Anna Karenina

Joe Wright was going to shoot this in Russia. Scouting St Petersburg and English country houses, the team kept hearing the same line: Keira Knightley had already been there twice. Wright responded by moving almost the whole story into a single theatre built at Shepperton. Sarah Greenwood based that set on the Kirov and the Mariinsky in St Petersburg. One platform becomes in turn an ice rink, a racecourse, a ballroom, a railway station and a cancan club, and the crowd’s movement is counted out in choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. The single exit is Levin. The character Tolstoy kept closest to himself is let out of the theatrical metaphor and shot in real countryside. Jacqueline Durran mixed the lines of 1950s couture into the period costumes, since Russian society of the day was besotted with French fashion, to give Anna a modern streak. Durran won both the Academy Award and the BAFTA for it. The film took 4 Oscar nominations and won only that one; Greenwood won best production designer at the European Film Awards in 2013. A good fit if you want the set changing in front of you to be the main event. Not for anyone who will count the design as getting in the actors’ way.