Emerald Fennell has opened up about the movies that informed her creative approach to her cinematic adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
Fennell, 40, the director behind Saltburn, appeared on the long‑running film interview podcast Happy Sad Confused, hosted by entertainment journalist Josh Horowitz, to speak about her interpretation of Emily Brontë’s Gothic classic, which stars Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff.
Throughout the conversation, Fennell discussed the wide range of films that shaped elements of her movie, from Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic Shakespeare to Mel Brooks’ camp Gothic spoofs.
Fennell said the two films that marked her most deeply were Romeo + Juliet and Titanic, both of which she saw as a young teenager.
“Like any young woman, I would say those movies were completely transformative—not just because of my lifelong, truly psychotic love of Leonardo DiCaprio in those films—but because they were disruptive,” she said.
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996)
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet reimagines Shakespeare’s tragedy as a hyper‑stylised modern romance set in Verona Beach while preserving the original dialogue—a bold creative swing that made a seismic impact on Fennell.
“Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet was so audacious and beautiful, and it felt young. It felt like something I could connect to. And he was using Shakespeare’s actual words,” she said.
She added that she tried to mirror that fidelity in her own adaptation. “I really did keep as much of Emily Brontë’s language as possible.”
The director still sees the film as a template for the kind of work she strives to make—films “people would want to go and see multiple times… that would become part of you.”
“I realised early on that I wasn’t going to make stuff for everyone… but hopefully, for the people that do love it, they’d love it like I loved Romeo + Juliet.”
James Cameron’s Titanic (1997)
James Cameron’s Titanic blends sweeping romance with historical disaster, following two young lovers aboard the doomed 1912 ocean liner—a film Fennell described as deeply formative.
“Titanic, which could have been an action movie—and in many ways is an action movie—turned out to be the most moving film about being in love. It just so happened to have an enormous iceberg in it,” she said.
She credited its cultural impact with shaping her ambitions: “Those two films changed all of us. And they changed the way I make movies: films people want to see multiple times, films that become part of you.”
Fennell said such emotional transparency feels out of fashion today. “I can be cheesy. I can be unironic and earnest… mostly I just want people to feel something.”
Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Coppola’s Dracula—a lush, operatic retelling of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel—was another major influence, particularly for how it embraces sensuality and Gothic excess.
“Coppola’s Dracula… captures the feeling, the distilled Gothic atmosphere—the sexiness, the camp,” she said.
Fennell argued that Gothic stories “cannot exist without some amount of humour and camp,” especially when working with material as “emotionally overwrought and often far‑fetched” as Wuthering Heights.
Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)
Brooks’ slapstick spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It, starring Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling Count, also made Fennell’s list.
She called it “a Leslie Nielsen banger” and insisted it is “as additive to the canon of Dracula as anything else.”
She joked that if she adapted Dracula herself, “so much of Dracula: Dead and Loving It would be there because I don’t know anymore what ends.”
Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993)
Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, a restrained but emotionally charged period drama about forbidden love in 1870s New York, also informed Fennell’s thinking about romance onscreen.
“That moment of him unbuttoning the glove, and hands in general in these kinds of movies, are crucial,” she said. She praised Daniel Day‑Lewis as “a romantic hero,” comparing his work to Jacob Elordi’s. “Because he’s so beautiful, it’s easy to forget he’s profoundly talented,” she said.
