What is it with Keira Knightley and period films?

Keira Knightley has a new movie coming out and big surprise, it’s
another costume drama. Re-teaming for the third time with director Joe Wright
(Atonement, Pride and Prejudice), this time the actress embodies Tolstoy’s
doomed heroine Anna Karenina in a highly stylized adaptation that’s been
getting raves on the festival circuit. 
So what is it about Keira and vintage corsets?

 KK: I’ve been asking myself that an awful lot and when I was
younger I felt really bad about it. I felt that I was doing something wrong in doing so many
period films and then, well, what is this? This is obviously my taste. I’m drawn to this. I
love history, I love reading historical novels, I love watching period
pieces as well as performing in them. I think it’s something to do with the fantasy aspect.
I think when you’re dealing with a time and a place that you don’t know, you get to leave
yourself behind, you leave your culture behind, you leave your situation in
life behind and you get completely immersed in different characters and
different emotions.
I think as a dramatic tool it’s a really, really handy one. Whether it’s a
historical piece
or it’s a science fiction piece they both do kind of similar things for me. It’s the element of
fantasy that I love.

Is it easier to get into a character in a fantasy?

KK: Sometimes it’s different. This one was exhausting. Very
happily exhausted by it but it was, I mean, this was definitely the hardest thing that I’ve done because
of the very specific staging. The shooting can be quite simple when you play
such an emotionally heightened character as I did with the David Cronenberg
film, you know, we’d do two takes, two set-ups and that was it. That was done. We’d
normally finish early. With this because the stylization was so extreme, the
technicality of doing it, you know, you’d be doing it 14 different times, 14
different ways. You’d have to twirl into a shot that was
actually shot through a mirror and time the tear to come down your face
as soon as
you twirled into it – and then it would take 10 times before the focus guy got the
focus point
through. Or trying to do a whole scene that’s meant to be incredibly, incredibly
passionate but you have to keep the strip of light exactly through your face so you
can’t actually move your body and as soon as you move your body the
whole shot’s completely ruined so you have to start again. So technically this was
really difficult and because of that and because we wanted to keep her as being this
emotional kind of creature it meant that everything had to be kept at this level all day
which was sort of 14 hour days. So I’d get home at the end of the day and have a glass of
wine and just pass out – then wake up and start again. So yes, it was exhausting but exhilarating. A real
proper challenge.

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Vera Anderson Es escritora, fotógrafa, cineasta y vive en Hollywood con su esposo y su traviesa cachorrita Airedale. Promete estar más activa en Twitter y espera que el guión que escribió con su hermano se convierta en película.