Andrea Arnold takes on Wuthering Heights

Andrea Arnold, the Oscar-winning British film-maker behind Red Road and Fish Tank, is stepping in to direct the new film adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Variety reports. Arnold will direct from Olivia Hetreed's adaptation of the novel – a first for the director, who wrote the hard-hitting scripts for both her acclaimed feature films. Explaining the hiring yesterday, producer Robert Bernstein said: "Andrea has previously said that the only book she would ever direct would be Wuthering Heights, because of the passionate, impossible love story at its centre and its elements of class divide," he said. "It's a very lucky coincidence for us that we've found each other." Arnold, who won an Academy Award for best live-action short for her film Wasp in 2005, takes over from Peter Webber, director of Girl With a Pearl Earring. He left the project in December, having stepped in to replace The Edge of Love's John Maybury, who dropped out of the project last summer. Natalie Portman, Abbie Cornish and Gemma Arterton have all been linked to the part of Brontë's heroine, Cathy Earnshaw. Speaking to the Guardian last year, Bernstein acknowledged that the film success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga – itself heavily indebted to Brontë's enduring story – had played a part in the project getting off the ground. " The Twilight factor is extremely helpful to Wuthering Heights ," he said. "It's clearly in the zeitgeist. Why is anybody's guess, but people are absolutely obsessed with this doomed, romantic love that can only be achieved beyond death, or in the case of Twilight, by becoming a vampire."