British director Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, 2006 and Atonement, 2007) is set to make a film based on Leo Tolstoy`s epic novel Anna Karenina.

Oscar-winning British screenwriter and acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, 1998) was engaged in the adaptation the 800-page novel.

Wright and Stoppard aim to reveal the drama of a high-society Russian family and dismiss all Tolstoy`s analytical studies of the Russian agricultural system that form a significant part of the original novel.

"[Stoppard] has done an amazing script which involves Levin`s story as well as Anna`s story," the director told in his recent interview to About.com.

The director has explained that he sees Anna Karenina first of all as a family drama. "It`s a family drama. War and Peace was his big political drama and Anna Karenina, as he says in the first sentence, is about families. `Happy families are all happy in the same way. Unhappy families are all unhappy in different ways.` So he wrote it to be read by the new emerging literate Russian population? The actual plot of it is fairly simple and very emotional."

Wright also raised the problem of languages in the upcoming movie as Tolstoy`s characters - Russian high society was mostly French-speaking.
sections: Culture, World News