Andrea Arnold was not pleased with her last film, Wuthering Heights.
“People keep saying one day I will come to like it,” she told Ira Sachs in a discussion at the 2016 Tribeca Film Fest. “It was a difficult experience making it, for various reasons. I find it hard to look at it.”
The filmmaker is always initially inspired to make a film after envisioning a specific image. For her adaptation of the Emily Bronte classic, it was “a misty moor on a day when the earth and sky are merging, and there’s a big animal climbing inside of the moor. But you went in and saw that it was a man, carrying rabbits on his back. It was pure and beautiful.” However, “when we got to film it, we had half an hour to get it before the day was over. It was bright sunshine and blue sky, and we had about three rabbits.”
“I felt so unhappy, but I did use the shot,” Arnold lamented. “What can you do at that point? You can’t because you’re working with a whole team of people and there’s money.”
Additionally, “It was a very difficult time for me, that film. I was in a dark place,” she said. “When I think about how it was, it’s associated with some personal stuff.”