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 Vanity Fair Production NotesAll's Fair in Love & War.
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 new film version of the classic novel by William Makepeace Thackeray introduces a new audience to the beautiful, funny, passionate, and calculating Becky.
The daughter of a starving English artist and a French chorus girl, Becky is orphaned at a young age. Even as a child, she yearns for a more glamorous life than her birthright promises. As she leaves Miss Pinkerton's Academy at Chiswick, Becky resolves to conquer English society by any means possible. She deploys all of her wit, guile, and sexuality as she makes her way up into high society during the first quarter of the 19th century. Becky's ascension to the heights of society commences when she gains employment as governess to the daughters of eccentric Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins). Becky wins over the children, and the Crawley family's rich spinster aunt Matilda (Eileen Atkins) as well.
The rural Hampshire household comes to find her indispensable, and Matilda comes to confide in the bright young woman. But Becky knows that she cannot be a true part of English society until she moves to the city. When Matilda invites her to come live in London, Becky eagerly accepts.
There, Becky is reunited with her best friend Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai), who - having grown up comfortably - does not share Becky's more brazen ambitions. Hewing close to the family she already knows so well, Becky secretly marries dashing heir Rawdon Crawley (James Purefoy) - but when Matilda discovers their union, she casts the newlyweds out. When Napoleon invades Europe, Rawdon bravely reports to the front lines. Pregnant Becky stands by distraught newlywed Amelia, whose own husband George Osborne (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is also called to fight.
When George does not survive the Battle of Waterloo, Becky's friendship with Amelia is strained beyond repair. Becky is reunited with Rawdon and gives birth to a boy, but, post-war, money and comforts are sparse for the trio. More intent than ever on gaining acceptance into London society and living well, Becky finds a patron in the powerful Marquess of Steyne (Gabriel Byrne). Steyne's whims enable Becky to realize her dreams, but the ultimate cost may be too high for her.
About the Production: Bringing Up Becky
Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! [Vanity of Vanities!] Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied? -- William Makepeace Thackeray, in his novel Vanity Fair
With these words, William Makepeace Thackeray closes 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? In his novel, Thackeray created a cinema verité of its day. It was completely accurate concerning what was happening and had happened in England, yet the questions are timeless. The extraordinarily rich characters have resonance for all of us today, and I think Becky is literature’s greatest female character.”
The director brings her own interpretation 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.
Producer Janette Day first began striving to make a feature version of the novel 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.”
For screenwriters and associate producers Matthew Faulk and Mark Skeet, adapting Vanity Fair “is a dream come true and in fact a privilege. The rich and comic array of characters that Thackeray provides is a screenwriter’s dream. This is a novel about us all.”
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.”
Vanity Fair 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 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. She notes, “Becky Sharp is one of literature’s great female characters. She recognizes that there is a better life out there, but the conventions of the time don’t allow people to move across social classes. Still, she figures out a way to do it. What is so moving is that, ultimately, having achieved what it is she so desperately wants, Becky discovers that there’s a certain emptiness to it.”
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 film. 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.”
Gigliotti adds, ”Mira is a great filmmaker with real humanity that is deeply appealing. Her understanding of her own origins and how she’s layered that into the film is spectacular.”
James Purefoy, cast as the romantic lead Rawdon Crawley, comments, “Mira’s background as an Indian director, attentive to the Indian culture that was coming into England in the early part of the 19th century, sets the tone.”
Nair’s frequent collaborator, Lydia Dean Pilcher, rounds out the female trifecta of producers on the film. Pilcher smiles, “This is the sixth film that Mira and I have worked on together. Working with Mira is a life experience, because she brings so much passion and humanity to her vision. In the process of making films, we immerse ourselves in whatever the culture and subject matter are, live it a little bit, and then bring it all in front of the camera. Mira looks for collaborators who can create a synergy with her vision. She’s the fearless leader charging up the hill, and she wants a team who can keep up with her.
Fellowes, an Academy Award winner for his Gosford Park screenplay, signed on to collaborate with Nair for the first time. He reflects, “The challenge of any adaptation is knowing what to leave out and this is doubly so when working on a novel both as long and as loved as Vanity Fair. You want to feel that the key moments have all survived but, at the same time, that you are making the story new for a modern audience.”
Pilcher adds, “Mira likes to have creative energy around her, from people who want to really collaborate. When that happens and you can sustain it and keep working together, you can further that energy.” Sure enough, a number of other previous colleagues joined Nair on the new movie: director of Photography Declan Quinn, editor Allyson C. Johnson, sound mixer Drew Kunin, and composer Mychael Danna, among others.
Fellowes enthuses, “I absolutely loved working with Mira, whom I found to be as creative as any director I can remember. She always gives notes that stimulate, instead of flattening, a writer’s ideas. Like Robert Altman, she has an extraordinary visual imagination.”
Despite the filmmakers’ considerable commitment to the material, the film 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. Following in the footsteps of Myrna Loy and Miriam Hopkins some seven decades prior, Reese Witherspoon came aboard and the new movie finally had a confirmed start date. “With the casting of Reese, this picture came together,” states Gigliotti.
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Bob Hoskins and Reese Witherspoon in Vanity Fair.