Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell is defending the book-to-screen changes she made in the new movie. Fennell's Wuthering Heights isn't a traditional adaptation of the 1847 Emily Brontë novel but, as the director explained in a Friday, February 13, interview with Entertainment Weekly, her own "interpretation" of the gothic classic. Writing the script, the Oscar winner said she challenged herself to recall as much as she could from reading the book as a teenager, which meant that she remembered moments that "were both real and not real.