In the Polish winter Heather Neill joins the freezing cast making Channel 4's "Anna Karenina"
Anna Karenina stood alone on an icy platform, desperation painfully clear in her every glance and gesture. It was 9am on a chilly Polish morning, and Helen McCrory had been on set for three hours already. She is a great one for using real-life experience, in this case a recent nightmare about Nazi brutality, to aid concentration: "As the train doors bang, I remember the strangling sensation around my throat," she said cheerfully later. She reread and annotated her script daily and she and Kevin McKidd, who plays her young lover, Vronsky, spent hours in preparation together. "You can't act in a bubble," he said, "and for television you have to get through five pages a day - it's one-and-a-half maximum in film." He should know; he was fresh from Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy.
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.
On the first day, Karenin (Stephen Dillane, taking a day off from the London production of The Real Thing) meets Anna off the Moscow train at Petersburg; filmed from a different viewpoint, the station would double as Moscow the next day. The call sheet read "winter" but no one needed to act cold. Off-screen, McCrory grasped a hot-water bottle and Dillane swapped his elegant topper for a cream wool tea-cosy. There was, nevertheless, no snow, though the fireman's foam sprayed along the tracks made a surprisingly convincing substitute.
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.
Most adaptations of Anna Karenina concentrate on the central love story; this time the three interwoven stories of Anna and Vronsky, Kitty and Levin, Dolly and Oblonsky are given proper weight in an attempt to investigate love and loyalty. Nevertheless, producer Matthew Bird admitted that the film is plot-driven; there is an inevitable tension between sex-and-trains and doing justice to Tolstoy's 800 pages. Script changes were faxed daily by writer Allan Cubitt, who had spent two years on the project.
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.
The former waiting room and ticket hall provided costume and make-up space for dozens of Polish extras. Smart Victorian ladies and peasants bundled in shawls chatted on their mobile phones.
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 Times April 27, 2000