Using Color to Stir Emotion

Much of Brontë's original text is unsettling, with the reader never quite knowing what our erratic characters will do next and what will be the consequences of their actions. To capture this feeling on screen, Davies and her team relied on rich red hues.

Jaap Buitendijk / Warner Bros. Pictures

"Red is always a powerful color on film—it carries instinctive associations with desire, vitality, and danger," Davies says. "That controlled use of red helped introduce an unease into the image—something visceral rather than literal—so the audience feels tension before they necessarily understand. We used it very sparingly yet with intention, never decoratively.

Jaap Buitendijk / Warner Bros. Pictures

Blending Time Periods to Tell a Story

Forbidden love is a literary trope that transcends space and time—it's not bound to the confines of the Victorian era. "This film was never about documenting the 1800s in a literal or academic way," Davies says. "Instead, it was about capturing the essence of a teenage fever dream—the sensation of first encountering the book."

While the upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation certainly pays homage to architectural trends from the late 18th century, the overall set builds on and pays tribute to several eras.

"The design deliberately draws from multiple periods," Davies says. "In reality, buildings from the 1800s always carry the residue of earlier centuries—those layers exist subconsciously within the architecture. Even a contemporary space contains traces of Georgian, Victorian, or Edwardian thinking. We embraced that idea and even pushed beyond it, allowing moments of something more brutal and even contemporary to emerge."

Jaap Buitendijk / Warner Bros. Pictures

Architecture Helps Convey Characterizations

At the heart of the Wuthering Heights story is the tale of two homesteads—Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange—along with the characters who inhabit them.

"The architecture of Wuthering Heights was designed to physically deny Heathcliff ownership of the space," Davies reveals. "The ceilings are low—particularly in the kitchen—so that he is never able to stand fully upright ... The house never belongs to him; it resists him at every scale."

Jaap Buitendijk / Warner Bros. Pictures

Just four miles away, notoriously free-spirited Catherine Linton isn't sitting comfortably either. But for a different reason.

"[Thrushcross Grange]'s architecture and design reflect Catherine’s attempt to reshape herself to fit in," Davies says. "It is ordered, decorative, and entirely man-made—the opposite of Wuthering Heights. While it appears more refined, it is also more artificial, and ultimately less aligned with who she truly is. Catherine belongs more to the raw, windswept landscape than to this constructed world, and the design reinforces that tension between aspiration and identity."

Whether we like it or not, our homes make up a huge part of our story. Come home to Wuthering Heights, in theaters beginning Feb. 13.