Here's Anna Karenina part of the About.com JW interview (JW also mentioned KK, P&P and Atonement in the interview)...
"It fascinates me. I’m reading at the moment, I’m hoping to do Anna Karenina in the Autumn and I’m reading about St. Petersburg society in the 18th century. There they imported a complete foreign mode of behavior. They all decided suddenly that they were going to be French. They divided their brain into two halves, the Russian half and the French half. The Russian half was always aware of what the French half was doing, how they were performing, how they were exhibiting their manners. I personally find that acting is an art form that is underestimated and overlooked in terms of its potential and what it can teach us about who we are as human beings."
Can you do Anna Karenina in two hours, or even three?Speaking of JW and KK, he directed her in the new Chanel commercial! (see Photos: Keira Knightley on the set of Chanel commercial in Paris taken last September 2010)
Joe Wright: "You can 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."
Will it be a challenge to make that accessible?
Joe Wright: "No, because 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."
What are the accents going to be? Russian?
Joe Wright: "No, because 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."
Who’s your Anna?
Joe Wright: "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." Read the entire JW interview here.
Keira Knightly is going to be in the new advertisements for Coco Mademoiselle, a perfume by Chanel. In the ad, directed by Joe Wright, Keira will be riding a Ducati (which is apparently a motorcycle). The advert will be out on March 23rd. Read Full Story
See a scan of KK and JW behind the scenes of the new Chanel commercial
(source:)
