Obsessive video surveillance, childhood neglect, poverty, and the darker side of sexual awakening: these are not the typical subjects one wants to explore. But in the hands of British director Andrea Arnold, there is a gentle storytelling that betrays the harshness of her subject matter. Her stories unfold slowly and often beautifully, with as many moments of detonating brutality as quiet redemption. Arnold’s films share the same quest for psychological causality––an attempt to understand how our childhood and subsequent maturation affects and shapes the men and women we become, our childhood joys and shames mirrored over and over again in our adult lives. Her ability to explore this tenuous terrain has won her critical acclaim including the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival and a BAFTA for Best Newcomer in Directing for _Red Road_ (2006) and a British Independent Film Award for Best Director for _Fish Tank_ (2009) as well as an Oscar for her short film _Wasp_ (2005). There are no single dimensions or easy characters in Andrea Arnold’s storytelling. Fragility can be strength, desire can be as base as it can be sinister, and love can be as brutal as it can be incandescent.
Given Arnold’s record of gritty, frequently urban, storytelling, an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel _Wuthering Heights_ may seem like quite a departure_._ Known as the passionate, obsessive Romance set against the brooding and windswept Yorkshire moors that first flutters the young hearts of English Classics majors, through Arnold’s lens, the story becomes much darker and with many more shades of grey. “Before I read it, I thought, ‘I’m going to read a romantic love story.’” Arnold explains, “But, in actual fact, it’s really not that. I think I was surprised by how I felt about it when I finished it. I think the book is so complete in its mysterious strangeness. I often say that I don’t pick my projects, they pick me, and it really felt like that. It had a hold on me. It’s not something I’m that eloquent with, because I don’t really understand it myself.”
True to her prior methods, Arnold worked with a cast of mostly unknown or untrained actors, allowing her instincts to guide her to find the right person for the role, regardless of prior experience. It is a process that confers an understanding of human emotion on and off screen, not simply an aesthetic constraint or cultural association. Arnold cast Kaya Scodelario as the character of Catherine Earnshaw, the female protagonist, without an audition. “I just saw her sitting in a high-rise building in London, and she was sitting there gazing out the window, and I just cast her in that second. I’d never seen her in _Skins_, I’d never seen her act, I didn’t give her 20 auditions, I just had this instinct about doing it,” recalls Arnold. “I took a lot of risks with _Wuthering_, casting so many unknowns and then putting them in weird period clothes and taking them up to the hills. Lee Shaw, who played Hindley, he’s from a housing estate in Leeds. In a way, you can never imagine someone like him would even put on those breeches, but he did. Even in his uncertainty about what he’s doing, and his nervousness and feeling a bit awkward in the clothes—all that brings something truthful.”
It is the same truthfulness Arnold sought when casting her _Fish Tank_ (2009) lead Katie Jarvis, who at the time had no prior acting experience. Arnold explains, “I don’t like all the knowing, and the confidence of knowing. I want there to be this place where we’re trying to find something…It’s about being a bit out of control. I want to be looking for things, and finding them there, rather than being totally in control and then knowing exactly what everyone’s going to do. When you cast non-actors that really happens. I try to bring a little bit of chaos to what I’m doing to keep it alive.”
It is a directing style that relies on a deep understanding of emotion and psychology––a process that differs with each actor. Arnold explains, “With young Heathcliff, Solomon \[Glave\] was this incredibly silent boy, but who spoke volumes with his face. By the end of it, I felt like I really understood him. He didn’t say a word to me; I could just read him so well.”
This attention to nuance becomes almost an imperative throughout _Wuthering Heights_. With minimal dialogue, Arnold allows the sparse but potent imagery of the rain-soaked, ethereal English countryside, the naturalist soundtrack of wind and trees tapping on glass windowpanes, and her untested actors to carry the narrative. In the talented hands of Robbie Ryan, Arnold’s long-time collaborator and cinematographer, the film takes on a poetic, almost tangible atmosphere––one that captured the Venice Film Festival’s award for Best Cinematography. “For _Wuthering Heights_, I was very obsessed with looking at things that were out of focus, that were hard to reach or watery,” describes Arnold. After initial tests shooting through glass or only by candlelight became impractical, Arnold and Ryan looked to the script for their visual allegory. “For some reason, in the script, there were lots of windows—people looking out windows, being blurred behind windows. That became a strong feeling for me––something intangible that you can’t quite touch or understand,” explains Arnold.
There is a bravery in Arnold’s willingness to give room to that which you can’t quite understand. In regards to process, this means a trust in one’s instincts. And in the space she creates in _Wuthering Heights_, it means allowing for a full spectrum of interpretation. As in the lyricism of Brontë’s poetry, a word can mean many things and a narrative can be read a thousand ways; a simple action is never simple to the actor. In Arnold’s _Wuthering Heights_, romance and love are unhinged from linearity and right and wrong dissolve into the immersive tailspin of feeling––watery, mysterious, dark, and light.
Written by Abbye Churchill Photographed by Kevin Foord
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