Director Joe Wright rethinks 'Anna Karenina'

DIRECTOR JOE WRIGHT ("Pride & Prejudice," "Atonement," "Hanna") was about to embark on a lengthy location shoot for his adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, when he did something rarely seen in preproduction.

He changed his mind.

Forget the huge hotel bills and the weeks in the Moscow snow. Let's shoot the whole movie in one place, largely on a stage.

He called his actors with the news.

"To receive a second call when you're already on board," is quite unusual, said Jude Law (Karenin). "But when the director calls you with a brave new vision, it's very exciting."

"If you're going to tell this story again," said Keira Knightley (Anna), "you might as well try to do something out there. Joe is a magical and frightening person to work with, because he demands everything from the people who work with him."

Knightley added that when they were all on board to do this very different "Karenina," it wasn't because they all knew it would work. "It was because the worst that could happen is we would fail," she said.

Not exactly the words producers want to hear.

But, working from an intricate screenplay by the brilliant Tom Stoppard (who condensed Tolstoy's phone book-sized tragedy into two hours of screen time), Wright plowed on. "The biggest challenge was revealing the artifice without disengaging the audience entirely," he said.

The result is a sumptuous, beautiful film combining theater and dance, interiors and exteriors, incredible costumes and attention to detail. It's Russian tragedy filtered through the eye of "An American in Paris"-era Vincente Minnelli.

Whether it all works as a movie is for People Paper movie critic Gary Thompson and the audience to decide, but visually, Wright's grand experiment paid off.

Besides Tolstoy, the always well-read Knightley, speaking with Wright and all the leads at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, said a key inspiration for her portrayal in the film was Orlando Figes' book, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, although she added that her copy of Anna Karenina with her at all times.

"Tolstoy hated her," she said of Anna, who cheats on her conservative husband with a dashing young count and is shunned by her high-society peers. "Sometimes she's seen as the whore of Babylon. Other times, it's as if he's not entirely sure how you should feel about her. She's deceitful and needy but also full of energy and love."

Wright agreed that it's difficult to get a consistent picture of Anna from the novel.

"Tolstoy started writing a book about a morally deplorable woman," Wright said, but at some point during the writing, "Anna rose up from the table and started dictating to him."

But one thing that's clear in the book is that "society turned on her like a pack of wolves," Wright said. "And society does that now."

Law, who knows quite a bit about the modern tabloid, based on his own scandal involving his wife, mistress and his kids' nanny, agreed that "the role of scandal and gossip" hasn't changed much since Tolstoy's time.

But whether or not the story is scandalous was merely subtext for the director. His storytelling goal, colored by his own experience, was something different.

"I'm not very interested in whether the film is relevant socially," Wright said. "I want it to be relevant emotionally.

"I've been in an obsessive love story," he added, "and they don't end well."

Email genslerh@phillynews.com.