by Brad Balfour

G21 Contributing Editor

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NEW YORK, NY, USA -While South Asian!=born director Mira Nair may have had $23 million to play with in making her latest film, "Vanity Fair" -- her biggest budget yet -- she's at heart an indie filmmaker and educator. Those two aspects of her life merged when she made her award-winning 2001 surprise hit "Monsoon Wedding," based on an idea by Sabrina Dhawan, then a Columbia University School of the Arts graduate student who also wrote the film that Nair, an adjunct assistant film professor, directed.

The two met at the school while Nair was teaching there. This is not the only time the veteran filmmaker has lent her support to students. This past spring, she teamed up with Bala Entertainment International to establish International Bhenji Brigade, a film production company that aims to create independent Asian cinema for the global marketplace and help novice filmmakers as well.

An extension of that effort, her Mirabai Films established an annual filmmakers laboratory, Maisha, dedicated to supporting visionary screenwriters and directors in East Africa and South Asia. The first lab, focusing on screenwriting, will launch in August, 2005 in Kampala, Uganda.

In June, Nair began mentoring the 32-year-old Thai filmmaker Aditya Assarat as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, which gives emerging artists a chance to learn from respected people in their field. And Nair is currently enjoying a career retrospective at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.

Yet her most massive education project might have been taking a classic tome like William Makepeace Thackeray's much taught and studied novel of English mores and manners, Vanity Fair, and making it into a commercially viable movie.

Thanks to the success of her earlier films, which also include "Salaam Bombay," "Mississippi Masala," and "Kama Sutra," Nair was chosen by Focus Features to helm the project, which opens Sept. 1.

She has imbued Thackeray's story with a stunning visual sense and an unusual yet uncanny lead actress in American Reese Witherspoon, who plays the irrepressible Becky Sharp.

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G21: How difficult was it making this movie compared to working on an indie like "Monsoon Wedding?"

MIRA NAIR: Making a movie is making a movie; the machinations of staging an epic film are common to any epic. Of course, you remember "Kama Sutra;" 16th-century India was produced on a much more limited budget, but the expanse and the scale that I hoped and tried to achieve were not that different from "Vanity Fair." Of course, "Vanity Fair" is a much greater banquet and saga of a book -- and one that I've loved since I was 16 years old.

I knew it really well being raised in good ol' colonial hangover India. Most of us who go to English boarding schools in India are steeped in English literature, and so Thackeray is, for me, a beloved writer. We know a lot more about English culture than the other way around. If there's any personal community that can understand class and see through hierarchy, I would believe that the Indians taught the English about class. [laughs]

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G21: How different was the original script from what you had in your head?

MIRA NAIR: Basically, we started over. The script the [producers] had was admirable but it was much more about the rise of the material girl rather than what I loved about the book -- which is the whole democratic swirl, the milieu of which Thackeray was writing. He was born and raised in India, and you know, in a sense, I always viewed him as an outsider in his own society.

He had this incredibly satiric, acerbic, and political point of view on the milieu that he was writing about. He wrote the book [around] 1850, although it was set in 1802. He wrote the book about the Regency Era after it was over and, at that time, was the peak of the relationship between the empire and the colonies. So for him -- and me -- that was an important context to talk about.

So that was really important to me and all the themes that he was writing so brilliantly of, the sham and facade of things, the fact that early 19th-century London was the filthiest, most cacophonous city in the world; he described, like cinema verité, the streets and details.

You couldn't drag me to see a well-mannered period drawing-room drama where the girls wait and hope they will get proposed to tomorrow -- that is not normally my thing at all.

So for me, I took these foundations that he gave us and these incredibly acute details of so many characters and ran with them.

My first choice for writing the screenplay was Julian Fellowes, so after about two or three months of my own homework on the script, the book, and creating what I call the Map of Life, I asked if I could see Julian, not knowing he was such a helpless fan of Thackeray himself.

G21: How different is Thackeray's Becky Sharp from yours?

Reese Witherspoon (l) taking
direction from Mira Nair (r).

MIRA NAIR: I know this book pretty deeply, and once I studied how to make the film, I read a lot about how he wrote the book. It was written as a tabloid, a monthly page turner, and it was like reading old Hollywood.

I have notes from his editor to Thackeray, saying "You're enjoying your heroine too much, make her more of" -- basically the 19th-century version of the bitch -- "crank her up and make Amelia the more or less heroine."

Let's not forget, the early 19th century was his audience, and to celebrate and enjoy her so much was not on -- that was what Thackeray was being told. So that's why if you look at the book as a literary work, there are inconsistencies in it, which is why he was attacked by Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens ... But we're making this film in the 21st century, and I don't want to dumb her down or sweeten her up. Because I had the ammunition of Reese, the glory of her, I went for a Becky Sharp that I would hugely enjoy and is more fitting in this time and do this sort of comeuppance very well.

G21: What's your next project about?

MIRA NAIR: It's about my own people. [laughs] The Pulitzer Prize!=winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri's debut novel is called The Namesake, and I read it on the way to India while shooting the [Vanity Fair] finale. And I had this completely visceral response to it, and when the plane landed, I bought the rights.

I moved two movies that I was supposed to do so that I could do this one, because it is my people. In a way, "Monsoon Wedding" is my India life, and this is about my real life. It's about a young couple from India coming to Cambridge, MA, their kid growing up, coming to New York, living a contemporary South Asian life here.

On the whole, it's the immigrant story, but told in the most stunning way. So that's what I'm doing, quickly and quietly, and also I want to be working, not so vulnerable to the vicissitude of "Vanity Fair" because it's the biggest release and it's on 800 screens and I've never been there and I don't want to be corrupted by the ups and downs of it.

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