountains of empty bottles, but it was on Davies to translate that into a reality — or at least as much of a reality for the world of the often unreal, dreamlike, and deliberately artificial-looking “Wuthering Heights.”

“Oh my God, that was such fun to do!” Davies told IndieWire. “We had a fantastic team of model makers doing all sorts of wonderful things [to make] these giant bottles of booze. I think I’d made it about five-foot high, up to the windows. I thought, ‘That’s a lot of gin.’ We’d been practicing it because, obviously, on a schedule, you can’t just dress those in. They’re actually on a rig, and we wanted to get light behind them so it’s hollow behind. [And] Emerald just said, ‘I think we need more.’” 

The twin peaks ended up over seven feet tall, made of a collage of mostly lightweight plastic bottles, with the odd real glass bottle here and there to create a bit of shine against DP Linus Sandgren’s ghoulish, slightly greenish lights. On the rig, they could be quickly lifted in and out of the Earnshaw sitting room, such as it is, for the scene of Cathy and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) confronting the body of the man who both brought them together and tormented them for years. 

Davies said that the monstrous nature of those sky-high bottle piles is not only a visual match for Earnshaw and the horror of what a drunk he was. It’s also part of the way that the Wuthering Heights house disintegrates into wreck and ruin. “We wanted the omnipresence of nature taking over in all forms. It’s coming from the mountain, it’s coming from all sides, it’s coming from the ground. Everything was just the heaviness and pressure of that building and the uncomfortable nature of what’s going on in that world,” Davies said. 

Behind the scenes of ‘Wuthering Heights’Jaap Buitendijk

By this point in the film, Davies and her team had already done a lot of work, giving the space an emotional trajectory similar to Cathy and Heathcliff’s self-destruction over their feelings for each other. Freed from any sort of period accuracy, Davies tried to start the house in a spartan, memory-like state, as Cathy and Heathcliff would remember it from childhood. “There’s not really an oven. There’s not the usual accoutrements of a kitchen. It’s very bare,” Davies said. “But I love that when Heathcliff and Isabella [Alison Oliver] take over, it’s just layers upon layers of dead animals and food and drink and shapes. It was great to do.” 

Whether working with the brooding ruin of the Wuthering Heights house or the glossy red corridors in Thrushcross Grange, Davies was guided by the same principles, which Fennell laid out in a phone call to Davies before she sent the production designer the script. “The idea that it was gonna be about a feeling more than anything. It’s like the architecture of feeling that we needed to design, rather than the architecture of the period,” Davies said.

Behind the scenes of ‘Wuthering Heights’Jaap Buitendijk

Davies translated that into all sorts of wet surfaces, with water dripping down the rocks of Wuthering Heights and the rock gradually pushing in over the course of the movie. The fireplace was designed as if it had been built out of that rock, and then it too starts to sweat — those who’ve seen Isabella and Heathcliff’s scenes as a married couple know why. 

“You’re just given this opportunity to safely make crazy decisions,” Davies said. “Although it’s [Emerald’s] story, she’s happy [for everyone to have], and expects everyone to have an opinion, and suggestions. So it’s not, like, ‘Do it this way.’ It’s like, ‘This is what I’m after. What can you do?’ You end up building this visual language that, luckily, over two films [including ‘Saltburn’], I feel like I sort of know her groove,” Davies said. “She pushes me in a direction I would not normally go, and it’s just brilliant for a creative role to have that freedom to just go a little bit crazy.” 

“Wuthering Heights” is now playing in theaters.