Sarah Jane Wright

Sarah Jane Wright is a production executive at Working Title.
She spoke to us about Anna Karenina, the latest period drama that the company had created, and talked us through the initial production process of the film.
The director, Joe Wright, had initially wanted to film the tale very realistically in the Russian cities of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, where the novel had been set. However, due to budget limitations given to them by a parent company, it was not possible, considering also the political instability and corruption in Russia.

Joe Wright then went away and over a period of 48 hours came up with the idea of setting the film in a theatre, since it was very symbolic of Russian high society at the time, where everyone was watching the lives of others.

She spoke to us about the basic production of a film. They use a software called Movie Magic Scheduling. They import the entire script, scene by scene, and then the software asks them various questions about what scene it is, where it is set, how many pages it is, to name but a few. A scriptboard is then created to give an idea of how many days and weeks it will take to film the piece; a medium sized film in the UK will cost between $750,000 and $1,000,000 a week just for the shooting crew. This figure increases when filming a period drama as the costumes and wigs needed are very expensive. In a modern film, for example, extras can wear their own clothes, but in period dramas even the most insignificant of background extras need to be properly dressed.

Anna Karenina was shot on film, with a Dior stocking over the lens of the camera, which created the soft effect on top of the scene. It was later moved onto film. Whilst Sarah Jane did not give us an exact figure of how much film was used for Anna Karenina, she told us that the adaptation of Les Miserables used over 1 million feet of film in the shooting of it.

We then spoke about the visual effects industry. 3 or 4 years ago, the visual effects world was thriving and companies could not expand fast enough in order to take on lots of big films. Sarah Jane stated that, as an industry, visual effects was "feast or famine" and that they were currently in a famine. There were lots of redundancies being made due to huge overheads and firms were constantly having to downscale.
However, visual effects companies have been benefitting recently from a 45% tax break in Montreal. Despite the distance from the UK, the digital age has made this incredibly easy to do.