Emerald Fennell's 'Wuthering Heights' an emotive and visceral experience: Margot Robbie

Hollywood star Margot Robbie says Emerald Fennells Wuthering Heights isnt just another faithful adaptation of author Emily Brontes classic novel as the filmmaker has tried to recreate the feeling she had when she first read it as a teenager in her version.

Hollywood star Margot Robbie says Emerald Fennell's ''Wuthering Heights'' isn't just another faithful adaptation of author Emily Bronte's classic novel as the filmmaker has tried to recreate the feeling she had when she first read it as a teenager in her version. The Oscar-nominated actor has produced and headlined the film, which is set to open in Indian theatres on Friday. She stars alongside fellow Australian star Jacob Elordi. Bronte's 1847 novel is considered one of the most intense and haunting love stories in English literature as it traces the destructive, all-consuming bond between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, a relationship driven as much by obsession, pride and revenge as by love. Fennell, known for directing critically-acclaimed movies ''Promising Young Women'' and ''Saltburn'', haa adapted the screenplay and directed the new movie. ''It's a bold interpretation of one of the greatest love stories of all time, a book that she (Fennell) loves dearly and I love, too. It has been adapted and interpreted many, many times over the years. I think what Emerald wanted to do was recreate the feeling the book gave her the first time she read it when she was 14 years old. ''And so, what you get with Emerald's 'Wuthering Heights' is a very emotive and visceral experience. It's very much focusing on how what's happening is making you feel,'' Robbie said in a transcript shared by Warner Bros India. As a filmmaker, Fennell puts a ''distinctive and unique stamp'' on her work that is able to elicit a visceral reaction from the audience, Robbie added. ''She does that in a different way in this film, but it is, like I said, a very visceral experience. It's very emotional. It's very romantic. And it's epic, it's storytelling on a really big scale,'' she said. The novel has been adapted in Hollywood in 1920, 1939, 1970, 1992, 2011 and 2022. The story has had multiple adaptations in Bollywood as well with Dilip Kumar starring in three -- ''Arzoo'' in 1950, ''Hulchul'' in 1951 and ''Dil Diya Dard Liya'' in 1966. Robbie, who broke out as a star with Martin Scorsese's ''The Wolf of Wall Street'' and has solidified her career with ''I, Tonya'', ''Once Upon a Time in Hollywood'', ''Bombshell'' and ''Barbie'', said she has often wondered what makes ''Wuthering Heights'' a story that filmmakers keep returning to. ''The answer is, I don't know, and if I did know, I don't know if we'd still be examining it 200 years later. But I suspect it's got something to do with how challenging these characters are, how much you want things to work out for them, how their relationship is so difficult and complex and yet so straightforward at the same time.'' Robbie and Elordi's chemistry has garnered a lot of attention in the film and the actor said Fennell, who worked with Elordi earlier in ''Saltburn'', wrote Heathcliff with him in mind. ''...It's because she said he looked like the illustration of Heathcliff on the cover of the book that she read when she was a teenager, which I love. For me, Heathcliff is a lineage of actors... I think of Laurence Olivier famously playing Heathcliff, and Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy, and it feels fitting to me that Jacob should play Heathcliff, given that I think he is going to be one of the great actors of our generation. He's already proving to be that,'' she said.

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