I wasn’t a big fan of Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina, but within Wright’s films there are always things to enjoy and most often that includes his tracking shots and just today I came across this behind the scenes look at the tracking shot in Anna Karenina uploaded by the film’s camera operator, Peter Robertson. Most often we can only marvel at the shot itself, but this allows you to not only hear the direction as the sequence is being performed, but all the pieces being moved in and out of place to execute it.
This look reminds me a lot of the behind the scenes look we got at how Martin Scorsese and Robert Richardson pulled off a lengthy Steadicam shot in Hugo, which I have also included below. Additionally, you can get an alternate angle look at the Anna Karenina shot right here, but unfortunately I couldn’t find the finished scene online anywhere.
Seamus Mcgarvey, Wright’s director of photography on Anna Karenina talked about the scene in question:
There was another elaborate scene that leads Oblonsky from his office in the auditorium — you see everyone packing up and the camera starts exploring the auditorium — and the prop men slide in gilded panels to create the restaurant. I cue it with a big lighting shift and it becomes an event, a restaurant — all in one single take. It was hugely complicated but it worked well.
Of course we’d plan these complicated shots out in advance. Joe is good at working with extras and actors to fuse together choreography, action, camera so it has a dynamism and logic. So we’d plot it with the first AD and do rehearsals and then off we’d go. But it was all imagined and devised before we started to plot it out physically. Working so closely with Joe and the ADs was really a treat.
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Here are a couple of other impressive Steadicam shots from Wright’s films including the subway fight from Hanna and the impressive Dunkirk evacuation scene from Atonement, which was also handled by Robertson.
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