Frances O’Connor always loved Emily Brontë, she said, during a panel discussion about her directorial debut Emily at Deadline’s TIFF studio on Friday.
O’Connor, who also scripted the film about the iconic British author, said her appreciation for the Emily Brontë is at a “very geeky high level, and I just love what she represents. And I’ve always kind of wondered who she was, and at the same time, I’m kind of interested in what it is to be a woman and to be authentic. So, it’s kind of melding those two things together.”
Emily, which has its world premiere in TIFF’s Platform section, imagines the story behind Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights. It follows her struggle within her own family and her fight for artistic independence as a female writer of her time. The film stars Emma Mackey in the titular role, with Alexandra Dowling and Amelia Gething as sisters Charlotte and Anne respectively, and Fionn Whitehead as brother Branwell. Clergyman William Weightman is played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen, with Adrian Dunbar as patriarch Patrick Brontë. It is Frances O’Connor’s directorial debut after a career as an actress in films like A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Mansfield Park, and The Conjuring 2.
To play Emily Brontë, Mackey studied biographies of the writer that were suggested to her by O’Connor.
“I like the academic side of reading the biographies that Frances sent to me and the poetry and trying to feed that side of my brain. And then the reality is that when you’re filming, and the script is your bible, that’s what informs us and what makes us do the thing. So, that becomes then the centerpiece. And then you focus on that and hopefully the two intertwine quite nicely.”
The rehearsal process was in-depth as the cast lived together and got to know each other ahead of the shoot. Gething compared the experience to working on a theater production in some ways. As she said, “The whole two-week in the run-up to the film… It’s such a luxury to be able even be able to rehearse and spend time with your fellow castmates and your director, that never happens. So, it felt quite play-esque in that respect. It felt like we had a real ensemble going on, and it was nice to have that build-up. It got us all fizzing.”
For Jackson-Cohen, working with O’Connor was a very positive experience.
“I think Frances captured so beautifully the tightness of this family and the love that was quite clearly so prevalent in that house. I think that was probably the thing that I thought was so beautifully managed in a non-saccharin way. And I just think that there’s something ‘Frances’ with what Frances wrote. It’s three women in that house at that time and the constraints of society and what women were expected to be, or expected to do. And here are these bright forces of nature. Frances captured that so beautifully. And I feel like it’s incredibly truthful to what it must have been like.”
When it came to playing Anne, Gething also noted the value of working with a director who worked on the script and is an experienced actor.
“It was so great because Frances is so involved with the script and feels so much of it so deeply,” Gething said. “I think we all kind of really bonded over so much of the story and there are so many different aspects of the script that Frances, I think, portrayed so well, to do with the anxieties that I know so many people, including myself, feel a lot of time.”
The Deadline Studio is sponsored by dr Liza + the[fix] and Watford Group. Special thanks to our partner Soluna.
Destiny Jackson contributed to this report.
