Courtney Howard // Film Critic
Linus Sandgren is more than just an extraordinary cinematographer, whose projects have spanned everything from a sunbleached spy movie (NO TIME TO DIE) to a Technicolor-inspired musical (LA LA LAND). The Oscar winner could also be considered a masterful illusionist, transforming a sunny, wily, windswept English countryside into the moody Moors author Emily Brontë famously wrote about that inspired filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s god-tier adaptation “WUTHERING HEIGHTS.” He approached capturing the toxic love story – centered on two internally tortured lovers, Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), who torment others in their orbit – through a focused lens and an artistic flair for the dramatic.
At the film’s recent press day for its release on 4K Ultra HD, I spoke with the affable talent about evoking moods, casting light on characters and creating a dreamy new school classic that harkens back to golden era Hollywood.
How do you choose your projects? Is it the characters or the story that resonates with you, or the filmmakers that you’ll be able to collaborate with, or a combination of all of that?
Sandgren: “Exactly. All of that. I try actually to stay available for interesting projects and in the meantime, I’ll do smaller things like commercials and stuff, to be able to wait for something that feels good. While this has an interesting director, it needs to have an interesting take on it – an interesting vision. It’s nice to try to not feel forced to repeat yourself. After LA LA LAND, I got a lot of calls for musicals. I tried to stay away from it because it’s not as interesting to do something the same way all the time. You don’t want to be repetitive. I want to learn. I feel so fortunate to work with different types of directors that I learn so much from and the creative collaborators. It’s all experience. Emerald is one of them for sure. She’s a favorite.”
It’s your second time working with Emerald Fennell and Jacob Elordi (both on SALTBURN) and third time working with Margot Robbie (BABYLON and SALTBURN). Is there anything different in your collaborative experience with them this time around?
“Margot is an amazing film producer and knows a lot about the quality of the project and knows how to make them right. She loves shooting on film as well. She feels like me and Emerald do, that it gives you more enhanced, immersive visuals and more color ranges. More aligns us in the sense we just want to make a great movie, basically. In these projects, Emerald has been… you start with the core – the seed – of the story and the script she wrote. She wrote something that she felt was her personal experience reading the book, how she saw what the world looked like. We had the opportunity here with a bigger budget than in SALTBURN where the intention of the film was to create a world from scratch based on Emerald’s vision. I think all of us want to start that way.
There are similarities between SALTBURN and this one in that Emerald loves beauty but she also loves ugliness. She’s interested in the combination of that. In this film, we could keep a little less to realism. She wanted to focus on the emotional story and dramatize just like how she felt when she read it. The visuals, from my point of view, was really only based on the emotions, much more than in other films. In other films, you usually adapt to more of a reality. Even though we have reality, but we have weather to work with. Sometimes we have rainy day in the film, because it was sunny in another scene, but here, it’s raining for a reason. It’s raining in scenes where you might want to feel miserable or that you feel a tenderness or you want to see that last kiss of the sun coming in, establishing hope when he’s proposing to her. It would’ve felt completely different if it were outside raining. We worked with integrating nature into their worlds and having the freedom to be more dramatic and painterly with everything, from the costumes, to the set, to the light – and weather was more dramatized like the romantic painters paint. It was such a freedom. We could start with the scene and [pick] what weather is [there] and why so we could create variations in the film.
There were a lot of things from Emerald, like how [Heathcliff] lives in this barn and how he could see [Cathy] brush her hair in the window and how things were related – and then this rock that came through and all these things grew all over the house to take over. How it was suddenly winter seeing her father in misery. It was just more dramatically visualized than normal, which is fine because it’s so different and felt appropriate for this film to become heightened, letting you cry and letting you feel.
Yes! This movie, like you said, is painterly. It’s got that mix of being real, but also unreal.
“Yeah.”
I listened to the commentary track on the disc and learned that some of the days were sunny outside and you needed to make them rainy and overcast?!
“The biggest challenge for me is always weather on films. It’s rarely the way you want it to be, honestly. I could be particular in how i think it should look and I’m disappointed. On Bond [NO TIME TO DIE] in Matera [Italy], it was cloudy, which doesn’t at all look as brutal as it does in hard sun, so we actually came back and shot again to get a hard sun there. But that was the only thing that mattered that day was that it looked hard.
In this case, we obviously had worked on soundstages first and established scenes. We decided scenes should be foggy and rainy. And then you come to the real world, which we were promised that in March, end of March, in the Moors, it’s gonna be miserable… in a good way. So we come there and it’s sunny and windy. If it’s sunny you can fog it up and make it look miserable, but if it’s windy, the fog disappears. But we did it. That was one of the few tools we had to tame nature was to add fog where we want, like when [Cathy and Heathcliff] walk amongst the rocks. That was important, because he’s finding her there and it should be obscured and not so clear.
Same when she finds him returning and he’s invisible in the fog. That’s shot on location. There was no fog. It was sunny that day, but we had so much atmospheric smoke to be able to do that. Our genius special effects department was able to turn on a cue to make him invisible and become visible in a few seconds. It was like everything was in a play – like improvised jazz. It was cool how that eventually worked. On stage, that’s much easier because you can just do what you want.”
I’m curious, you had said earlier you love learning. What did you learn that you were able to put into practice on WUTHERING HEIGHTS?
“I guess what I mean is that you learn so much from the people around you, especially intelligent directors that take you on this journey and develop a film together. It’s in all the small details that you learn from a director. It evokes situations that creates challenges that you have to figure things out that you don’t know how to do yet, and then you learn your own work.
That happened, for example, on this film. I felt there was a certain amount of theatricality Emerald wanted. It’s sort of like these fantastical devices in the sets, like a rock [juts] out into the kitchen and the house is grown over by these cancerous [tumors] that are weird fabrics. There was always a level for allowance for that. At the same time, we felt that, instead of shooting on a green screen, or build a massive, super expensive Volume, I love the soft drop textiles that you print on and then you can light them for different looks – for a flat look or backlights through the clouds for a dramatic look. And that’s what we did on this film, which I’ve done before and isn’t what I learned.
The thing was we were trying to get the sense, in the stage, that it was gonna be very real feeling. We knew it was going to have a stage look, but make it as realistic as we could make it. So we decided to paint the imagery so that it would have dark clouds on the top of the backdrop. On the ceiling, normally, you put white silks to create the skylight. But that bothers you if you shoot these big VistaVision shots indoors and you see the ceiling, it would have to be replaced by the visual effects. So we figured out, with that challenge, I recalled that I had seen gray silks. We did a gray silk that was the same color as the clouds in the photographed backdrop that went seamlessly together on the ceiling so the trans light kept going into the sky. With enough atmosphere, you could not see it wasn’t sky. I learned that the look of that, when you have that big gray sky, it looks so much more realistic than a white silk. So from then on, for every movie now, I’m gonna use that for sky. If you want to have light, it’s still soft, but if you pull out the lights, it doesn’t reflect lights, which would look fake.
The beauty of working with interesting people is that you always learn so much. In the directing, it’s interesting to learn how directors work with actors. The actors are so important for the story and the cinematography, for me, is the tool – with the light and the lensing and the closeness or distance from the actor and the composition – that should do similar things that sound and music does with the audio.
I think the cinematography should serve the emotions. It could be subtle, but it should rather serve the emotions than the plot. I’d rather feel the right feeling with the characters, if I just see an image, than if I understand what’s going on with the plot. It’s really important to focus on that. I feel like I want to be directed like Emerald’s directing actors. I want her to tell me what she tells the actors, because it’s about those things. That’s how we get the images in our heads. It’s better than coming in with visual images to show. I like to work with her telling me how to feel: like say ‘miserable.’ Well, how does that look in this world? Stuff like that.”
WUTHERING HEIGHTS is now available to buy on digital and 4K Ultra HD.
