Set on the Yorkshire moors in Northern England, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights tells a dark and passionate story of destructive love between Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie). Based on Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic, the film blends Suzie Davies’ expressionistic production design with Linus Sandgren’s atmospheric cinematography to conjure a surreal, dreamlike world that feels both vivid and unsettling. Davies built the sets from the ground up on a vast soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden, using Rosco SoftDrops to create an immersive, weather‑beaten landscape that becomes as integral to the story as the characters themselves.
At the heart of Wuthering Heights are two contrasting homesteads—the wild, windswept Wuthering Heights and the calm, opulent Thrushcross Grange. When recreating these settings, the filmmakers were less concerned with strict adherence to historical fidelity than with capturing the force of Catherine’s inner life. “We were aiming for an accuracy of feeling rather than period,” explains Davies. “All the design and the vision of it had to be felt before it was understood.” The composite indoor/outdoor sets, reminiscent of classic 1940s and 1950s films like Gone with the Wind, featured massive backdrops of the Yorkshire landscape, reinforcing the film’s Gothic atmosphere and psychological depth.
While building the location on the soundstage, the production design team carefully integrated the house with landscaped garden elements. Terraces, hidden pathways, and extended sightlines—created with Rosco SoftDrops—were added to suggest that the gardens and grounds continue into the distance, giving the sense of a sprawling, continuous environment.
The garden at Thrushcross Grange, with a Custom SoftDrop creating a moody sky and distant mountain landscape.
The Rosco Digital Imaging team photographed the Yorkshire filming location and blended those images with archival RDI material, applying precise adjustments and retouching to achieve the filmmakers’ desired look. Davies said: “It’s a high‑res image that we stitched together to get a sort of 360 vibe, and then we created pockets of weather in certain areas so we could highlight or low‑light those elements.”
Final artwork (above), and the Rosco Day/Night SoftDrop—35 ft × 463 ft (11 m × 141 m)—installed inside the Thrushcross Grange set (below).
The SoftDrop provided sweeping exterior views outside the windows of the Thrushcross Grange's blue room and red library, visually opening both spaces to the landscape beyond. With lighting adjustments, the SoftDrop could mimic different times of day and shifting weather conditions, creating a convincing, fully immersive exterior environment.
Davies conceived the location as a harsh, windswept home perched on a hill—gloomier and more unsettling than Thrushcross Grange. She describes the look as dark, cold, and “bruised”—an environment the characters long to escape.
A large archway at the courtyard entrance symbolises the passage from the bitter interior world into the possibilities beyond, with a Rosco SoftDrop in the background extending the landscape.
To heighten the bleak and isolated setting of Wuthering Heights, the production design team surrounded the set with a Rosco SoftDrop depicting a stark, desolate landscape. As with Thrushcross Grange, the RDI team created this backdrop from digitally enhanced on‑location photography.
Final artwork (above) and the Rosco Day/Night SoftDrop—38 ft × 434.5 ft (12 m × 133 m), featuring sections of varying heights—installed inside the Wuthering Heights set (below).
The built environment incorporated real natural materials—grass, greenery, slate—along with hidden structural supports such as rastra and moulded polystyrene, all designed to blend seamlessly with the backdrop and create visual continuity with the exterior scenes filmed on location.
Linus Sandgren used different lighting setups on the backdrop to evoke changes in time of day and a variety of weather effects. Davies said: “We have slightly manipulated the weather so that we can change it with various lighting conditions on the stage. With Linus, our cinematographer, we get to have these amazing sunsets, sunrises, wind, and rain.”
See Wuthering Heights in cinemas worldwide from Warner Bros. Pictures—and discover how SoftDrops help shape its striking visual style.
To learn more about Suzie Davies’ work, visit her website suzied.co.uk. For more information about the product the filmmakers used to create Yorkshire settings for Wuthering Heights, please visit the SoftDrop product page on our website.
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Tatiana Massano March 19, 2026 Questions?
Content Marketing Specialist: Based in the Madrid office, Tatiana is ideally positioned to share inspiring stories of how customers use Rosco products to accomplish their ideas in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
