The Times  (London)    

Thursday April 27, 2000

Luvvies in a cold climate

In the Polish winter Heather Neill joins the freezing cast making Channel 4's "Anna Karenina"

We were in Wroclaw, an hour's flight from Warsaw. Filming had been going on in Poland since October, but cast and crew were there for only a week, making the most of an imposing disused 19th-century train station.

Victorian ladies and peasants bundled in shawls chatted on mobile phones

This four-and-a-half-hour, £4.5 million Channel 4 adaptation has an impressive cast. Joining McCrory, McKidd and Dillane were Mark Strong, best known for Our Friends in the North, as charming, philandering Oblonsky, rising star Douglas Henshall as Tolstoy's alter ego, Levin, and the RSC veteran Sara Kestelman as the Countess Vronskaya. Their trailers were warm havens for the inevitable waiting about. Kestelman had spent all day dressed as the elegant countess, but the call did not come till evening. She writes poetry at times like this and has put together a one-woman autobiographical show. Strong loosened his stiff collar, and got out a set of sunny holiday photos, an antidote to the chill.

Bird is a hands-on producer. Over dinner he mentioned that he had appeared three times as Karenin's footman because an actor failed to turn up. That sounds fun, I said recklessly. The next day I was a pale babushka done up in two tweedy skirts and a green paisley shawl. After six hours standing in more or less the same position, listening to a rousing speech and waving the chaps off to the Turkish wars, I was cured.

Two magnificent steam trains, brought in from a museum 60km away, chugged in and out, wreathed in clouds of smoke. This was a trainspotter's paradise and David Blair (who took over as director from This Life's Harry Bradbeer several weeks into filming) knew how to appreciate it: he had travelled there by rail from Inverness. Blair, a veteran of The Lakes and Takin' Over the Asylum, was immensely patient: time and again an extra got into shot, obscuring the principals at a crucial moment. Watching the monitor, Blair silently raised both hands in frustration and ordered another take. The aim was for a more naturalistic effect than is usual in costume drama and thus "looser" camera work.

Ros Ebutt, the costume designer, is a veteran of television adaptations, including the BBC's Buccaneers. The wardrobe trailer was especially welcoming - always warm and smelling of freshly-brewed coffee. It was a treasure trove of silks, velvets and lace. Ebutt aimed to combine accuracy with unfussiness: you should feel people are wearing familiar clothes, not dressing up. Someone appeared at her door bearing a bendy severed leg. "That'll need a boot," she said. The accident early in the book, when a railway worker is killed by a train, had to be gruesome enough to stick in the audience's mind when Anna later commits suicide.

Two days later, close to frosty midnight, a stunt man winked at a genuine amputee as he took his place on the track. We drank thin, hot soup out of plastic cups as a Polish actress, playing the widow, let out an anguished scream over and over again for repeated takes. The effect was blood-curdling every single time.

Henshall - kind man - did not recognise me as the hammy babushka later in the hotel bar. He plays Levin in a gorgeous, swinging fur-lined coat. Over the local tipple - bison-grass-flavoured vodka and apple juice - he described filming the threshing scene in the countryside near Warsaw. "As night fell, you could hear the wolves howling in the woods." There are definite atmospheric advantages to filming beyond the Home Counties.

The Guardian    

Thursday April 13, 2000

Instant classic

The director has been replaced, there's no time to rehearse and the cast are knee-deep in snow. Is this any way to treat a much-loved masterpiece? Bibi van der Zee visits the set of "Anna Karenina"

The British actors are provided with umbrellas and hot-water bottles, while the Polish extras are left to fend for themselves. "They're used to the cold," says one crew member, running between Warsaw's Palace on the Water and someone's trailer.

Peach-coloured paper lanterns warm the air as Anna dances with Count Vronsky, laughing and flirting. In the background young Kitty, who has turned down a marriage offer because she believes Vronsky will propose to her soon, is heartbroken; it will be several hundred pages - or a good few episodes - before she can find love.

Soon Anna will leave her husband for the count, setting in motion the events that make up one of the world's greatest tales of passion: their affair, the falling away of their love, and Anna's suicide beneath the wheels of a train at Obiralovka station. But for now, David Blair, who has never directed a costume drama before, is hunched behind the camera. His fingers are shoved deep into his hair and his face is screwed up in agonised concentration as he waits for the Polish extras to begin the mazurka again. Anna and Vronsky pause in the centre of the floor.

One of the actors has a pregnant wife who is suffering from terrible morning sickness. Dougie Henshall, who plays Levin, the man spurned by Kitty, shouts at me for suggesting that Anna Karenina might not work on television. Helen McCrory, the actress playing Anna, gets very drunk with me on the last night of my visit and fixates on the idea that I find Anna unsympathetic. "But why?" she keeps asking anxiously. "Why are you doubting us so much?" She is determined to prove that Anna was wronged by society, and is clearly upset by the suggestion that Anna may have overreacted slightly to Vronsky going out for the day. In fact, all the actors look exhausted and are smoking heavily; any suggestion that they may have taken on more than they can handle gets a robust denial.

It's an extremely ambitious project. Gub Neal, head of drama at Channel 4, appears to have a vision for his department that is unlike anything it has done before. He came from BBC2 (where he had a hand in commissioning Gormenghast) and has brought us Queer as Folk, Dockers and Longitude. Longitude didn't go down that well, or Gormenghast.

'I read the novel after I got the part of Anna," says Helen McCrory. "I'd read War and Peace and Tolstoy's diaries but I'd never read Anna Karenina because I'd always had this image of it as this rather sentimental piece of work. Women running around deciding who they want to marry bores me stiff." But this is to be a "modern, contemporary take on Anna", and Channel 4 seems to be aiming to shatter some preconceptions with its casting. Like most of the British cast, McCrory is not an obvious choice for her role - she's not staggeringly gorgeous in the way you expect Anna to be. One crew member describes McCrory as "not beautiful but mesmerising"; she has the sort of indefinable quality that makes the barman knock things over as he goes to light her cigarettes.

Similarly, blond, granite-faced McKidd is an interesting choice for Vronsky, about whom we have so many romantic notions. (In fact, Tolstoy mentions that "Vronsky was beginning to get prematurely bald".) Best known for Trainspotting (he played naive, vulnerable Tommy) and for Small Faces (as psychopathic gang-leader Malky Johnson) he can currently be seen in Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy. "Some of the Polish extras just come up and stare at me," he says, when asked what he thinks of the casting. "It's like they're trying to work out what I'm doing playing Vronsky. It's quite intimidating, really, but I know I'm not the world's handsomest man. Around here, this book is a national treasure."

The lack of time is clearly worrying people: McKidd has been spoiled by Mike Leigh, who spends months in preparation, and he clearly yearns for rehearsal time. "In telly there are always really tight schedules," he says. "You just have to do what you can and hope it will work."

McCrory is utterly committed to her character but clearly petrified that she's not getting it across and says she feels huge pressure. "You really don't know as an actor if it's good or rubbish till you've seen the rushes," she says nervously.

The ballroom scene is nearly ready, and the musicians have got into their gallery. Blair has managed to take McCrory to one side during lunch to chat about something that's worrying her. (He gobbles his food in four minutes flat, fielding questions from three people, then goes straight back to the set.) McKidd is outside having a crafty cigarette, while the costume designer stitches until the very last minute. Blair wanders around, has a few words with cast members, then calls, "Action!"