Inside Cathy’s 'Wuthering Heights' House with Margot Robbie

Hello, AD

and welcome to the Wuthering Heights movie set tour.

[upbeat music]

♪ Up close you see things aren't what they seem ♪

♪ You know the need to be anything ♪

♪ And keep it locked inside me, though you ask for more ♪

We have a very grand staircase

as any grand manor should have.

And ours is unique,

because we have red fur lining the underside of it,

which I've personally never seen ever.

And I think I'm gonna do a big dramatic crying scene

on this staircase.

I'm gonna take you through to the dining room

where we can meet Suzie, our production designer.

♪ Can I count on you like you count on me ♪

♪ Can I trust you too ♪

Hello, Suzie.

[Suzie] Hey, Margot.

Welcome to the dining room.

This is our gorgeous table and of course, the doll house.

So, the doll's house is basically

where we started off with whole design

of Thrushcross Grange, the tongue twister.

Yeah.

So, that is a perfect replica

of the room that we're standing in right now,

even to the point

that there is a little doll's house in there,

the way there is in this room.

[gentle music]

How extraordinary!

[Suzie] And then there's a doll's house in there.

There's a doll's house in that

and another one in that and another one that.

It could be matryoshka doll.

So, whenever we see Bubbles,

Bubbles has her own chair

and we wanted to feel that she was very welcome

in this family.

We've even got the miniature Bubbles.

[Margot] There is a miniature Bubbles.

She's having a little sleep at the moment on that chair.

There's a tiny Bubbles in a little, tiny Bubbles' chair.

Yeah.

I think that might be Bubbles' real hair.

[Margot laughs] [Suzie laughs]

And I think my favorite thing about the room,

is how it looks like there's really beautiful condensation,

like the walls are sweating, but in a very beautiful way.

So, we found these lovely plastic,

very contemporary bobbles, half spheres

and we got a selection of different sizes

and put them a very regency style and then twisted them up.

So, we've used contemporary materials

in a traditional way, wherever possible.

And then, we had the idea

that the wool had started to sweat.

The whole film has a feel of moisture throughout it.

So, this is like posh moisture

and it drips down

from the panels onto the floor on occasions.

You are wet!

I'm not!

So, we've had a fantastic food economist,

who has helped design and come up

with all their recipes and ideas along with Emerald,

as to what our character's going to eat.

[Isabella] Can I give you your wedding present now?

[Suzie] So, I think this is our mushroom sea.

[Margot] This is our kind of autumnal-

[Suzie] Yeah.

Set dressing.

At Christmas time, it's all different,

or every meal, it's different.

We did a big fish banquet with all the jellied seafood.

Delicious.

[Margot] Yeah, it's all about the aesthetic.

It's not about what we're eating practically.

[Suzie] Yeah.

[Margot] It's just gorgeous to look at.

Jelly has been quite a theme though, hasn't it?

Yeah? Jelly's been a theme.

We found we can suspend many things in jelly.

[Margot laughs]

So, hands are a bit of a theme in Thrushcross Grange.

And we've created our own ceiling roses.

And then we've got these beautiful chandeliers in each room

where possible, we're using wheel candles there,

double-wicked to give a little extra punch in the light.

And it's the same with all the fires,

practical, wherever possible.

The special effects guys have put in a special flue system

in each studio, so we can have real fires,

which gives a lovely light.

♪ Don't ever let me leave you ♪

♪ You make these nightmares come true ♪

[Margot] So, you're in the entrance hall now.

So, we have a Trompe l'oeil on the floor,

which is a painted representation

of the garden of Thrushcross Grange.

We were gonna have it on one of the walls.

And then when we decided

on the different effects in each room,

it became like we're never gonna see a Trompe l'oeil.

But we realized that we had a spare floor.

So, it's on the floor now

and it's a beautiful gold, hand-painted.

We had some amazing artists come in and paint it for us.

So, our staircase here leads up by the magic of film

to a massive suite of rooms.

[Isabella chuckles]

[Heathcliff] Your bedroom.

Here, look.

In this regency house, we decided each interior

of the panel will be a different text or fabric.

So, we've got the quartz crystal in the blue room,

red velvet in the hallways,

silver walls with the droplets in the dining room,

we've got the skin room, which is Cathy's bedroom.

We have a gainage room,

which is when fabric is wrapped

over each panel and stretched,

a pleated purple room for Isabella.

And then we have Cathy's dressing room,

which is silk with jewels

and it looks like a big pair of pants dressed

from the ceiling.

Like everyone else who stepped onto these sets,

I was just astounded

by how beautiful they are and magical

and how completely transported I felt.

And I just went straight back to Jacob and said,

You're gonna have to work harder.

Because for Cathy to choose Heathcliff over all this,

I mean, he's gotta be quite a guy.

These sets are probably the craziest film sets,

I've ever seen in my whole life.

You walk in here and I'm like,

That's, I want to live here,

I wanna see it on screen

and live it again and again and again.

It's the best, it makes my-

[Suzie] Yeah, I think having the inside, outside helps,

doesn't it?

[Margot] Yes, it sounds-

[Suzie] It's a completely composite set.

So, very rarely, do you get to do the outside

and the inside on the same sound stage.

It's so true.

Normally, you're on location,

then you open the door, cut to three weeks later,

you're in studio and you open the door

and you're in that house.

But here, we just walk in and out altogether.

And I think there's also being in a sound studio,

whilst being outside is also funny and surreal

and also, a specific device, I think,

in Emerald's storytelling as well,

like the stillness of Thrushcross Grange.

My character's bedroom, Cathy's bedroom, the skin room,

which is gonna sound really weird,

but it's her skin-

[Suzie] Beautiful.

[Margot laughs]

[Margot] On the walls, the floor,

everything is designed to look like Cathy's skin.

It's beautifully described in the script.

So, when you read that sort of description

as a designer, you're like,

Bring it, come on, let's get this.

And on a previous film that I'd worked with Emerald,

I knew that she was really into tactile materials.

And we had some latex in the office

and we had a skin-toned latex.

And I was like, There's something in this.

And then we'd took photocopies of Margot's arm

and I just laid it over the top

and realized there was an opaqueness to the latex.

So, we developed the photocopy on

and printed that onto some stretchy fabric,

padded the fabric and then lay the latex over the top.

And before you know,

it is this perfect representation of visuals.

We're doing lots of senses.

I sort of want to have Smell-O-Vision,

scratch and sniff, textures, moisture

that all the senses are gonna get wound up in this film.

And this skin room definitely does that.

♪ Just tap to shatter my paranoid shelter ♪

♪ My shelter ♪

Welcome to the blue room.

It's blue.

[Margot chuckles]

It's our drawing room.

[Suzie] So, this is our crystal walls

with an ombre-silk underneath.

So, Bubbles, whose character name in the movie is Pamela

and is to quote the script,

The smallest dog you've ever seen,

has a little chair.

Wherever we sit, Bubbles has a chair as well or a swing.

Every window opens smoothly like a sash window,

it's supposed to do.

We have some scenes

where we're gonna have the billowing foils.

So, every window along the front

of the house has this aspect to it as well.

We're just not really restricted by the sets

in the way that you normally are.

The fact that you can walk to a window

and open it on a set actually doesn't ever really happen.

And obviously, we've got the backdrops here of Yorkshire.

I mean, those are actual pictures of-

Yeah, yeah.

[Margot speaks indistinctly]

And obviously, just blown up humongous.

With lighting, it can kind of shift

to look like different times of day.

So, it's a high-res image that we then manipulated

of the actual location we're gonna be filming in.

And we stitched it together to get the sort of 360 vibe

and then created pockets of weather in certain areas,

so we can highlight or lowlight those elements.

♪ Golden Gate, I'm awake ♪

♪ There's somebody on my mind and a pill I can't taste ♪

♪ I'm fake ♪

We are in the gardens of Thrushcross Grange,

my favorite set of all times, these gardens.

We're standing on real grass.

When you walk in, the smell of roses hits you,

because there are real flowers everywhere.

These trees are probably one of my favorite things about it.

Because on the other side of the Thrushcross Grange wall,

there's one tree growing over the fence.

These trees are growing towards each other,

like lovers who are kept apart.

Very descriptive script that Emerald writes was very clear

that it needed to be a composite set.

And that was also one of her first things

that she said to me,

We're building the world on a sound stage,

that whole old-school traditional form of filmmaking,

but let's do it in a contemporary manner.

So, we got the biggest sound stages we could at this studio.

And to make it composite, we had to come up

with a balance routine, how much we can build in the house

and how much we can create in the garden.

Hence, why we've got terraces,

which give us ideas of gardens going on.

And we have hidden sort of avenues and vistas

on the side of the house just to give the impression

that the house garden

and the house carries on behind us as well.

The script required me to create a little element

of the moorland when Cathy tries to climb in

and have a peek at what's going on.

And that helps with deciding how we build the shape.

And the whole of this set is all about even numbers.

So, everything's very symmetrical and regular here,

whereas over in the Heights,

it's all, nothing's the same,

everything's slightly wonky.

With here, we're really strict with our lines.

And from a producer point of view, you're like,

Oh, we should shoot on location.

It'll be cheaper than building these insane sets.

But you just want the most amazing, beautiful thing.

You also just, I think, as a producer,

just want to have everyone really dream big.

And then, you figure out,

Okay, how do we actually practically do it?

Last week, it was snowing here.

It was completely, Thrushcross Grange was covered in snow.

Movie snow, of course,

which is tiny little pieces of paper.

But it was like the most beautiful,

magical thing you've ever seen.

My first day here,

it was springtime summer version.

And it's Christmas time, we do all the snow dressing

and everyone's redressing it back now.

But there's meant

to be a juxtaposition like Suzie mentioned,

between Thrushcross and our Wuthering Heights set.

The conditions over at Wuthering Heights,

it's a lot more blustery, harsh, wind and rain in your face.

And here, it's almost like a sound stage stillness to it.

It's just impossibly beautiful no matter

what the season is at Thrushcross Grange.

The swing is actually based

on an amazing famous painting by Fragonard

of a young woman having the joyous time of swinging

in a exact replication of what we've done here.

And so, it was really fun to play with that.

That was sort of like the beginning of the inspiration

for the rest of the garden really, this corner.

We did a great scene, Alison and I, on the swing there.

He is the most handsome man I ever saw.

[dramatic music]

It's just the most magical little corner

of all the sets, I love it.

The script was fantastic, gave me good pointers,

but also the fact that I knew it was gonna be represented

as a doll's house,

so, I almost designed the doll's house

and then the full-scale version,

rather than the other way round.

So, we've got these massive windows

that's complete opposite to what's up the Heights.

So, these tall, narrow portrait-style windows

as opposed to the landscape that we have, like the Heights.

Honestly, we'd been shooting

on the Wuthering Heights set for weeks

and I came over here and I was like,

I don't wanna go back,

which is very good for my character actually.

When you see the Wuthering Heights set too,

you can appreciate, it almost like lives and breathes

and the landscape encroaches in on the set

in a way that's just fascinating and artistic and cool.

But it's quite harsh.

It's a lot of brutalist sort of elements

and it's a lot darker.

And of course, when you come to these sets,

everything's so bright and it's just meant

to be a great juxtaposition.

Emerald's very keen to have this boundary around us

to push out any reality.

So, anything that's living is caged or in something.

So, we've got the goldfish,

I think, we've got a bird's cage, everything's caged

and even the garden feels caged apart from that tree

that's making a dash for it.

We just had live goldfish in it.

It was unbelievable, it was so cool.

Yeah, like Suzie said, everything is caged

and it's symbolic for Cathy's life here as well.

And the fish and the jelly,

I mean, everything's kind of suspended in a beautiful way,

but it is caged.

But of course,

we don't have the goldfish here right now, we had only-

Under special conditions.

'Cause yeah, by the way-

Certain temperature and yeah-

The real diva of this movie is the goldfish,

I have to say.

I almost never do contemporary films,

because I wanna be in a different world.

And when you're doing a period film,

you just feel like you're transported to a different place.

And we're not, obviously,

this isn't a period-correct film

in that we stuck

to all the rules using contemporary materials like resin,

but like a period-correct silhouette is kind of extends

to the costumes where we're using materials

that aren't period-correct but the silhouettes are.

And it's fun,

but it's also actually more difficult to pull off.

Because the options become just kind of infinite.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you have to start giving yourself rules,

otherwise then the world really is as big

as your imagination

and you've got so many imaginations at play.

It's like, it's easier I think to do a period-correct film

where it's just like, This is how it was,

zips didn't exist, that material didn't exist,

couldn't be put together like that.

And you just do it how it was.

But in the Wuthering Heights that we're creating,

the options are kind of limitless.

♪ Gravity got a hold on me ♪

[upbeat music]

♪ Sanity is where I need to be ♪

[upbeat music]

Thanks for visiting us today at Thrushcross Grange.

And we hope you enjoy seeing these sets

on the big screen when the movie comes out.

Bye!

[Margot laughs] [Suzie laughs]

[upbeat music]