Vanity Fair: Bringing Thackeray's Timeless Novel to the Screen

This excellent companion to Mira Nair's cinematic adaptation of VANITY FAIR provides very interesting and insightful behind-the-scenes combinations of probing comments, production notes and interviews and beautiful photographs and drawings. The book is a very fine and carefully made presentation of texts - including the screenplay - and stills.

No, this isn't Thackery's original classic, but a screenplay of his novel, packed with 140 color photos, original costume designs, and examples from other movies and photos which served as inspiration for the film. As much for film production students as for Thackery scholars, Vanity Fair covers the mechanics of translating a classic novel to the screen.

Vanity Fair: Bringing Thackeray's Timeless Novel to the Screen is an excellent book for anyone who has seen the film and wants to delve in to what went in to making it. The film itself, an adaptation of Thackeray's classic novel, is a sumptous feast of vibrant colors, deliciously wicked dialouge, great acting, and skillfull direction by Mira Nair. Reese Witherspoon sparkles as classic herione/anti-herione Becky Sharp, the social climber in 1800's England. The rest of the film is well cast and the supporting cast turns in some terrific performances. That being said, this book is packed with details that will enhance your viewing of the film. I particulary found the correspondance section between director Mira Nair and writer Julian Fellows to be quite entertaining. It gave me an idea of some of the process that goes in to the writing of the screenplay. Development of characters, set locations, and the casting of the actors are some of the topics that Fellows and Nair discuss. Nair also talks about some of the problems that arose during the pre-production phase like having to move the shooting to Ireland instead of where the novel is set in England. She also had to scrap some of her original plans to shoot scenes in certain areas of India due to budget concerns. The rest of this book deals with other areas that went into making of the film. These areas include costumes, art direction, music, cinematography. Also, included is the complete final screenplay along with hundreds of color pictures from the film. Going back to the screenplay, it is probably a little too early to start talking about adapted screenplay oscar nominations, but I really thing Julian Fellows' screenplay is an early contender. I really encourage everyone to see the film "Vanity Fair". If you really enjoy it, I would encourage you to pick-up this book as well. It will really give you a better appreciation of the film and what went into creating it. I would also recommend getting the soundtrack, the music is really great in this film. Mira Nair has created one of the better movies of 2004, and Julian Fellows has written a great script with some crackling dialouge!