Before the release of Joe Wright‘s action film Hanna, the UK director was known for his skillful dramatic touch in films like Atonement, Pride & Prejudice and The Soloist. As he preps the release of his new film, which stars Eric Bana, Saoirse Ronan and Cate Blanchett, Wright is readying his long in development adaptation of the classic Leo Tolstoy novel Anna Karenina. [The Playlist, via About.com]
The book is a sprawling epic, like any good Russian novel. The title character is a high-society wife in 18th-Century Russia who starts an affair with a young sailor, pushing against the trappings of her world. Given that the book is about 900 pages long, this only hints at the book’s complexities, but luckily Wright has the great Tom Stoppard adapting. What does Wright think about the prospect of carving this story into a 2-hour film?
“You can [make a 2 hour movie] if you’ve got Tom Stoppard writing. He’s done an amazing script which involves Levin’s story as well as Anna’s story. Yeah, Tom Stoppard is just..also, he’s so immersed in Russian history and culture and identity or lack of it.”
Wright is in the midst of an exhaustive amount of research on the film’s world, as well:
“….I think Tolstoy wrote it as an accessible piece. It’s a family drama. ‘War and Peace’ was his big political drama and ‘Anna Karenina,’ as he says in the first sentence, is about families. ‘Happy families are all happy in the same way. Unhappy families are all unhappy in different ways.’ So he wrote it to be read by the new emerging literate Russian population. Obviously, it goes off into analytical theoretical studies of the Russian agricultural system which I won’t involve in the script. But the actual plot of it is fairly simple and very emotional.”
“….they didn’t even have Russian accents. The high society was quite French. They didn’t even speak Russian. A lot of them literally didn’t learn their own language so couldn’t talk to their own serfs, their own peasants, because they didn’t speak the same language. So the whole language issue is actually a really fertile one for that society. But I think they’ll be talking English, probably, with English accents. The problem is what you get the peasants to speak, the peasant characters and whether you have them speak the same language or whether you have them do really dodgy kind of west country English accents. They’re more difficult. I might have them speak Russian. I’m not sure.”
And his leading lady is most likely once again Keira Knightley. Wright just brings out the very best in her, as evidenced in Atonement and Pride & Prejudice. He can’t confirm it yet, though:
“Not sure yet. It’s fairly obvious, but I can’t quite say. She hasn’t signed on the line yet. I’m loyal to my actors.”
No word yet on when Hollywood will get around to announcing development on Android Karenina, the revisionist novel by Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters author Ben H. Winters, but I’d like to see Wright, Stoppard and Knightley tackle this Russian classic.
Wright’s action-thriller Hanna opens April 8, 2011.
Are you looking forward to another collaboration between Joe Wright and Keira Knightley? Will you be seeing Hanna?