Despite the filmmakers' considerable commitment
to the material, the Vanity Fair movie would not have been made
without the charismatic leading lady who could bring to life
one of the most well-known female characters in English literature.
Producer Janette Day adds, "Reese and Mira had been looking
for something to do together, and the Vanity Fair movie was
the perfect match." Vanity Fair is the first major adaptation
of the author's work since Stanley Kubrick's 1975 feature Barry
Lyndon.
Day developed the Vanity Fair movie 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 Vanity Fair movie 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 Vanity Fair movie project.
In the spring of 2002, plans for the Vanity
Fair movie 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 Vanity Fair movie.
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."
Nair's frequent collaborator, Lydia Dean Pilcher, rounds out the female trifecta of producers on the Vanity Fair movie, making this film a roaring success.
