Capturing complexity of a socialite
TORONTO — There is a moment in “Anna Karenina,” Joe Wright’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s novel, when Keira Knightley as the titular 19th century Russian aristocrat waltzes with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Count Vronsky. She is married to government official Alexei Karenin ( Jude Law). She and Vronsky have only recently met, and the eyes of Russian society are upon them as they dance, and yet none of it matters, as the lust that will soon consume the couple is evident in every wild step and extravagant gesture.
“The ball sequence was always Joe’s moment, the one where he was like, “OK, I don’t want to do just a waltz. I want to do something that really tells the story through movement.’ Phenomenally difficult!” Knightley laughs during a chat at the Toronto International Film Festival, where “Anna Karenina” screened as a special presentation.
“Unbelievably difficult, so we spent about three weeks, as much as we could, basically learning this thing,” she adds. “Everybody got sick. It was the sort of thing where they said, ‘You do a bit of yoga, you’ll be fine.’ It wasn’t like yoga. It was like running a marathon. It was constant, the movement of it, so it was rather intense. I think what’s extraordinary is the yin-yang quality. I’m in black, he’s in white, the melding of the hands, the manipulation of body parts was all sort of a part of that story.”
Oscar nomination
This is Knightley’s third collaboration with Wright. He directed her to a best actress Academy Award nomination for 2005’s “Pride and Prejudice” and to a Bafta nod for 2007’s “Atonement.” She remembers having a kind of shorthand with him when they made the latter film, having gotten to know each other so well during their first experience together. “Anna Karenina” was more challenging, partially because it had been a longer gap between pictures, but also because of what Wright was attempting. The Tom Stoppard-penned script takes place largely within the confines of a theater, a brash conceit that reflects Wright’s own view of human nature.
“Joe was obsessed with this idea of people playacting, and that’s what we do all the time,” Knightley says. “In this, you’re playing the role of the journalist, I’m playing the role of the actress. When we go home, we’ll be playing a different role. When we’re out with friends, we’ll be playing another role. The idea with Anna that she’s playing the role of the perfect wife. She’s playing the role of the perfect mother, and suddenly she finds that she’s been miscast and she’s trying to break out of that. That was all part of the theater — he wanted to represent that.
“She’s such a strange, complex, jewel-like creature, and you sort of go, ‘I really don’t know whether you’re meant to like her or not like her,’ ” she adds. “There was the constant issue, the heroine-antiheroine issue. There’s that question mark that goes over everything. I think because of that, we really talked about everything and we disagreed and then we’d find our way through it. It was an interesting kind of dance for the both of us.”
Not what she recalled
The 27-year-old Richmond, South London, native first read Tolstoy’s book when she was in her late teens, and she remembers thinking the story beautiful and romantic. Before shooting began, she read the novel again and realized with a shock that this was not the love story she remembered.
“It’s so much darker, and she’s so much darker,” Knightley says. “People will completely disagree with this, but when I read it last year, I thought, ‘Tolstoy hates her. He’s holding her up and judging her. And then he loves her as well and he understands her.’ But there are points where you think, ‘He’s holding her up, saying this is the whore of Babylon, this is the fallen woman, this is the corruption.’
“I think that totally fascinated both me and
Joe. We really did want to keep that duality of whether she’s a heroine or a villain, and everything sort of happening at once, her being both guilty and innocent, that duplicitous thing in her personality and malicious thing and that hardness that she has, as well as the light and the love and laughter and joy and all of the rest of it. It was certainly a much bigger task than I had anticipated.”
Wright hired choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui to both design the waltz and also the intimate scenes between Anna and Vronsky. He also rehearsed his actors for three weeks, a luxury Knightley had never experienced before on a film. It was time she found invaluable, even as she discovered that her two co-stars are as different in their approach to acting as Karenin and Vronsky are in their attitude toward Anna.
“Jude and I work in quite a similar way,” she says. “We get the script, we sit around a table, we talk. We analyze every bit of it. We break it down. We try things out, but it’s based on discussion. Aaron doesn’t do that at all. He is incredibly movement-based. We didn’t talk that much about the relationship. We talked a bit, but we did massively long, movement-based improvisations.
“There was one 20minute very strange one that we pretty much ended up basing the arc of the end of the film. I think it was partly because the relationship between Anna and Vronsky is physical, so it made sense to have that be kind of where you start creating it, and it was created entirely through movement, whereas Karenin is just the opposite, so Jude and I just sat around and talked. It was interesting developing the two things in two completely different ways.”
After spending so much time with the character, Knightley is still struck by Anna’s situation. She sympathizes with her, recognizing that she lived in a society with suffocating rules and where her role as a woman was strictly defined. At the same time, she acknowledges that Anna is the architect of her own undoing.
“In my view, the biggest tragedy of Anna herself is that she is never able to recognize what she has,” Knightley says. “She is never able to go, ‘This is it.’ She’s always going, ‘But I want that. I want what’s over there.’ That insatiable want, actually, is her downfall. It’s never enough. None of it is ever enough. The love that Vronsky has isn’t enough. The time spent isn’t enough. Karenin certainly isn’t enough.”