Emerald Fennell

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0:45The last time Emerald Fennell and I were together was at dinner in the River Cafe. As we lived near to each other, we shared a ride home. Emerald is a great filmmaker. How about winning a Best Screenplay Oscar for Promising Young Woman, her first movie? Amazing. How about writing and directing her own movies? And how about acting? We call them Midwife, The Crown, and Barbie. On this Valentine's Day, we're going to have the next Emerald film, her adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Already, everybody's talking about it, and personally, I am counting the minutes until seeing it. Right now, though, we're here to talk together about films and food and family.

1:26And on a gray January day, Emerald is the ray of sunshine we all need. Me, most of all. Thank you. Why Wuthering Heights? Because I love it. I think it just connects with you. It connects with the people who love Wuthering Heights and particularly love Emily Bronte. Yeah. It's difficult. Yeah. It's difficult material in every way. Not just the kind of content and not just its sort of refusal to take a moral position and not just the fact that it's troubling, but, you know, just the kind of... Her writing is very complicated, dense, and beautiful and poetic. She really requires active reading. You need to be dedicated and persistent and you need to be kind of obsessive and fanatical, I think, to like her work.

2:24because, and that's, I think that's why I love it so much is that there have been so many adaptations, I think, of Wuthering Heights and so many of them. Do you have a favourite? It's so beautiful. I love Andrea Arnold's, I love Andrea Arnold's film. Yeah, I do, yeah. It's so beautiful, it's so powerful and I love the Laurence Olivier version, of course. But they're all really good because they're all different because there's so much to say. I love Balthus's illustration. and I love Kate Bush's songs and I love the kind of like tertiary material around it too because she sort of inspires people to do interesting things because the book's so slippery.

3:05I knew I wanted to make it one day if I dared because it is an undertaking. Like it's very personal to people. In Saltburn, spoiler alert, there's a sort of scene by a graveside in Saltburn that is sort of inspired by Wuthering Heights. And after Salt Burn, I had, because people had liked it and that's just such a unique position to be in as a filmmaker, to be able to choose what you want to do, I knew that I wanted to make a kind of an old Hollywood soundstage movie and I wanted it to be Wuthering Heights and I knew that this was probably going to be the only time that anyone would let me do that.

3:47And I knew that I wanted to do something that would make, I like making people feel things. I like a physical response. But it's, you know, same with you. You're giving people a physical sensation. And that's what I feel that I like to do making movies, is that it's that. And there's nothing more physical than Wuthering Heights. I think it's just extremely visceral. It's extremely sexy. And this is what's interesting about it. People will, people argue at that point. They argue rightly whether it is a love story or not. It makes you cry. It makes you recoil. It makes you uncomfortable. It makes you kind of question yourself.

4:30It makes you, you know, it makes you disagree with people that you think you would normally agree with. I just love it. It's just been amazing to be able to do it. And also it just meant I got to read it a thousand times, which was always fun. Where did you film? we filmed in Elstree Studios so we built Wuthering Heights and the surrounding area and we built Thrush Cross Grange and the surrounding area I think for me if you're looking at something gothic you need to build it from scratch because it's an emotional landscape as much as a real one and then we went to Yorkshire obviously and we went and filmed up there we couldn't film anywhere but Yorkshire that would just be kind of sacrilegious but we wanted to make something that looked and felt the way that the book made me feel so it meant we were kind of looking at brutalism as much as we were looking at kind of the industrial north of the time so we filmed in kind of disused mines rather than just the more than the kind of like the sort of rock we were looking for something quite sort of harsh no it was amazing what about what you eat when you're working because I've interviewed people from Ridley Scott to Wes Anderson to Greta to Noah about the French hours, you know, the idea that you just keep working and you don't eat because the annoyance of having to stop this rhythm, it just ruins the flow.

5:50Well, it's also like, I think for lots of people, you know, you're digesting. I mean, it's a kind of literal physical thing. I also do French hours because it's that balance, isn't it, where you want people to be able to get home and to see their families. Yeah. And to not be able to do that is just killer for everyone to not have any kind of a life is really tough, especially if you've got young kids but I always you know we always try and make sure that the food is great on saltburn we made kind of long tables it was because the weather was so beautiful so we had these long tables with you know outside and everyone eats together I'm really like fanatical about everyone eating together and and all of that kind of stuff but it was harder on this because you're in a studio and you know can't quite but I I would love to know what the other directors eat because I eat toasted cheese sandwiches.

6:38Without giving a spoiler, is there a food scene? Oh, there are so many food scenes. I'm obsessed with foods. Well, you have a movie that has the word salt in it, so there you go. Yes, yes. And eggs. There are eggs in this new film. There are eggs. There's jelly. But also, that's the thing about the Victorian that I'm kind of obsessed with because this movie, it's set in the kind of late 18th century. But the food then was like everything. there's a kind of perversion of taking the natural and preserving it so everything was in aspic everything was pickled everything looked alive but was dead really so all the food is kind of designed to be you know so we've got sort of crayfish fighting it's taxidermy it's flower pressing it's you know it was about containing the natural it was about being frightened of the the world actually in the natural world and what that meant and so that's such an important part of this movie too it's about what happens when you kind of constrain nature and whether it's like a corset or it's putting a fish in jelly it's the same thing isn't it the same instinct because we don't do that now we don't want our food to look like the thing that we're eating no it's sinister did you have cooks who who researched the food and made the food yes whole team fantastic a whole department and the food was just like there's also a scene where Margot sticks her finger in a fish in a jelly inside the fish's mouth and in order to get that shot the consistency of the jelly, the clarity of the jelly the type of fish, we had fake fish with lipstick, we had fish with teeth we had, you know, the number of different prototypes you know, but that's the fun of it and like they're, and everyone's just so thrilled that they're not just making like bangers and mash or whatever it normally is So we just have, oh God, it's bliss.

8:28I was thinking that you and I actually work both in very collaborative ways. Totally. It has to be. You need to be a benign dictator. So you can't be so inflexible that it cracks, that something breaks. You need to be able to bend but always be steady. And I think that's the most fun way of doing things. And all of the people that I work with are like that. you know if somebody comes to you with an idea rather than be like no yeah it's it's a kind of yes and yeah and i think the and could also be it's a sort of substitute for a but sure because when you're in charge you always want to be like but but but you're trying to kind of preserve your little precious thing that you sort of thought of but actually you've got to yes and yes otherwise it never goes anywhere and it stagnates and it just is a kind of little fossil that you've preserved so you've got to let other people especially you know if you trust them and if they're geniuses you know Jacqueline Duran did the costumes on Wuthering Heights and she's just like extraordinary and you're looking to entertain each other you're looking to surprise each other you're looking to provoke each other you're looking to do something that interests and challenges both of you so that's I think that's kind of the process of collaboration but you know also you're in that unique position as you are here where you also have an overview so you can't get too carried away you can't go veering off too far but my my thing is always with with filmmaking is I want to push something into its very very limits to see what that limit is and then pull back so it's always an exercise in letting people be free to make something disgusting you can't make anything interesting unless you're willing and unafraid to make something difficult and something unpalatable I suppose it's maybe it works with food as well as it works with filmmaking it's sort of you're taking a risk you're taking a risk but the real risk I think is is in being earnest being cringed doing something lame doing something whatever you know it's like that we've got so much in our culture now that we've got the brakes being put on creatively I think all the time because we're afraid of embarrassment I think so for me I'm always like I don't mind being embarrassing I think being human is kind of fundamentally fairly embarrassing so I'm happy to say like look you can't be embarrassed I won't be embarrassed by anything that you do because I'm interested in stuff anyway it's just a constant sort of rubbing up against the the ghastly that's kind of what interests me and that's why the gothic's interesting yeah We all have extremely high standards.

11:11We're kind of fanatical about it. But I hope that the people who work with me know they can come to me with anything and I'll be like, yeah, okay, let's talk about that at least. And so that's really important. And then it's constant and it's constantly, you know, we do for the actors tons and tons of rehearsals and I look at everything from the kind of surprising things emerge between characters that you wouldn't expect. You know, Saltburn was so much like that. we found there was so much between Archie Medekwe, who played Farley, who's a genius, and Barry Kjogand, in rehearsals. And I was just like, I really want to, I want to look, we need to look, examine this more.

11:52People bring so much of their own thing always, and their own energy, and their own chemistry, and their own ideas, and their own cleverness. I guess the parallel in the restaurant is that we change the menu for every meal. So you might think, it's actually a really grey day today. and so let's do some more comforting food than we might have done. Or who's my team working? So I know that person isn't great on grilling, so maybe we'll put the simpler things to grill on the grill. And you're sort of looking at each person's abilities and what you feel and how many people are coming. And then, of course, you walk in, and then you have the sea bass didn't come in today, so we only have two fish, but we can use something we were going to start with.

12:33So there's a constant. It is challenging. What we're doing, trying to work in that way. If we knew we had a set menu every day, you would come in and it would all be done and probably make more money. But this is the way we've rolled for the first day. It's very much what you're saying of the parallel of making a movie and making a lunch. Definitely. And I think, I mean, what you're describing sounds so exciting. But I can imagine that for lots of people that would instill dread in them. Because it would be, it's so, well, it's kind of improvising, isn't it? and it's having the faith in your team and it's why I think people come here again and again and I just can't imagine, because I'm such a nosy person, the things that must be witnessed here, the proposals and the break-ups and the tense conversations and the silent, fascinating.

13:23What's dramatic? There's a lot of drama and I think that's why probably actors loved working in restaurants.

14:03We'll be right back. Subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. The Volkswagen Beetle started out as Hitler's dream car. It wound up as a beloved hippie icon and the best-selling car of all time. How did that happen? I'm Jacob Goldstein. And I'm Robert Smith. On Business History, we tell the surprising stories behind the inventions and entrepreneurs that shaped our economy. And the story of the Beetle is truly surprising. It has so much in it. It has Nazis. It has the German economic miracle. And it features one of the most famous ads of all time, an ad that really redefined what advertising was in the United States.

14:42The calculation was that there was some number of Americans who were ready for something different, who were ready for something that was counter to the culture, if you will. Perfect timing. In this new decade of the 1960s. Listen to Business History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And watch episodes on YouTube. Do you think that growing up in your early life, do you think this was kind of also a sense of preparation or interest or how did this happen? I think I'm just very lucky. I think the first thing I would say that is the bit of luck is that my family really loves me and I really love them.

15:25And so just to grow up in a household where you all really, really love each other is, as I grow older, it's just very lucky. and so that was that's such a grounding for anything because you feel like you can do something and so there was that side of things but also my mother is a writer my father is a is a jewelry designer although he's sort of more than that I would say you know he sort of makes very specific individual one-off pieces sort of magic box pieces kind of strange things actually and my mother you know she worked for years as a photographer's agent and um and now as a as a writer novelist and latterly a screenwriter her first film's just been made the luck of having parents who live in london so you can live in london to go to auditions when you're young you know there's an enormous amount of sort of i think privilege obviously attached to to all of that stuff which i don't take for granted and i and i'm very aware of but yeah I think I've always admired that they work very very hard both of them too you know they worked all day both of them at their jobs and then they would be out every night you know meeting people going out to things so what was food like who cooked who cooked mum but I think she would say Marks and Spencer's I would say the main food that we had growing up was a very specific oven ready tagatelle with ham and mushroom in a sort of creamy sauce from M &S that I think was 90 % of what we ate growing up and actually mum's an amazing cook but she just you know she just worked she worked we were very much a ready meal family and I think that's I'm still quite I'm still quite comfort foodie but then stuff like when we went to we we grew up in Herefordshire every Friday night we'd go up and we'd have fish and chips from the chip shop in Hereford and that was just that's the thing I remember most is the feeling of the fish and chips on my lap what was that feeling like was it well it's hot it's really hot and it smells like hot paper and vinegar and it's just the best and it's just seeing if you can wait yeah it's like a game of chicken see if you can wait till you get home and just like you can't yeah yeah as soon as you You would eat it in the car.

17:45It would be eaten in the car. Yeah. And it was great. And would you go to, would they take you to restaurants? Did you go to restaurants as kids? We did. We did. We went to somewhere on Gloucester Road called the Texas Lone Star. Oh, I remember that. Do you remember the Texas Lone Star? Yeah, I do remember. And they had pinball machines and it was, I guess it was kind of like Americana themed. And they did the most delicious thing you've ever tasted in your life, which is called a Texas pub. And it's a Frankfurter. slit open, cheddar cheese inside it, wrapped up in a hard taco, and so it's like a crunchy hot dog with cheese.

18:22And it's got to be a billion calories, and it's not something that would grace the plate here. I can still taste it. And me and my sister still talk about the Texas part. I was in New York last week, and I was starving because I hadn't had lunch, and I took a walk down for Thefton, and it was a hot dog stand. And I thought, I'm just going to have a hot dog, because I have Italian food every day of my life and there's something about being in New York. It was really good, but I just went for the classic hot dog and mustard and it was so good. In the freezing cold in New York? Yeah, freezing. Just heaven.

18:56But when they entertained, were you the kid who was brought down to say hello or were you in your room or did you kind of... I made myself that kid. I bet you made. I was very much slowly descending the staircase in a kind of wistful manner until somebody paid me attention. Like, I don't sleep very well, so I never slept when I was a child. And I could hear that there was mum and dad downstairs. And this is the 90s, really, when I was little. So mum and dad, actually, they very rarely had people over. They were more out. Go out, yeah. But when they did have people over, it was absolutely kind of ab-fab territory, you know, just ciggies on the go, everyone having a laugh.

19:36And, you know, it was just, it was a different time. It was kind of glorious. So then did you go to boarding school? At what age was that? Went to boarding school at 13. Was that a shock? It actually was, I think, probably a very good idea. I think I would have gone quite quickly off the rails in London. I think we all, even I, even I knew that, even as a child. So even though I was homesick and I do love my family, and as an insomniac at boarding school, it's quite lonely being in a room full of people awake, when everyone's asleep. I think it was probably a more wholesome scenario than if I had stayed under.

20:13Do you remember the food in boarding school? I do, you know, it was fine, it was a lot of toast. I love toast. And again, you know, I'd been brought up on like, the ready meal, so I was just like delighted. Like, if there were chips for every meal. So I mostly grew up on carbohydrates, which was absolutely fine by me. It was only when I hit 18 and realized you actually can't eat 5 ,000 calories worth of carbs every day. I was like, oh no, this diet isn't sustainable. Now I've just come back from New York. You know, this whirlwind tour of everywhere. I was in San Francisco and Las Vegas and with people and kids.

20:49And now this whole thing is going back to like high protein in a big way. I mean, you know, the young people, especially in San Francisco, the techie guys are all on, it's like protein, protein, protein again. What were you doing on your tour in America? Oh, me. I saw my brother who sends his love to you. Can we actually just talk about your brother? He's in love with you. Oh, I'm in love with your brother. And you met through... So when we were doing the kind of award season push for a movie, you do all of these actually really wonderful things with like the DGA, so the Directors Guild of America, and the WGA.

21:21So you get to meet loads of really interesting, cool people. And one of these screenings afterwards, I met your brother, Michael, and somebody said, this is Michael, and he's a writer, and he wrote this and this and this and the jerk and this and this. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? Sorry, I'm so sorry. Because The Jerk is my favorite film by such a, like, huge measure that I couldn't. And then I just, like, attached myself to him like a limp it. Because he's just the coolest. I had no idea who was your brother. He's my brother. And he's a really good writer.

21:56He's an incredible writer. But the fact that, you know, it's always so fascinating when in a family you have such talented people, but in such wildly different ways. what was your upbringing like? Oh, I like the way you're interviewing me. Well, but I really want to know. Sorry, sorry. No, it's good. My father always encouraged us, but then my brother was an actor and a writer. It was a stand-up in this career. And then my sister is an artist, and I think they really had hopes for me that I'd be a doctor or a lawyer. But they encouraged us all. And I think, like you, I always say, I was really taken by what you said about having been loved.

22:34Psych is that gives you the courage and the interest. But when you have a podcast, you can come and interview me about that. But I think you're good. So you were working in L.A. Did you ever live in L.A.? Yeah, we lived there for three years. And then our son was born there. And then COVID happened. And with a young baby, we just wanted to be near our families. But I think we'd have stayed there longer. Because I love it. Love it. I love the energy. I love England. But the kind of thing of the determination and the kind of can-do and everyone, I don't know, I think it's very exciting over there.

23:23Did you like the food? Did you go out to eat a lot? Yeah, I love the food. I love the food. The food's amazing in LA. In LA, it's a very food culture. Really foodie culture. and you know it's just a very people want to talk so if you want to talk everyone you speak to is interesting they've come from somewhere interesting and they're doing something interesting and I just I think here people don't love to have a chat as much I mean they do once you kind of if you if you're persistent but here we're very formal and I and I love I really want to I really want to talk to people a lot. So I can, you know, like my husband always laughs because there's often a moment when I'm sort of trying to get something going with someone and they just don't want to engage and he's like, oh, it didn't work.

24:10It didn't work. It didn't work.

24:25Crook and Chase Chase Nashville chats with the coolest cat in country music. He is edgy. He's fun. He is Chase Matthews. Keith Urban helped make him a global sensation last year, but it's his recent number one hit darling that put Chase on the map and launched a fun and difficult conversation about lovers who cheat and lie. That's why I'm scared to get married. You're giving me trust issues, brother. Crook and Chase Nashville chats with Chase Matthews. Listen and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. the recipe oh my god spaghetti batarga which i thought was so interesting that you chose that do you know i don't know that i've ever had it i just wanted it and it's really delicious thing to want okay spaghetti with batarga for six ingredients 250 grams of spaghetti three tablespoons of olive oil two garlic cloves peeled 50 grams of fresh flat leaf parsley finely chopped one dried red chilli crumbled 100 grams of Bataga coarsely grated and the juice of one lemon cook the pasta in a generous amount of boiling salted water heat the olive oil in a separate saucepan fry the garlic with parsley and chilli for a few seconds, add the drained pasta and toss well, stir in most of the Bataga and lemon juice, serve immediately with the remaining Bataga on top.

25:45So I wouldn't obviously change anything about this because you're Ruthie Rogers and I'm not psycho but i would say that i know that it's bad form to have parmesan yeah with fish pasta well you can there are ways you can break the rules you can break a rule there you go because nothing can ever be salty enough yeah and last question if you did need food for comfort just to make you feel better would it be that cheese sandwich or that fish and chips or the memory of your mother's tag or something different is there something you'd reach for i think that the best thing i've ever eaten is the first cookie that my kids made oh so i think what was it it was let's be honest it was shit okay you know come on it was a sort of shortbread and it was decorated with like a lot of multi-colored gloop yeah but i think it would have been like five and three and just the fact that they've done it frankly and i just thought well that's got to be the best thing i've ever really.

26:46And the best memory. And just the best, yeah. So that would be it. I'd have that cookie. Thank you. Thank you. That's cool.

27:16The Volkswagen Beetle started out as Hitler's dream car. It wound up as a beloved hippie icon and the best-selling car of all time. How did that happen? I'm Jacob Goldstein. And I'm Robert Smith. On Business History, we tell the surprising stories behind the inventions and entrepreneurs that shaped our economy. And the story of the Beetle is truly surprising. It has so much in it. He says you should be able to mount machine guns on it. Sure. Not for the family vacation, but, you know, for other things. You never know. Other plans. Listen to Business History on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.

27:49Follow Business History and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero? Charlie was an example of power. they had to crush him Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and visit Myrtle Beach listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts this is an iHeart Podcast guaranteed human