Producer Janette Day first began striving to make a feature version of the novel about Vanity Fair a decade ago. She notes, "I've always felt that this was the period film I would like to make; there's nothing prim about it, and Becky Sharp is very much a modern heroine stuck in the wrong time, in a lavish mad world where she is feisty and difficult and different. "The influence of the character is far-reaching and enduring." .

 

The new film version about Vanity Fair of the classic novel by William Makepeace Thackeray introduces a new audience to the beautiful, funny, passionate, and calculating Becky.With these words, William Makepeace Thackeray closes about Vanity Fair, and it was these lines that in particular inspired director Mira Nair.

She states, "The reasons I wanted to make Vanity Fair are Thackeray's essential, and in my view spiritual, questions - which of us has dreams, and when we achieve them, are happy? What is contentment? What is aspiration? What is the vanity of life? The director brings her own interpretation about Vanity Fair to the classic material. Her Indian childhood complements Thackeray's own (as the Englishman had spent his early childhood in Calcutta).

This fortuitous connection is at once creative and highly personal, and the new film version meditates on how much of domestic imperial England was informed by the cultures across the sea. Day developed the picture about Vanity Fair while at Granada Film and continued nurturing it once she became an independent producer.

Similarly, Donna Gigliotti, who had been working with Day on the project about Vanity Fair since 1999 while president of production at USA Films (where she had worked with Nair on Monsoon Wedding), set up her own production company, Tempesta Films, and stood by the project.

Reese Witherspoon
Jonathan Rhys-Meyers
Gabriel Byrne
James Purefoy
Romola Garai
Vanity Fair