On November 16, 2012, a new adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina will enter limited release in the US market. With a script from the legendary Tom Stoppard, Anna Karenina pairs director Joe Wright and actress Keira Knightley for the third time, following Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007).

The new silver-screen adaptation of this age old tale of love and lust features an interesting presentation in which all of the intricately large, detailed sets are all confined in one theater, creating a new spin on blurring the lines between stage and film. On November 8, 2012, I and a small group of journalists sat down with Knightley at the famed Waldorf Astoria to talk about Anna, Joe Wright, period dramas, and future projects.

Can you talk about playing this complex character? I believe she’s one of the most complex characters you’ve played.
She is. I think it was weird because I initially read the book when I was in my late teens, early 20s, and my memory of it was as Anna being somebody who was sort of a victim and in the right, almost saintly, and everybody else being wrong. And then all of a sudden, I read it again last summer, just before we did the film. This is not the same person that I remember at all. I saw her as much darker, and questioned the function of the role within the whole piece. I think because it’s called Anna Karenina you expect her to be the heroine. You expect  her to be the one you should always sympathize with, and you should be seeing through her eyes. I don’t know that that’s the function of the character within the piece.

I think the one to be idolized is Levin, and if you like, the goody is Levin. Anna definitely walks the line of being the anti-heroine. She is also the heroine. I thought if you’re having the Levin/Kitty storyline within the piece, which is the romance, the idealized kind of hope, then what’s the point of doing the same thing with Anna? So, I thought it would be more interesting if we looked at that kind of darker, more morally ambiguous side of her.

Is that why you think it still resonates to this day?
I think it resonates to this day because it’s about love, and not just romance or just that happy bit; not love in the way it’s all sold to us, but love as the thing that we’ve been fascinated by and obsessed with for centuries. Love is that thing that we are all after, and yet can destroy us and is painful and can be madness and can be joy and can be happiness. It looks at the whole thing. I think that’s why it’s so complex. It has more questions within it than it has answers, because we never manage to answer the questions.

Love is something that is so inexplicable and so complex and strange. I think it’s a novel that looks at all of that. I think that’s why you keep going back to it. That’s why within preparing for this, when we were talking about it, every single person, whether they were a member of the crew or the cast could go, Oh yes, I relate to that — because everybody had a story within their lives that was applicable to the situations. It didn’t matter that we lived in 2011 or 2012, or that it was written in 1873, because it’s about that emotion.

I was exhausted by watching some of the things you went through. How did you sustain yourself through that emotionally wrenching process?
It was pretty exhausting, [and] it was an incredibly stylized, technical piece of filmmaking. So, maintaining a character who is so highly emotional through a 12- to 14-hour day is quite exhausting. But it’s just one of those things.

Joe [Wright] was telling us that he played music for you guys. Were you taking a breaks and dancing to music?
No. He was taking a break and dancing. I was putting my own music in, which was normally something incredibly depressing, as he was listening to house music and dancing over in the corner.

What were you listening to?
Elgar, a lot of Elgar, cello concertos, anything to make you cry — a bit of Tchaikovsky if she was going really mad always helps.

Joe said [during a prior interview], “We may question love with our rational mind, but it’s beyond our brain to process.” Do you personally think you’re the kind of person who thinks love conquers all?
I’m a 27-year-old woman. I think it would be a bit strange if I had those romantic notions about relationships that I think you should have when you’re in your teens. I think that it is absolutely inexplicable, and I think that there is a lot of pain involved with it, as there are absolutely great moments.

It would be a bit shit of me to stand and go, “Yeah, love conquers all.” You’d obviously go bollocks. So no, I mean I think it’s a fascination. It’s the questions that we can never answer. Why do we feel the way we do? Why are we attracted to those people? Why even when it’s going badly, do we go back for more? What is that within us, you know?

You said before that everyone relates to Anna, different parts of her in their own lives. How do you relate to her?
I’m not quite sure. I mean, I find her terrifying. I find her terrifying because I am no better than she is. I find her terrifying because even in the moments when I judged her the harshest, I thought, Would I do any differently? Have I behaved any better? Do I know that I would behave any better? Do I know that I wouldn’t be destroyed by this? No. I think that’s what’s so terrifying about her, and that’s what’s so fascinating. I think that’s why people go back to her again and again and again.

Can you describe how your relationship and your trust level with Joe Wright has evolved over the course of three films?
There is an amazing amount of trust. I think that’s sort of the overriding thing within the relationship. Even when we have our bickering moments, we are quite like siblings.

That’s what he said too.
Yeah. We do bicker. But there is never a question that I love him to pieces and I completely, implicitly trust him.

What was it like working with Jude Law?
Wonderful. I was meant to work with Jude. Actually, I did Pride & Prejudice because the film I was meant to do — which was which was written by Tom Stoppard — was going to be me and Jude Law. It fell apart six weeks before it was meant to start shooting. So, I was suddenly available and ended up doing Pride & Prejudice. It felt like a wonderful thing that we finally got to work together on Tom Stoppard’s script. I’ve known Jude socially for quite a few years; I’m a big fan of his because he’s a character actor. I mean, he’s a damn good looking man, and he’s very good at those leading roles — but he is essentially a character actor.

What was really extraordinary about this was that he was on stage at the same time that he was shooting a good portion of this. He was in Anna Christie by Eugene O’ Neill. So, seeing him in that play [as a] big sailor, this massive beast of a man, and then coming to us during the day and being this kind of small, contained creature….I think says a lot for the talent of the man,.

What about working with Aaron [Taylor-Johnson]?
Aaron is amazing. He literally works the opposite of the way I do. He’s movement-based. So, with Jude and me, we’d sit around a table, and we’d have notes, and we read the book, and we’d be discussing for hours and all the rest of it. Aaron doesn’t like to do any of that. Every bit of the emotion, he can’t necessarily describe it, but he can do movement-based improvisation. So, we’d do 20-minute improvisations with no words whatsoever that were entirely movement. He is completely comfortable within that realm. I’ve never seen anything like it, actually.

[After] working with all these actors and their different techniques, did you find you’re taking some of these techniques with you into your next projects?
Yeah. The movement-based technique, there’s a lot of schools for that. I think it’s very interesting; it’s incredibly helpful for stage. Generally speaking, in film, it’s in vogue at the moment for close-ups. You really rarely work in wide shots anymore. So, generally speaking, I might say I’d like to be a movement-based actor, but if you’re working in a close-up, it doesn’t matter what my foot’s doing — I mean, it’s a close-up. Saying that, I think it’s great to have those tools, always.

Did you like to get back into costume? What did you like and dislike?
What do I dislike? I dislike the fact that the working day is a hell of a lot longer if you’re dealing with big costume or big makeup movies. If you’re doing a film like Cloud Atlas, for example, [those actors] were called in three or four hours before everybody else. So, you’re adding three or four hours to a 12-hour working day, and that’s just to make it, not to take it off. So, in costume dramas, you’re looking at two hours on top of a 12-, 14-hour shooting day. That’s a bitch. I mean, that’s really why I tend to do one and then go off. A modern day piece, you come in half an hour before, you chuck something on, it’s lovely. This one was exhausting. The whole makeup and costume department were wrecked at the end of this — partly because a lot of the costumes were still being made during the film. They were ready as we needed to shoot, but some of them were literally being sewn together on me. The amount of work that goes into that — you really have to take your hat off. It’s a labor of love.

It was the same for The Duchess, same for Pride & Prejudice. Any costume piece, the amount of work from those departments is massive. The brilliant part of it is the costume and hair and makeup become such a massive part of the character, because you’re creating everything from scratch, and the symbolism within those costumes is huge. There were dead birds in the hair that couldn’t fly; diamonds that could cut your throat at any second because they’re the hardest stone. A lot of the dresses were based on lingerie, so you were bringing [concepts of] sex and death. There were some dresses that were made of bed fabrics. The final dress, I got obsessed with the idea of the Whore of Babylon, so the color was a very specific color that we got from paintings of the fall of the Whore of Babylon.

That’s what I love about working with Joe and working within fantasies: you can put so much symbolism into every single part of it.

Was there anything you wanted to keep?
No. Well, actually, the diamonds. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any of those.

Was there any discussion of doing a dialect?
Doing a Russian dialect? Yeah. I mean there always is. If you’re meant to be French or you’re meant to be Russian, do you do it in a French accent, do you do it in a Russian accent. Then you go, Okay, if you’re doing it in the Russian accent, why aren’t they speaking Russian? If you’re not doing it, should it be an English accent? But why should it be an English accent? Should it be an American accent? It’s one of those discussions that goes around and around.

We did accents for A Dangerous Method because the character that I played was not speaking in her native language — she was meant to be a Russian living in Germany or Switzerland. I can’t even remember. We thought that was a very important part. You wanted to see the mark of somebody who had been taken from their homeland and put somewhere else. Here, [in Anna Karenina], we’re dealing with everybody from the same place, speaking the same language. Because we were all English actors, I think we just decided that the English accent is as right or as wrong as any other.

With back-to-back films and the intensity of this particular film, are you making plans to take time off?
I’ve been working solidly since May. I finish in December, and I can’t imagine finishing yet. So, I don’t know.

Is this the film you’re shooting with the same makeup team as Cloud Atlas?
Yes, it is called Jack Ryan, which is a big, old Hollywood thriller.

What attracted you to that one?
I got to the end of Anna Karenina and realized that I’d done five years of films where either I died or something horrific had happened in all of them. I wanted to spend a year not dying and trying to do things that were very positive. So, the first one that I made is a film called Can a Song Save Your Life?, which is an incredibly positive, hopeful piece about friendship and making an album and possibilities. The next one is the thriller, Jack Ryan.

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Matthew Schuchman is the founder and film critic of Movie Reviews From Gene Shalit’s Moustache and also the contributing film writer for IPaintMyMind.