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.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."
Screenwriter Julian Fellowes states, "In
Becky Sharp, Thackeray has created a genuinely archetypal heroine,
who remains vivid and fresh and relevant for any period or age
group."This Reese Witherspoon picture is the first major
adaptation of the author's work since Stanley Kubrick's 1975
feature Barry Lyndon. Faulk and Skeet admit, "Reducing
a 900-page novel to a movie script was the main challenge. But
by concentrating on the adventures of the wonderful Becky Sharp,
it became possible. It was a long journey from inception of
the project to the final result, but if we make this great novel
more familiar to the world, it will be worth every second."
Day developed the Reese Witherspoon picture
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 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.
In the spring of 2002, plans for the film coalesced at the newly
formed Focus Features, where director Nair, whose Monsoon Wedding
was finishing up a successful run worldwide, agreed to make
and finance the Reese Witherspoon picture. Day notes, "Vanity
Fair had to be huge and lavish and funny and moving in terms
of characters and storylines all having to interconnect and
it had to have a real truth and humanity to it. If you watch
Monsoon Wedding, Mira did all that, and you cared about every
character."One of America's most popular stars, Reese Witherspoon,
unites with one of the world's most acclaimed directors, Mira
Nair, to bring to the screen one of the greatest female characters
ever created, Rebecca (Becky) Sharp. The Reese Witherspoon Picture
of the classic novel by William Makepeace Thackeray introduces
a new audience to the beautiful, funny, passionate, and calculating
Becky.
