In his book Orientalism, Said argued that Westerners used the romantic mythology of the exotic East to justify their colonialist ambitions. Nair pays homage to her friend and neighbour in a brief sentence in Vanity Fair's credits: "Salaams to Edward W. Said for continuing to inspire."
"I was greatly fuelled by his ideas on Orientalism," says Nair, who was educated at Delhi University and Harvard, and who also keeps a home in Uganda. (The director lived next door to Said with her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, also a Columbia professor.)
During an interview in Toronto, which she began with a bright smile and a request to "Please call me Mira," the award-winning director of Monsoon Wedding, Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala and The Perez Family, says she entered the Vanity Fair project with grand visions.
She wanted the financial backing to create a film as enduring and epic as Gone with the Wind, but, unlike other film adaptations of Vanity Fair (which opens tomorrow), she did not wish to whitewash the storyline.
The Indian-born Nair was intrigued by William Makepeace Thackeray's exploration of England's rape of the Orient during the early 19th century — a story in which, she says, the lust for titles among the merchant middle classes is as fundamental as are the love stories. Thackeray, who was born in Calcutta in 1811, "thumbed his nose at colonialism," Nair says, adding that English middle-class families like the Osbornes in Vanity Fair made their fortunes off the backs of Indians.
She first read the weighty novel she calls "a sophisticated soap opera" when she was 16. Thirty years later, bringing a condensed version to life on-screen, she says she "wanted to try to capture the cracks of life," explaining that it was easy to make the literature accessible to the masses because "Thackeray gives us a banquet to work with."
Nair began working on the film two years ago with the help of screenwriter Julian Fellowes, who also wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman's critically acclaimed and character-heavy Gosford Park. In Fellowes, says Nair, she found "an equally helpless Thackeray fan."
The film is based on Thackeray's satire about social climber Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon), an orphan with an impoverished background who strives to be accepted by the upper classes.
Nair says it was her intention to make Vanity Fair as vibrant and colourful as her popular Monsoon Wedding, which was set in India and followed the trials and tribulations of a Punjabi family as they prepared for their only daughter's wedding. "That's my sensibility," says Nair. "I didn't want this to become one of those period-frock movies — one of those fudsy-dudsy films."
What helps to really blow the dust off the antiquated plot is a universal question, she says.
"The question that Thackeray asks in the novel, which we repeat in the mouth of [the Marquess of] Steyne is: 'Which of us is happy in this world? And which of us, having met our desires, is content?' And that is the ultimate yogic question that all of us grapple with: 'What do we yearn for in the process of achieving that yearning, and are we then happy?' " It's a question Nair herself has yet to resolve.
"I have been blessed," she says with a slow smile, but adds that she is still too young to answer the question. Still, she says, "It's great that I can do movies that raise these questions."
The film also toys with the culture of vanity as the "Western way."
"This whole culture is about vanity," says Nair, "There is a lack of attention given to an inner space. It's all about looking outward, and basically the outward appearance."
To keep the actors' focus off their egos — and on the film — Nair brought a yoga teacher to the set. "It's part of the deal," says the yoga devotee.
"[Yoga] helps to keep the ego out of it. When it's time for filming, it's now-or-never time, and instinct will reign unfettered."
It was Nair's instinct, what she calls her "female barometer," that helped her cast and direct actors to best capitalize on their sex appeal, and heighten the sexual tension between characters. She says the casting of lesser-known British actor James Purefoy opposite Witherspoon was for a reason.
"I didn't want to pair a movie star with a movie star, because otherwise it would be like Cold Mountain," Nair says, referring to the 2003 U.S. Civil War film that starred both Nicole Kidman and Jude Law.
That said, she was happy to have the white-hot Witherspoon on board. "She has intelligence, guile and wit, and of course irresistible appeal with a capital A," says Nair. "I can't help but like her."
The director's admiration of the calculating Becky Sharp is just as ardent. Although Sharp schemes and manipulates her way through the drawing rooms of London's nobility, her redeeming characteristic, Nair suggests, is that she never lies. "She is a modern, timeless girl who needs to survive. She is born without things and she wants to belong," says the director.
"I like Becky because she treats the courtier as she treats the king. She has no pretensions. I like people who are marginal," says Nair, and then adds: "The desire to belong is everywhere. It's a desire that fuels many of us."
