Anna Karenina is a story that has seen countless retellings in various art forms, but Joe Wright’s unique adaptation starring Keira Knightley has chosen to revamp, respin, and revolutionize the story by setting it inside of a voyeuristic bubble of theatricality. In an interview with Hypable, director Joe Wright and star Keira Knightley explore this decision and discuss the general madness that is Anna Karenina.
Anna has long been heralded as one of the more complex and confusing characters in the history of literature, so the pressures behind accepting such a role are naturally high. Knightley was introduced to the character when she first read Anna Karenina at the age of nineteen. As a frame of reference, she filmed Pride and Prejudice when she was eighteen.
After she got the role, she read through the book again before the start of shooting only to realize that Anna was a much different person that she had originally thought. “I see her being much darker,” said Knightley. “Her moral culpability is constantly in question. I think she is held up to be condemned at certain points. I also think she’s held up to be loved and to be understood and to be sympathized with.”
Anna is judged as guilty of a number of cultural and personal offenses in the story, but Knightley wanted the character to serve as a reminder to the viewer that they shouldn’t judge her just for sinning differently than they do.
“She’s a terrifying character, and she’s terrifying because you do judge her,” said Knightley. “You try and throw stones at her, then you go ‘Am I any better than her?’ And I think the answer for everybody is no. Are we all occasionally deceitful? Yes. Are we all occasionally manipulative? Yes. Do we all hurt the people we love the most? They’re the people we hurt the most. None of us have the right to judge her, and yet we do. And it’s terrifying.”
As it turns out, the story of how Joe Wright’s unique adaptation of Anna Karenina was first conceived, and how Keira Knightley came to inhabit one of the most coveted roles of all-time, began with a conversation.
“We [herself and director Joe Wright] had a conversation when we were doing Atonement about great female characters and how many there are, and Anna Karenina definitely came up in that conversation. So he phoned me about two years ago when I was working on A Dangerous Method, and he went ‘Anna Karenina?’ and I went ‘Yup!’ and he said, ‘Okay, we’ll only do it if Tom Stoppard does the adaptation.'”
As we now know, Tom Stoppard ending up penning the shooting script, and Keira went on to star in Joe Wright’s adaptation that, surprisingly, wasn’t always meant to be set in a theater.
“It was going to be completely naturalistic telling,” revealed Knightley. “It didn’t turn into this stylized thing until ten weeks before we started shooting when he phoned me up and said ‘Uhm, I’ve got something to tell you.'”
That’s right, the enrapturing veneer that fuels Joe Wright’s astonishingly refreshing vision was a surprise move made by Wright just a few months before they were meant to start filming.
“I went to his office and it sort of like this was this madman’s lair with weird drawings and storyboards everywhere. And he said ‘Right, we’re going to set it in a theater.'”
“Even when you look at Pride and Prejudice, it was deeply naturalistic in that all the hemlines were a bit off and there was mud on everything, and Atonement was the infamously unfilmable novel,” said Knightley.
“So I always knew there was something else he was going to bring out [for Anna Karenina], I just wasn’t expecting it to be that.”
Even when it comes down to the tragic figure of Anna herself, Knightley had to put herself in the position where the act of adultery wasn’t just okay, it was almost expected.
“I think it’s completely understandable,” said Knightley. “You have a woman that’s been married since she was eighteen, she gets to twenty-eight she’s never had an orgasm, she’s never experienced romance. Of course she suddenly feels lost for the first time, she suddenly has a taste of romance for the first time, and she equates that with love and only that with love.”
Knightley went on to explain how the costuming and design elements that went into the film also represented Anna’s tragedy. “She was a caged bird,” said Knightley. “So that idea of the symbol of the cage, being that and the cage underneath the dress that you see at the end, and then the veils, the idea of keeping death close to her at all times, so she’s wrapped in fur. She’s got dead birds in her hair.”
In case those of you at home are wondering why Knightley always seems to hit the big screen in sweeping period dramas or epic fantasies, she finally has an answer as to why she chooses those roles in particular.
“Your imagination is required instantly in a period film, because it’s a world that you don’t know, with rules you don’t know,” said Knightley. “I certainly relate to characters on an emotional level very differently in period pieces or sci-fi pieces or fantasy pieces than I do in pieces that are more voyeuristic and present us with the world that we know. I think that’s a very different relationship with the story.”
Funnily enough, Knightley’s next feature is a film set in modern times, so you can either see her in Anna Karenina, or in Jack Ryan next year.
Director Joe Wright and Keira Knightley have maintained a long standing relationship with Knightley appearing in a leading role in all three of his latest major motion pictures. With their third outing in Anna Karenina, Wright decided to throw Knightley for a loop, and cast her before he even told her what he was planning on doing with the film.
“I told her, and the first thing she said was ‘oh fuck,'” recalled Wright in an interview with Hypable. “Then she pretty quickly understood it. I think it made it more challenging, and Keira and I both work best from a place of being the underdog.”
There were a few conditions that Joe Wright had before he would make Anna Karenina, one being that Knightley would star as the titular character, and the other being that playwright Tom Stoppard would pen the adaptation.
Not many people know that although the final result ended up being “What if Anna Karenina were to take place in the visual world of theater?”, the original script by Tom Stoppard makes no reference at all to the unique set design and costume changes, nor does it even mention a theater.
“The idea was to take Tom’s screenplay as it was written and find solutions, find ways to express exactly what he’d written in the limited environment [of the theater],” explained Wright. “You find that the limitations liberate you creatively.”
“Vronsky is about the only lead character who’s age isn’t described,” said Wright. “Vronksy is described as being a boy soldier. It was like detective work, I had to figure out what Tolstoy thought Vronsky was.”
When constructing the characters, he often found himself relying on the pages of the book, as well as his own personal experience.
“The way in which Vronsky falls in love seems to me to be sort of a young puppyish love, said Wright. “I remember when I was about eighteen, nineteen, I saw a girl in the shop and thought she was the love of my life.”
For those familiar with the books, the casting of Jude Law as Karenin might have turned some heads since he’s a character that normally functions as someone who isn’t quite as aesthetically gifted as the actor.
In this adaptation, Law plays the role of Karenin very sympathetically, and it was because of this that Wright knew that Law would be perfect for Tolstoy’s character.
“There are no goodies or baddies in Tolstoy’s books, there are just flawed individuals,” said Wright. “Karenin needs to be someone that you can imagine Keira marrying when she was eighteen. She didn’t marry him for his money, she married him because it seemed like a good match.”
“It was to express the idea that these people were performing roles in her life,” said Wright. “It’s no coincidence that the first time we see Keira, she’s getting dressed like an actress; putting on a costume. She goes out into the world, or family at home, and she tries to play a role she’s no longer suited to.”
Although the idea of theatricality in the upper class very much adheres to the themes in Anna Karenina, Wright revealed that the concept was always something he had wanted to do.
“This film, the aesthetic of this film, is probably closest to my upbringing than any other. I was brought up in a puppet theater in London.”
“My dad made the puppets and my mom made the sets and the costumes so it all had a very homemade feeling about it,” said Wright. “That’s what I was trying to create in this film.”
If our review of Anna Karenina is any indication, Wright succeeded with both his vision, and its relevance to the story. Anna Karenina is currently playing in theaters everywhere.