Actress Kaya Scodelario brings an earthy un-sentimentality to the romantic anti-heroine, Cathy. “I always worry about Cathy being unlikeable, and not coming across very well. In the book she makes a lot of harsh decisions, ones that people don’t forgive her for. I think at the time, when Emily was writing the book, women were supposed to be very quiet and not say very much. They didn’t have much of a say in their future. I think Cathy is a girl of her time, and in a very difficult position. She ends up marrying Edgar, despite having feelings for someone else, and was very conflicted about what to do. I felt a lot of empathy for her.”

Both Arnold’s debut feature, Red Road, and follow-up, Fish Tank, employed a mixture of trained and non-trained performers, the latter teaming Michael Fassbender with Katie Jarvis, an Essex teenager that Arnold’s producer came across arguing with her boyfriend on a railway station platform. Arnold describes her casting choices as essential to the authenticity of her work: “I will definitely continue to do it. I had to cast quite quickly in this one, which I’ll never let happen again. You need time to find the right people, and to also work with them and get them comfortable.”

The cast of Wuthering Heights was predominantly populated by people found on the street in surrounding Leeds and Sheffield: “My plan was to cast people that lived there, so that it’d create a sort of raw feeling. We did have quite a lot of non-actors. I’ve worked like that before, but I’d never had so many.