Perth-raised actor Frances O’Connor steps behind the camera for her directing debut in a film about Emily Bronte, who wrote the literary classic Wuthering Heights.
By Ara Jansen
While she’s been an actor all of her career, Frances O’Connor has finally achieved a dream. She has made her writing and directorial debut with a fresh imagining of the life of Emily Bronte in a film called Emily.
While the idea has been in her heart and mind for nigh on a decade, it wasn’t until three years ago that Frances got serious and started working on the project in earnest. She worked with a script editor to get the writing taut after a friend told her in order to direct, she should write the movie herself.
Born in England but raised in Perth, Frances was a WAAPA graduate before her breakout role in the movie Love and Other Catastrophes. Among others, she has gone on to appear in Mansfield Park, Bedazzled, The Importance of Being Earnest and Blessed as well as numerous television appearances in works such as Mr Selfridge, Madam Bovary and The Missing.
Seeing her name in the opening credits felt incredible and like a scene from the movie where Emily first sees her own name on the spines of her books. As a writer, Frances feels a kinship with Emily who is searching for her voice and identity, on the way to writing the Wuthering Heights.
“I wanted to write a story that was saying something about what I had been thinking about in my life,” says Frances, “which was how to be an authentic voice or person and woman when that’s not being reflected back to you, or those qualities in you are seen as not good.
“As a young actress I was struggling with how to be true to myself in the film industry and be a creative person when I’m just judged on how I look and wanting to be approved of. In life there’s still a lot of pressure for women to be like that.”
Emily stars Emma Mackey (Sex Education and Death on the Nile) in the title role alongside her sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling – The Musketeers), Anne Bronte played by Amelia Gething (The Spanish Princess) and Oliver Jackson-Cohen as curate William Weightman. The movie also features the other pivotal people in Emily’s life – her brother Branwell and her father.
The movie explores a young woman’s battle with her darker, wilder side and what drove Emily to write a book which in the movie Charlotte calls “ugly and base, full of selfish people who only care for themselves”.
“It wasn’t the kind of novel a woman should have written at the time,” Frances says. “I was interested in saying that when a woman has some power and does have something different to say, they can expect some people not to like that. Weightman falling in love with Emily is kind of like the patriarchy falling in love with Emily and then not really liking some aspects of her.
“Emily is a creative being. It’s just pouring out of her; she is connected to nature, to everything. I felt that as a young woman and for women now, we still feel like if we show some of the darker aspects of ourselves, will we still be accepted? And sometimes the answer is no.”
Turning her hand to writing and directing has opened new avenues both as an artist and emotional explorer, which Frances O’Connor is keen to pursue. The award-winning actress is excited that on the other side of 50 there’s a whole different world opening up.
Emily opens in cinemas on January 12.
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