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Emerald Fennell has said her career as a filmmaker might never have taken off had she not been sent off to a £62,000-a-year boarding school.
The Wuthering Heights director, 40, was raised in London but attended Marlborough College in Wiltshire which she thinks stopped her from going ‘off the rails’.
It is considered one of the 150 best private schools in the world and is also among the top 30 senior schools in the UK.
Some of its former pupils include the Princess of Wales, comedian Jack Whitehall and the wartime poet Siegfried Sasoon.
Speaking on Ruthie’s Table 4 podcast, she said: ‘I went to boarding school at 13. It actually was, I think, probably a very good idea.
‘I think I would have gone quite quickly off the rails in London. Even I knew that even as a child.
‘So, even though I was homesick and I did love my family, and as an insomniac at boarding school it’s quite lonely being in a room full of people awake when everyone’s asleep, I think it was probably a more wholesome scenario than if I’d stayed in London.’
Asked what the food at the school was like, Emerald said: ‘It was a lot of toast, and I love toast.
‘I’d been brought up on the ready meal, so I was just like delighted if there were chips for every meal. I mostly grew up on carbohydrates, which was absolutely fine by me.
‘It was only when I hit 18 and realised you actually can’t eat 5,000 calories worth of carbs every day, I was like, “No, this diet isn’t sustainable.”‘
Emerald’s upcoming film, stylised as ‘Wuthering Heights’ in quotation marks, is loosely inspired by Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel but has been lambasted for its casting, costumes and tone among others.
The director’s version of the gothic classic is based on how she interpreted the novel as a teenager, with the Saltburn creator arguing that it would be impossible to directly adapt a book as ‘dense and complicated’ as the original.
Emerald did not have the blockbuster budget that one would expect for a film that has generated such buzz.
She reportedly turned down a $150million bid from Netflix and ended up with a $80million budget from Warner Bros. after they assured her they would prioritise a theatrical release.
Amid the backlash, Emerald hit back at the criticism of her new project, defending the differences between her adaptation and the original works.
Speaking to Fandango, Emerald said: ‘I think it’s a lot of things but I think primarily it’s because the book means so much to me and it means so so much to so many people, and I’ve been doing a lot of talking to the Brontë Parsonage Museum and to other people who love this book too because it means a lot to me.
‘It’s very important that everyone who loves it as much as I do feels almost a part of it, I guess.’
She continued: ‘But the thing for me is you can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book. I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible.
‘What I can say is I’m making a version of it. There’s a version I remembered reading, which isn’t quite real. And there’s a version that I wanted to stuff to happen that never happened.
‘And so it is Wuthering Heights and it isn’t. But really I’d say any adaptation of a novel, and especially a novel like this, should have, you know, quotation marks around it.’
