Un film de Joe Wright

Kirsty Lang reports on how puppets have entered the theatrical mainstream.

She speaks to Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones of the Handspring Company, who made the puppets for the international theatre hit War Horse and to Joe Wright, director of the films Atonement and Hanna, whose new cinema version of Anna Karenina features puppets in a central role.

Wright says all his films are influenced by growing up in a puppet theatre - the Little Angel Theatre in London. Kirsty pays a visit and meets Joe's mother, Lyndie Wright, who founded the theatre in 1961 with her husband John Wright. She also discovers an unexpected link between the Little Angel and the award-winning War Horse puppets.

Matthieu a écrit:Puppets take centre stage (BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, 6 janvier 2012).
Comment ai-je pu rater ça ?

In the commentary from his first feature film (Pride and Prejudice) director Joe Wright discusses how he uses his knowledge of art history to try and compose his shots after classical paintings. Can you see it in his works?

ELLE.com spoke to Knightley recently at the Waldorf Astoria

Next up for Knightley is the November 9 release of Anna Karenina. “You won’t be able to imagine what [director Joe Wright] has done with it,” she said. “He’s going for a very theatrical—not a naturalistic—take on it. It’s very stylized and right out there as a kind of look. The first time we worked together, on Pride & Prejudice, there wasn’t any pressure, so anything better than shit was amazing! The second time we worked together, on Atonement, everyone was like, ‘It’s an unfilmable novel, who is James McAvoy, it’s going to be crap,’ so again, no pressure. This time, everyone’s going, ‘It’s going to be great,’ so we’re like, ‘Oh nooo!’ So if we’re going to go down in flames, let’s really go down in flames. I’m really excited about it and supportive of his choices.”

I've been in my cutting room for six months with my new film, Anna Karenina. I generally don't watch films whilst I'm making one.

For his adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, director Joe Wright looked at Russian and English locations, then decided to film it in a Shepperton studio transformed into a theatre. The result is fluid and compelling

Artistic doubts, money worries, producers tearing their hair out – the new film of Anna Karenina had hit the buffers. Then the director, Joe Wright, had a eureka moment. Sally Williams tells the inside story

Joe Wright and his tracking shots
Joe Wright didn’t invent the tracking shot. You can go as far back as Orson Welles’ opening sequence to Touch of Evil or Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope for early examples of masterful tracking shots. Nor did Wright perfect the tracking shot. That credit probably has to go to Alexander Sokurov, who filmed his entire 96-minute picture Russian Ark in one, unbroken take.

But Wright lands on this list for his conscious effort to make the complicated tracking shot his visual trademark, employing it in multiple features. He started experimenting with longer shots in Pride and Prejudice before knocking audiences for a loop with the near-five-minute beach shot in the middle of Atonement. Grace in the midst of chaos became Wright's calling card. In Hanna, Wright once again choreographed a breathtaking tracking shot as he followed Eric Bana into a subway station … and right into a multi-person fist fight. The camera never looks away. And now we’ll never look away from a Wright film as we wait to see if and when he attempts to outdo his previous, spectacular efforts.

Wright is about to amaze audiences with his stunning literary adaptation of Anna Karenina, which wowed festival crowds and opens on Nov. 16. But the L.A. Times says that Wright is negotiating with Lionsgate to possibly helm an adaptation of the book The Secret Life of Houdini, written by William Kalush and Larry Sloman.

Even before Karenina (which I adored), I would have signed on to anything that Wright decides to direct. His previous films – from Pride and Prejudice and Atonement to the exhilarating Hanna -- were visually stimulating exercises in attitude and pacing. Karenina ups the ante for Wright, and I’m dying to see what he chooses to do next.

For example, in one scene, Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) has lunch with Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), then leaves to visit Kitty (Alicia Vikander), a sequence that Stoppard wrote with traditional transitions involving carriages, entrances and exits. Wright compressed the action so that it all transpires in one space, with the set changing behind the players and a stage curtain standing in for the exterior of Kitty’s house. The approach is complex but also delightfully simple, as it focuses in on the pure emotion and expression of Tolstoy’s work, rather than its material trappings.

“I’m misquoting him, but it’s when Levin says something like, ‘Sex is given to us to help us choose the one person with whom to fulfill our human-ness,’ ” he says. “The only advice the film gives — and this isn’t me, but Tom Stoppard and Leo Tolstoy, but I concur — is this idea that you can’t apply the intellectual rationale to it. You have to learn to love the questions.”

And speaking of music, Anna Karenina plays like a glitzy musical, despite the lack of singing. Would you direct a musical, or is this the closest you'll get?
I would love to direct a musical. Have you seen Holy Motors?
Yes.
Fuckin' hell, that's a good movie. Wow. That moment when Kylie Minogue starts singing that song—that just blew my heart out.

So it was more of a ballet than a musical for me, and it was about exploring the boundaries between dance and the movement of actors in a scene. It was about exploring where that line is—what's choreography and what's just action. And that's something I've been thinking about for a while.