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"    Photo: Getty Images   Out in limited release this Friday, director Andrea Arnold&amp;#039;s Wuthering Heights tells the story of lovesick Heathcliff and Catherine without the usual period piece trappings. Using handheld cameras, lingering shots and little music, Arnold manages to make a film where the audience feels almost like an intruder watching actual events. As with Arnold&amp;#039;s last film Fish Tank, which starred first-time actress Katie Jarvis and a pre-Shame Michael Fassbender, her version of Wuthering Heights features a cast heavy with newcomers, including Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave as the young Catherine and Heathcliff respectively. The result is a film that is distinctly Arnold&amp;#039;s, even if the story itself is not. ELLE.com caught up with the director in New York to talk about the dangers of filming in mud and how to direct thirteen-year-olds.   ELLE: You came on to this project sort of in the middle of pre-production. How was that? Andrea Arnold: I joined something that had already had a history, which was a very interesting way to start a project. I had never done that before. I do this weird thing of wanting to do what I want to do, but also trying to be nice to all of the things that have gone before. I get myself into a mess really because what I should have said is, &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s start from the beginning again.&amp;quot; \u2028 ELLE: Do you remember what it was like when you first read Wuthering Heights? So many people read it at an impressionable age, when it can really stick with you. AA: I read it when I was either in my late teens or early twenties. I think it&amp;#039;s in the ether isn&amp;#039;t it? Even if you haven&amp;#039;t read it you feel like you know it. It&amp;#039;s one of those stories that&amp;#039;s been around us forever. So I think I had that feeling about it when I read it that it would be this traditional love story and a classic love story. It&amp;#039;s so much more dark, disturbing, and complicated than that. And I remember when I read it, feeling very unsettled by it and not really able to work it out. But it intrigued me. It never leaves you. ELLE: It&amp;#039;s a beautiful film, but I imagine it must have been a painful shoot in the rain. \u2028 AA: Yeah it was. When I saw the film for the first time it didn&amp;#039;t look nearly as bad as it was. The mud was intense. The mud around the house was bad to start but then we had fifty people traipsing around day in and day out, it was worse and worse. Your feet [would sink] up to your ankles every time you took a step. Everyone fell over a lot. I remember running down the hill and falling over. I [was] flying through the air and left the ground. I fell flat down and [after] getting up and I saw the medic going like this [eyebrows shoot up] and I put my thumbs up saying I was all right, because I went really flying. ELLE: Can you talk about casting, especially the Shannon and Solomon as young Catherine and Heathcliff? They have to convey this very intense relationship without really saying very much. AA: I don&amp;#039;t know that that actually existed between them for real. They were friendly, but I think that age is an interesting time because there&amp;#039;s stuff going on you don&amp;#039;t even realize yourself. They were both thirteen. My sense with both of them is that internally there is a lot that they&amp;#039;re discovering and that they&amp;#039;re feeling, but almost don&amp;#039;t know it. Or they&amp;#039;re not able to understand it because it&amp;#039;s happening to them for the first time. That&amp;#039;s how it felt. Obviously they&amp;#039;re acting and they&amp;#039;re playing parts but the essentials of each of them I think was very alike. Shannon is quite a free spirit and independent and physical. Solomon is quite internal and doesn&amp;#039;t say a lot, but shows a lot in his eyes. They&amp;#039;re both quite like that as people. They were then. Now they&amp;#039;re a little older, they&amp;#039;re probably changed. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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