Ben Wheatley: I was doing some development work at [the production company] Working Title, and we were working on some stuff for a year or so, and then they said, “We’ve got this script of Rebecca.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s a crazy thing to do.” Generally, my choices are like that.

I will write you a romantic novel, which will totally ruin the genre for you forever.” The idea of taking the rich widower on holiday, the holiday romance, and the Cinderella thing — all the tropes of romantic fiction, and then turning it into this thing of him being a murderous swine and dragging this poor, innocent women through all this misery, you get it in your hands and go, “This is fantastic!” And then 40 pages in it’s a ghost story, and another 40 pages in it’s a courtroom drama, and another 40 pages it’s a thriller?

That’s the heart of the of the du Maurier book.

That’s why this stuff in the south of France is so straight up.

It’s romantic.

And it’s unashamed entertainment in segments, and I think the idea of the beginning of the movie being literally like a free holiday somewhere ...

It’s probably highly unlikely any of that’s true, or how much of Danvers’ account is true as well.

I felt like the ’30s, in terms of style, felt very familiar: Their sunglasses, their trousers, their bikinis, or they were wearing or tops and beachwear and stuff, it felt like it could have been shot last week?

You have a background in horror, and while Rebecca doesn’t deal directly with the supernatural, it’s often considered a kind of haunted house story.

The elements of a house, like the door handles and drawers, all the noises those things made were the noises of things weren’t actually those objects.

So everything in the house was kind of suggesting how the murder happened in the boathouse.

It doesn’t matter if you if you spot it or not, but it’s the kind of subliminal building of evidence for something that’s going to be revealed later on?

The proper version of this movie is much more like a Miss Marple thing where Maxim de Winter is led off in handcuffs and the star of it is really Danvers, who’s like a detective.

There’s a bit that’s different, the death of Danvers, going to the burning of the house, and the capering about in London.

But a lot of that stuff had to be done because it works in the book, but it’s a very difficult thing to portray.

In the book, they just kind of stand around in the car park and basically give up and then drive home again.

In the book, she just kind of fades out

She’s not seen building the house — she just disappears after that