Bird's Eye View

Young Heathcliff (Solomon Glave) and Cathy (Shannon Beer)

Andrea Arnold is celebrated as one of Britain’s most important contemporary filmmakers. Birds Eye View’s very first event back in November 2002 featured Andrea Arnold’s beautiful and disturbing short film Dog. Her third short, Wasp, won her an Oscar, and was screened at the first Birds Eye View Film Festival in 2005. Andrea then sprung into feature film with the tension thrilled Red Road which won the jury award at Cannes, as did her second feature Fish Tank, which won the Birds Eye View Marie Claire Best Film of 2009-10 Award, presented by Gillian Anderson at our 2010 film festival. For the first time, Andrea has delivered an adaptation of a classic novel for her third, equally distinctive feature film. We had the opportunity to chat with her about the experience:

Interview questions by Rebecca Brand, Head of Communications and Operations at Women in Film and Television UK , with many thanks from BEV!

Yes and no. I tried really hard to stay true to what I believed to be the heart of the book and what Emily intended but also no because if I took on the enormity of everyone’s expectations I could not have moved. In the end you just have to make your own decisions and find your own way and that’s a very intimate thing.

What is it about Bronte’s novel that you originally connected to as a reader that made you want to adapt it?

I find it hard to explain why I did it. I made an instinctive decision and then it would not let me go. Now I think it was maybe the abuse and the nature I was drawn to.

The novel has been made for film and television numerous times before, but your film has been described as a ‘bold and distinctive approach’. Did you feel it was important to distinguish your adaptation from those that had come before?

I haven’t seen any of the adaptations apart from the Laurence Olivier one when I was a kid. I just went about it in my own way not knowing really what had gone before. I did look a little at the Buñuel version although I could only find a small part on the internet. I was curious about that one. A journalist in Toronto told me he had seen most of the adaptations and had found it interesting they they were for the most part romantic and fluffy and made by men and that it had taken a woman to expose its true brutality.

One of the striking elements of your adaptation was the decision to make Heathcliff a black man, played as a boy by Solomon Glave and in adulthood by James Howson. Why did you choose to do that?

There are a few brief descriptions of Heathcliff in the book. They nearly all suggest he is not white and I felt it very important to
honour this and feel his difference as it was in the book. There is obviously a mystery surrounding his appearance and its unexplained so everyone can make their own assumptions but Liverpool where he was found by Earnshaw was a big slave port at the time so its very possible he could have been related to a slave? His difference felt massively important to the story I wanted to tell and contemporary too.

Your first two feature films, Red Road and Fish Tank, are both set in the modern day. What was it like making your first period drama?

I think everyone expected me to set it on a council estate in 2011. I remember a friend sending me a quote from a newspaper article. It said something like ‘Can you imagine Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights?’: “Heathcliff put that fucking grouse down and get your lazy arse in here now”. Fantastic. I did actually start writing a contemporary version. When I first started I went to Haworth and saw a lad with his hood up skulking down a busy country road alongside a dry stone wall and I thought I’d seen my Heathcliff. I started writing in the modern day. A troubled teenager in the passenger seat of a car, looking out at the car beams sweeping across the isolated moor at night. The man driving was Earnshaw and he was fostering Heathcliff. Then as I read the book more I came to realise that so much of it had a feminist voice. Emily says a lot about how it was be female at that time and I thought it would be a disservice to her to make it modern.

You filmed Fish Tank in sequence, gradually sharing the plot with the actors as the shoot went on. Obviously, the actors may have been familiar with the story of Wuthering Heights already so you couldn’t have had that same degree of control over them. But did you try to employ a similar method in the way you revealed your script to them and the way you shot the film?

Actually very few of the actors were that familiar with [the novel]. Maybe they were all mostly too young. I was also not able to have the luxury of filming chronologically on this film and so it was all very different. I worked with each of the cast depending on what they wanted. I showed James Howson the whole script because I felt he needed to know his childhood. I told Kaya (Scodelario, who plays Cathy) not to read the book but offered her the script eventually. Shannon (Beer, who plays young Cathy) and Solomon just had their pages little by little so they had less to take on board. It just depended on what each of them needed.

The clever use of sound – the relentless howling wind, the squelch of heavy feet wading through the muddy moors – and extreme close-up shots of intimate details and the surrounding nature really drew me into the film and created a very visceral experience. I felt like I was up on the moors with those characters. Was that something you were actively trying to achieve?

From the writing onwards I always wanted to have natural sound. The wind is such a big character when you are on the moors. It is the thing you hear the most and it makes its own music anyway. I always wanted the film to be visceral and the sound was a a big part of that. I had an amazing sound team who worked so hard and each one of them a poet and bringing beauty. I am glad you picked up on it because I think they did special and brave work.

The rugged landscape looked absolutely great in the film. It must have been tough shooting in those conditions though?

It was a very physical experience for all the crew. We knew it was going to be hard but not to the extent it actually was. We got behind from the start which I have never done before. It was just so hard moving around with camera gear. We could not use vehicles and had to carry everything. The mud was deep and hard to walk in. Everyone fell over all the time. It was cold. There was nowhere much to sit. We needed farmers’ boots with proper treads. Normal wellies could not deal with the ground. By the end of the week everyone was knocked out and we partied as hard as we worked to make up for it.

Once again, you have drawn out great performances from your unknown and inexperienced young leads, Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer, as you did previously with newcomer Katie Jarvis in Fish Tank. How do you do it?

Casting. Lucy Pardee who cast the kids is great at finding natural kids and credit goes to her. She also found Katie in Fish Tank. She’s
a diamond.

You’ve said before that you make films for yourself, rather than for a particular audience. So what’s your personal verdict of the film?

The only way I know of doing this is to look to myself, I don’t know how else to do it. If I tried to make films for everyone I think I
would get lost. I have not got enough distance from this film yet to know what I think of it though. It deals with such pain and cruelty. I never feel pleased at the end. I start off with such a pure idea and it always gets battered and this film more than most. The other day I played a mixed tape that Paul Hilton gave me during the shoot. (He is the lovely man who plays Earnshaw) I played it at the end of every filming day and it was like a friend. I had not played it since the shoot and put it on again after finishing the film completely. Out of nowhere came this rush of feelings. A release of tension. Memories. The moors. The cold. The faces of everyone. Everything came back and my heart felt full for it all. Its always an amazing experience to make a film but I am frustrated with my own limitations. I don’t know.

We’ve heard that the next project from Lynne Ramsay is going to be a Sci-Fi Moby Dick! Can we expect something equally bizarre but brilliant from Andrea Arnold?

A remake of Carry on Up the Jungle. I wanted to do something funny and this combines nature and comedy.

Thank you Andrea! We’ll look forward to carrying on up the jungle with you, or wherever your next film takes us.

Birds Eye View Nest Members have the opportunity to apply for a pair of free tickets to the screening of Wuthering Heights + Q&A with Andrea Arnold at the Curzon Soho Cinema on Friday 11th November at 6.10pm. For more information on how to join the Nest, please click here.