The producers of the latest Bronte projects are targeting the Twilight audience with younger casts than previous versions and scripts that emphasise the sensational gothic elements alongside a contemporary psychological realism.
Wuthering Heights, directed by Peter Webber, will star 22-year-old Ed Westwick, a British actor best known from the American teen TV series Gossip Girl, as an unusually youthful Heathcliff. Gemma Arterton, 23, will play Cathy.
Jane Eyre, meanwhile, will be directed by Cary Fukunaga who, in the pursuit of authenticity on his last film Sin Nombre, got arrested for riding illegally on the roof of a cargo train. Jane Eyre stars the 20-year-old Mia Wasikowska, soon to be seen in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, opposite Michael Fassbender as Mr Rochester (who was at one point lined up for Heathcliff in the other film).
Dominic Murphy, the British director who made his debut this year's with the harrowing White Lightnin', is writing an untitled project about the imaginative worlds invented by the Brontes as adolescents, isolated in their Haworth parsonage.
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