Inside story on the new Anna Karenina film

One afternoon in the summer of 2011, Joe Wright lay on a sofa in the production offices at Three Mills Studios, east London, feeling depressed. Wright, the British director of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, had 12 weeks to go before the start of shooting on his new film of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. It was, in many respects, going very well, he recalls. Tom Stoppard had written a "particularly fantastic" screenplay. Big-name actors had signed on in the leading roles: Keira Knightley as Anna, the aristocratic wife and mother who embarks on an affair; Jude Law as her cuckolded husband, Alexei Karenin; and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as her young lover Count Vronsky. But Wright had doubts and, as shooting approached, those doubts multiplied.

They started while he was scouting for locations, touring palaces in St Petersburg and Moscow. "You'd be shown around and they'd say, 'Oh yes, we've had seven versions of Anna Karenina shot in this palace before'?," he tells me. (There have been 12 previous film adaptations of Anna Karenina, four for television and one ill-fated Broadway musical in 1992.) "Then in England, we were looking around stately homes thinking, 'Well, if we shot it from this angle it could look kind of Russian.' Then someone would say, 'We've had Keira Knightley here five times before.' And it just felt like I was treading the same ground, not only that other people had trod, but also that I'd trod myself."

There were also money worries. The budget for Anna Karenina was £31 million. Stoppard's script "jumped all over the place" from Moscow to St Petersburg, to remote villages: in all, 246 scenes set in locations as diverse as an ice rink, the race track and the opera house. "The producers were tearing their hair out, saying 'We can't afford this! We can't afford this!'?"

So Wright lay on the sofa wishing, he says, he "had the balls just to do something bold and extraordinary".

Late that night, the phone rang in the home of Sarah Greenwood, the film's production designer. She knew there were problems with the film and that, as she pungently puts it, "we were up ---- creek, basically". "Hey Sarah," said the voice, Wright's voice, at the end of the line. "Why don't we set it all in a 19th-century dilapidated theatre?"

Published in 1873, Anna Karenina is the tale of a disgraced, adulterous married woman, set in a nation on the cusp of great change. It depicts Anna Karenina as a sensuous heroine, imprisoned by society and by her husband, a stiff Petersburg bureaucrat, fond of cracking his knuckles. (Tolstoy is an astute observer of body language and the stories it can tell). The novel charts Anna's escape with Vronsky, a wealthy, handsome cavalry officer. But her freedom quickly becomes another prison, one in which Anna loses herself completely.

The novel's power lies in its vivid, unpredictable characters: Karenin is emotionally cold but in one unexpected moment sobs like a child, warmly forgives both Anna and Vronsky — and then refuses to grant a divorce.

It's also a novel driven by contrasts. The wholesome domestic life achieved by Kitty, the younger sister of Anna's brother's wife, with Konstantin Levin, a farmer (and Tolstoy's spokesperson), is set against the destructive lust that brings Anna and Vronsky together. The artificial lives of Europeanised aristocrats in Moscow and St Petersburg — these Russians only speak Russian to their servants; to everyone else they speak French — are set against the authentic lives of peasants scything in the countryside.

It's a sprawling book of more than 800 pages, punctuated with extended descriptions of Levin's agricultural practices, and devoting pages to the process of mowing. All of which might explain why, faced with the challenge of turning Tolstoy's book into a film, one might have doubts.

Despite all these obvious difficulties, Wright eventually couldn't resist Anna Karenina, he says, because "it's about love and I find love to be the most interesting, challenging, wonderful aspect of life".

The adaptation came to him at an important turning-point in his own life. In 2007, he was engaged to the actress Rosamund Pike (they met when she played Jane Bennet in his 2005 film Pride & Prejudice) but broke off the engagement just weeks before their wedding day. Last September he married the musician Anoushka Shankar, daughter of renowned Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar; together they have a one-year-old son, Zubin.

"I feel I was going through something quite similar to Tolstoy [when he wrote Anna Karenina] in the sense that he had just got married and children were on the horizon," he says, "It feels like he was a man trying to figure stuff out, in the face of this extraordinary experience of marriage and love". Tolstoy went on to have 13 children with his wife, Sophia Andreevna. "I won't be doing that," stresses Wright.

Love became a guiding principle for the film. "Tom [Stoppard] and I decided before he set pen to paper that if the scene was about love then it was in," says Wright. "And if it was about the politics of farming, then it was out."

The result amounts to something ressembling a dissertation on love. There's unrequited love, experienced by Kitty (Alicia Vikander) in her initial infatuation with Vronsky; as well as obsessive love, between Anna and Vronsky. If Karenin represents love of duty and God; then Anna's jolly brother Stepan Oblonsky (Matthew Macfadyen), a serial adulterer who nevertheless loves his family, stands for a love of appetites. There's also motherly love; fraternal love; love of country; self-love. And as to the vexed question of what is true love, Wright (and Tolstoy) are in no doubt: the bond between Kitty and Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) comes closest to the ideal and "has a real spiritual destiny to it."

Liberties had to be taken. In the novel, Anna and Vronsky are 32 and 25 respectively. Knightley and Taylor-Johnson are 27 and 22. "We did the same on Pride & Prejudice," says Paul Webster, the film's producer, "he [Wright] has cast everybody as young as he can."

So we have the odd situation of Jude Law, typically a bronzed and swaggering heart-throb, being one of the senior citizens of the film. Law is 39, but looks ancient as Karenin, with thinning hair and a pinched face. The role pushes Law to one of the strongest performances of his career.

"When an actor is as handsome as Jude is, he gets cast in these handsome roles and it's all just about whether he's handsome or not," says Wright. "I think he really enjoyed himself on this movie not having to worry about any of that stuff."

Law admits that, for him, the role was "maybe a turning point. There were elements of Karenin that I had never examined before: his severity, sternness, stillness, introspection - they were all colours I was really excited about dabbling in."

Karenin minds very much about his wife's adultery: not, primarily, because she has fallen for another man, but because she has broken the rules. Law prepared for the role by getting a manicure and trimming his beard, finding in these physical gestures the "little things that just locked him in". His Karenin is a study in rigidity: straight feet, straight arms, walking in straight lines. It was all about, he says, "trying never to raise one's voice and overuse one's eyebrows or facial muscles. I kept trying to slow my heart beat down to this metronomic pitch."

It is now November, 2011, and I am standing in what appears to be a theatre, a set that Wright has had constructed at Shepperton studios. All around. there are gentlemen in frock-coats and uniforms; ladies with bare shoulders and gleaming diamonds applaud from the stalls and the boxes overhead. In the scene being filmed today, Anna is at the opera with Princess Betsy Tverskoy (Ruth Wilson) but is more interested in scanning the audience with her opera-glasses. She and Vronsky are yet to become lovers; they're still in the wooing period.

The camera cuts to Vronsky, dressed in a white military uniform and sitting in the box opposite Knightley. Taylor-Johnson is the film's blonde bombshell; his dark hair has been bleached in dramatic contrast with Anna's dark curls. Beneath the studio lights, Knightley's chocolatey eyes gleam, almost as bright as the pearls around her neck. They're the genuine article; Chanel, whose perfumes Knightley advertises, have lent around 20 pieces of jewellery for the film.

"Cut!" cries Wright, now clearly enjoying himself. He's even grown a moustache out of solidarity with Taylor-Johnson and Macfadyen. Oblonsky's is so enormous it takes over his whole face. "This is a beautifully whiskery film," says Ivana Primorac, the hair and make-up designer.

Wright admits that setting a major film in a theatre is odd, "almost Brechtian" and audaciously "uncommercial". The idea came to him, he says, in a eureka moment, albeit after "a great deal of simmering". He virtually grew up in a theatre — his parents ran the Little Angel Theatre, in Islington, north London — and he'd been reading about the non-realistic theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Russian director from the Twenties, and Natasha's Dance, Orlando Figes's history of St Petersburg. "Figes talks about how the Russians of the time were suffering an identity crisis and living their lives as if on a stage," says Wright. "They were acting constantly."

Not all the action of the new film is set in the theatre. Levin's scenes were shot on Kizhi, an island in Lake Onega, northern Russia. Wright justifies this on the grounds that "Levin is seeking a more authentic life".

To make the script fit Wright's new vision, only one stage direction had to be added: "The action takes place in a derelict theatre."

For the art department, however, the change of plan triggered a period of maniacal activity. For 12 weeks they had been on course for a traditional costume drama shot on location in Russia, but they quickly came round to the new concept. "Because you are not hidebound by a location, you can actually refine and create the image you want more easily," says Greenwood.

Today the theatre serves as a theatre. On other days it will become an ice rink, paddock, office, grassy meadow, summer house, and stables - in all, 100 or so scenes will be shot inside it. The film interweaves special effects and real locations. When Anna arrives at Moscow, Knightley gets into a real steam train at the engine shed in Didcot, Oxfordshire which then thunders through the proscenium arch into the theatre. Vronsky's rooms are shot in Ham House, Surrey — because, it transpires, they ran out of time. "We could have made those scenes work within the theatre but we are cracking at the seams here, so it was one of those things that got left out in the cold," says Greenwood.

Fans of Macfadyen's performance as Mr Darcy in Pride & Prejudice, will be surprised to see that his Oblonsky is a heavy man, with the "broad box of a chest" that Tolstoy describes. Playing a character incapable of depression, Macfadyen begins the film laughing and eating and never really stops. "It's all there on the page, so I jumped in," he says, "I loved it."

Back on set, Wright is finding the time to fiddle with a fold on Knightley's dress. Not only does Wright direct, he also dreams up the costumes. When I ask Jacqueline Durran, costume designer, if they're in period, she looks at me as if I'm mad. "Joe wanted a very sculptural look, and he looked at the 1950s." He tells me later that he "doesn't particularly like dresses from the 1870s; the silhouette is lovely - but the fabrics, bows and over decoration is quite prissy. Not very graphic."

Wright says that, as a director, his forte is communication. Today he is communicating to his cast by blasting music through the sound system between takes. "It's time for a big dance scene," he explains, "so I'm keeping the energy up". I leave the set, stepping out of nineteenth-century Russia back into modern-day Shepperton with thumping nineties house music ringing in my ears.