ON LOCATION : Weathering ‘Heights’ : Paramount launches its European division with a remake of Emily Bronte’s classic story--but can Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche replace Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon?

Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind, blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily the architect had the foresight to build it strong.

--Emily Bronte, “Wuthering Heights”

To stand on Boss Moor, an exposed stretch of open, hilly land in the Yorkshire Dales, with a chilly 40-mile-an-hour wind whipping around you and leaving you breathless, is to comprehend fully what Emily Bronte meant by the word wuthering .

As she wrote in her classic 1847 novel “Wuthering Heights,” the word is “a significant provincial adjective” describing the stormy weather common to these parts. That weather also evokes the doomed, tempestuous passion of the book’s two central characters, Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

“Wuthering Heights” is a novel with such a strong sense of location that these moors and dales assume the function of an extra character. So if you wanted to make a movie adaptation of Bronte’s masterpiece, as William Wyler did in 1939 with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, or as Paramount Pictures is currently doing, the arguments for shooting exterior scenes in Bronte country are overwhelming.

All this explains why British actor Ralph Fiennes, hair dyed black and face covered in stubble, is staring moodily across the moors this day. He’s playing the vengeful Heathcliff.

“It all feels right, doing it up here, doesn’t it?” says Fiennes, perched on a canvas chair on a grassy moor between scenes, as the wind howls. “We’re going down to Shepperton Studios (near London) in a few weeks to do interior shots--and that’s going to seem weird.”

The storms have wreaked their havoc on this location. Out on an adjacent moor, a facade of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff’s forbidding home, has been constructed--but the sheer force of the gales has blown some windows in. When the time came to dismantle the facade, high winds made it too hazardous to take down the scaffolding behind it.

The weather aside, there is a degree of tension on the set. It’s understandable, in that so many of the principal players are making their debuts in their respective roles.

This is Englishwoman Mary Selway’s first film as a producer, though she is a highly respected figure in the film business as a casting director, with 90 movies, including “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Return of the Jedi” and “Alien,” to her credit.

Director Peter Kosminsky is making his feature debut after an acclaimed career as a documentary filmmaker and director of dramas for the British Broadcasting Corp.

Fiennes has emerged as a notable stage actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, but this is his first movie. As Cathy, French actress Juliette Binoche, known primarily for her work in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” plays a lead character for the first time.

And then there is Paramount Pictures itself. Two years ago, the studio set up a London office with the intention of making films in Europe with an international sensibility and on lower budgets than have become the norm in Hollywood. Paramount threw a lavish reception in London to announce its arrival, but executive shuffles in Los Angeles forced Paramount’s European venture to remain on hold.

“Though we are considered a sort of foreign outpost, we are affected by changes in Los Angeles,” said Ileen Maisel, the studio’s senior vice president of European production, who is a constant presence on the “Wuthering Heights” set. “As things changed in Los Angeles, we got pushed further back.”

During the very time the European unit should have been pressing ahead with this production, Sid Ganis, president of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group, and Paramount Chairman Frank Mancuso exited the studio and Stanley Jaffe and Brandon Tartikoff entered the fray.

A movie adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” looks like an odd choice as a statement of Paramount’s intent for Europe.

Maisel was looking for a love story to film and, on seeing “Pretty Woman,” thought how well the Pygmalion myth had worked. “I thought, ‘Hmmm, what’s another myth that could work?’ ” she recalled.

When she voiced the idea of another adaptation of Bronte’s book to Royal Shakespeare Company director Adrian Noble, he was enthusiastic.

Selway, a lifelong Bronte fan, also encouraged her: “I took Ileen to Haworth (the Yorkshire village where the Bronte sisters lived) in April of last year. And that clinched it. We were standing outside the parsonage where Emily grew up, and she said we had to have Emily in the film somehow because her spirit was so strong.”

As a result of that impulse, singer Sinead O’Connor is spending a couple of days on the set to portray Emily Bronte in a handful of scenes. “We’re trying to achieve Emily’s spirit . . . and trying to show how she started imagining the book,” Selway explained.

O’Connor is another newcomer to feature films. “She’s a natural, instinctive actress,” Selway said. “She’s passionate about Emily Bronte, whose father was also Irish. She has that same inner spirit; you just believe her.”

Still, O’Connor doesn’t seem the most obvious choice for the role. Selway anticipates the next question: “She will not play Emily with a shaved head.”

Maisel insists that the movie of “Wuthering Heights” is a Paramount statement of intent in one way--in the glittering array of British talent that has been signed to the film. These include Oscar-winning costume designer James Acheson, who frequently works with Bernardo Bertolucci; production designer Brian Morris, fresh from his duties on “The Last Boy Scout,” and director of photography Mike Southon, who worked on Jodie Foster’s directing debut, “Little Man Tate.”

“We have invited the best of British craftspeople to say we can make an extraordinary-looking movie for $9 million,” Maisel said. But the availability of Acheson, Southon and Morris might have less to do with Paramount’s largess than the parlous state of British film production. On this particular week, only one other feature film--”Waterland” with Jeremy Irons--was shooting in Britain.

Given this scarcity of work, one might think the “Wuthering Heights” project would be welcomed here. But some sections of the British press have already been sniping.

Binoche has come under attack from journalists who dispute casting a French actress in the role of Cathy, a quintessentially English heroine. (Binoche has been unwilling to talk to journalists on the set.)

Other writers have questioned the wisdom of making another film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights”; few apparently remember the 1970 British remake starrying Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff and Anna Calder-Marshall as Cathy.

Fiennes, who has been tagged “the new Olivier” in Britain, is unapologetic.

“Though I think Olivier cuts an amazingly passionate, romantic powerful figure (in Wyler’s film), it’s not as good a film compared to the book,” he said. “It’s dated too, whereas other films of the time are eminently watchable. I think our script is much more truthful to the spirit of Emily Bronte.”

This appears to be the party line on the set. Said Maisel: “With respect to Mr. Wyler, it was clearly a movie of its time. When you read the book, then see his film, you think (Bronte) must be like a spinning top in her grave.”

“It’s a period film,” Selway said, a little more charitably. Director Kosminsky thought it “a good film but not an adaptation of Bronte’s novel,” adding: “They only used three speeches of Emily Bronte’s in the dialogue. We hope we are doing the first faithful adaptation of the novel.”

Certainly Wyler’s film isolated the love story between Heathcliff and Cathy and discarded the second half of the novel, which deals with a love affair in the generation that succeeded them. The version of “Wuthering Heights” now shooting here covers the entire story as Bronte told it.

This pleases Kosminsky, who describes the book as “an obsession.”

“I didn’t understand it when I first read it at school, but when I read it later and I was able to understand the passion, and how it grows out of its environment, it absolutely blew me over,” he said. “To me, it’s about that choice of following your head or your heart, and that’s what I’m trying to make the central theme of the film.”

For a time, Paramount’s expansive plans for a European division looked like empty talk.

“The intention was not rhetoric,” Maisel insisted. “The intention was that we would try and make two or three pictures over two years. But things got in the way.”

Maisel now has two more pictures in development--”on the fast track,” as she put it. One is called “Ghost of a Chance,” a story of two American girls given a European vacation by a mysterious benefactor, with Anthony Hopkins apparently expressing interest. The other is a script called “They Want Me Dead,” which Maisel described as “sexy, romantic and funny--a female ‘Carnal Knowledge’ meets ‘Working Girl.’ ”

But there is no slate as such for more European projects.

“There is no industry in Britain, whatever anyone says,” Maisel noted. “There’s a desire to have one, but it’s not as though I’m in Los Angeles and I have a reading list of 15 scripts. There just aren’t any spec scripts that one could read on the weekend, call L.A. and say, ‘Let’s go with this.’ ”

Kosminsky is happy with his first experience on a feature, though he concedes he is under the microscope.

“It’s no secret that Paramount is a hands-on studio, and they have their first film from their European division being directed by a first-timer, and they’re watching very carefully,” he said. “The pressure isn’t unhelpful or getting in the way of what we’re trying to do--in fact, it’s supportive and quite protective. But it’s there.”

Meaning that Maisel is on the set every day? “Yes,” Kosminsky said, “and one is aware of the scrutiny.”

He has also been made aware of the schedule and budget: only 10 weeks at a modest $9 million. To achieve this end, some scenes have been cut--scenes Kosminsky says “eased the story along.”

“Now the story has to survive without them,” he said. “I’m disappointed, but I know the reasons and I’ve been involved in the decisions.”

This adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” is deliberately being skewed to a younger audience, Selway noted. “The story is so elemental, and all those emotions and passions will appeal, I hope, to a young audience,” she said. “Everyone feels they have the power of those emotions within them, but they’re not allowed to express them in our rather gray times.”

But will that young audience be deterred by the fact that this version lacks star power? Fiennes and Binoche, after all, are unknown quantities.

Selway sees it differently. “The star is the title, really,” she said. “I actually think it’s a bonus that you have two people who aren’t too well known to moviegoers. They can be Heathcliff and Cathy.”

Maisel confirmed that Paramount had discussions with Daniel Day-Lewis and Isabelle Adjani about playing the two lead roles.

“Then Daniel went off to do two pictures for Fox, while trying to keep his hands on ‘Wuthering Heights,’ ” she said. “Now we’ve seen the rushes. Not one of us has any regrets that we have Ralph and Juliette instead.”

Kosminsky saw 100 actors and 200 actresses for the two roles. “I think he’s the greatest actor of his generation,” the director said of Fiennes. “He’s punctilious, thorough and has an ability to show intensity through small movements, which is perfect for film acting. He generates all the power you want without straying into melodrama.”

This view of Fiennes seems commonplace in British movie circles. As Selway put it, “Anyone with anything to do with our industry knows Ralph is in line to be one of our next big stars.”

Binoche’s work is already attracting similar on-set praise.

“She simply is Cathy,” Selway said. “Juliette doesn’t just act at it. She’s out there in the freezing rain on horseback in 60-mile-an-hour winds and she’s not cold. Because Cathy wouldn’t be.” Kosminsky agreed: “She was the best in capturing the vivacity, the coquettishness, the power of Cathy. A lot of the actresses I saw were quite cool. She wasn’t. Binoche was the one.”

Though most of the cast and crew are staying under the same roof at an adjacent hotel, Fiennes and Binoche, true to their roles, have opted to be alone. Both of them are enjoying the solitude of cottages in the moors. “Watching TV and eating baked beans on toast” was how Fiennes described a typical evening.

Beneath the on-set tension is a palpable feeling that everyone must get it right.

“There’s a pressure to be definitive, and I feel that pressure tremendously,” Kosminsky said. “After all, this isn’t the kind of story which gets remade every five years. When you love the book as I do, there’s a responsibility. If we don’t get the story right, not only will the film come out in movie theaters, it may be hanging around video stores for years. We’d be giving the wrong impression to whole generations.”