Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is now available on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, which is a perfect way to soak in the sumptuous production design, listen to the evocative score (complete with glittery Charli xcx songs) and parse through the stunning cinematography, which comes courtesy of Swedish cinematographer Linus Sandgren.
Sandgren worked with Fennell on “Saltburn” and returned for her follow-up, a horned-up, anachronistic take on Emily Brontë’s 19th century novel, this time starring Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, who are caught up in a truly sweeping love affair that transcends class and station.
We got to chat with Sandgren about the cinematography of “Wuthering Heights.” And before you ask, yes, we did inquire about his work with Denis Villeneuve on “Dune: Part Three” (he’s taking over for the great Greig Fraser, who is, instead, working on Sam Mendes’ Beatles movies), but he has been told not to talk about it. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of time to talk about “Dune: Part Three.”
TheWrap: When you started on the project, what were the things that you and Emerald talked about in terms of the look of “Wuthering Heights?”
Linus Sandgren: It started with her, obviously, talking about the film in regards to her vision. I hadn’t read the book, I read her script, and she’s really great at actually explaining with few words, so you get images in your head when she’s talking … you sort of see images when she explains things. With “Saltburn,” she would explain how he’s licking the bathtub, you get images in your head.
What was lovely was that the core of the story, the core of the visual storytelling comes from how she saw it as she read the book for the first time, basically, and therefore it was a mishmash of inspirational images that could be coming from Brutalist architecture that she’s seen in her neighborhood with films she’s seen as a kid or other things. She built that story in her head and the dream for her was to make a film that looked like that.
She wanted to shoot it all on stage. Basically, to be able to create, at least the world, to look in a specific way and not just shoot in a random house. Everything is derived from her fantasy that has evolved, I’m sure, over the years, and so she had very specific ideas for costume and the design. It would be like the element of a rock and she would have images of rocks, and then images of unclear details of an animal on the wall that you don’t know what it is, but it looks gross, but it’s also beautiful, and it’s actually nothing special. It’s just a piece between the leg and the chest on a pig, but it looks like something else.
It was [a] playful and very inspirational room that she had, with inspiring images that were not necessarily in the movie but they were helping us feel the freedom to go much further than you would normally do in in a film that would have to stick to reality – in a way that it was meant to be heightened realism and focus on the love story itself and let the world be expressive for this strong love story, in the same way romantic painters painted dramatic landscapes of man and nature. I think we use the same idea in different ways. Nature and man could be combined in, as much as we could fit, everything to whatever goes on emotionally. And then we had the freedom to be more dramatic than normal, Emerald encouraged [it].
From shot to shot, as we went through the story, we decided on what would benefit this scene emotionally to make us feel when we watch these images and the actors in them, how they feel like inside, you always want to do that, but I think to a degree, in this case, it was only what we cared about. That was fun, because that was different from other films, and also, it was a dramatic, emotional and sensual story, which also was different for me.
Emerald is the most fun to work with, because it’s always laughter. We always have so fun. Doing this film after “Saltburn” was really a fun challenge, but more challenging for all of us was the technical stuff, because it demanded more technical solutions for everything to work.
What were those technical challenges?
Well, for example, you decide to shoot on stage and build a house on stage with the interior and the exterior of the house. We shot only landscape shots and the introduction and the hanging and different things on location, but otherwise anytime you were outside around the Wuthering Heights house or Thrushcross Grange, it was on stage.
One, you need a variation of weather to both entertain the audience, but also, we saw that as an opportunity to use the weather for the different emotions. That was an important key. It’s like when you play Zelda, then you mix these superpower drinks, you put down like a little bit of Kubrick here and then a little bit of “Gone With the Wind” here and German Expressionism there.
I always try to think, which painterly style are we in? “Saltburn” was more baroque, because it could be like a picture that depicts something really hard to watch, but at the same time, you can’t resist watching it because it looks great. In this case, it was like, go all in on romanticism, use the nature with the emotions of the characters and an absolute classic.
Also, because we were on stage, that it couldn’t look too artificial. The lighting, in a way, I feel like it should look naturalistic as much as possible, like the correct color temperatures that is in the real world, but an unrealistic amount of dramatic lighting, because it was always somewhat dramatic – either it was foggy or it was like rainy or it was the last sun with the dramatic clouds. Because it happened to be always a little bit dramatic, I guess that is what creates that heightened reality or surrealism in combination with strange sets.
When we’re on location, we wanted to maintain that look on location and the technical challenges there would become that it’s sunny and windy, and you want to have a foggy looking or rainy looking scene, we added fog and added rain. All those scenes that look foggy or rainy were a challenge. There was also a challenge to light it in such a way that you had a great flexibility, because we shot on, I forgot now how many days, but it must have been over 40 days on the stages. And, from one day to another, you change, or even from one shot to another, you change direction, and a lot of lights are up there in the ceiling and on pipes and stuff. We needed to always have the flexibility to turn around. And so, we had to add more lights than we needed in a way that I basically peppered the ceiling with the LED lights.
It was technical challenges like this because we aimed for creating somewhat realistic but also a dramatic once-a-month type of moment for every shot or every scene. Why it becomes a little more surreal but it was really about trying to capture whatever felt important in that particular scene, emotionally, in the most appropriate way, to enhance that with the visuals, which you don’t always do in films, because sometimes you want it to not be looking the way it feels or you want to do it in more subtle ways or realistic ways. Here it was more all in, which was different and fun.
“Wuthering Heights” is available on Blu-ray and 4K UHD from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.
