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| Interview: Connecting, British Council |
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Do you feel this is a significant departure for you, recreating a distant historical period in a country far from India? Yes and no. Yes, because I have never filmed English culture in any of my work, and no, because I have made period films before (Kama Sutra, The Perez Family) and the process of mounting a period film is familiar. In some stylistic ways, it is not a departure at all: like Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay!, Vanity Fair too is a swirling ensemble piece, dense and layered, about a certain society at a particular point of time. Upon reflection, I’ve seen that the influence of Indian, so-called Bollywood, films - specifically our unabashed emotional directness, the freewheeling use of music, the emphasis on elemental motivations and values - is a thread running consistently through every one of my films. Even when exploring foreign worlds, I have taken the bones and flesh of those societies and tried to infuse them with the spirit of where I’m from. With Vanity Fair, I jokingly call it The Return of the Native. What particularly drew you to Thackeray and have you always enjoyed Vanity Fair? I knew the book well in my early college days, but I rediscovered the banquet of it a few months ago when I was offered the film. Looking at pre-Victorian London to adapt Thackeray’s gloriously entertaining saga, Vanity Fair, I find an enormous panorama of themes familiar to our society and to our cinema: a woman who defies her poverty-stricken background to clamber up the social ladder, unrequited love, seduction through song, a mother's sacrifice for her child, a true gentleman in a corrupt world...the catalogue of human stories remains the same. I love the possibility of linking the human folly of Vanity Fair with the idea of evoking something spiritual. It is, after all, a story that comes down to basic human ambition, asking the essential yogic question: Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied? When I was offered the film, I happened to be reading a book my husband had given me, Exterminate the Brutes by Sven Lindquist. It basically describes the discrepancy between the reality of what colonisers did in the colonies vs. what they reported back home, thus creating a real sense of moral corruption in England at the time. This corruption, hugely fuelled by the monies coming in from the colonies, was what created the "new money society" which is the setting of Vanity Fair. The new middle class, having tasted the fruits of exploitation in the colonies, now aspired for what the titled aristocracy had. The myth of the English gentleman who could go to India and return a nabob, widely prevailed. Every male character in our story either works in India or does business there. So the theme of the influence and lure of the colonies is one I'm weaving into the aesthetic, the politics and even the shooting of Vanity Fair - I have, rather mischievously, written in three days of shooting in India as well! How 'modern' does the work seem to you? Social dislocation, warfare, women's empowerment - the themes are there. Is it your intent to make them overtly relevant to today? Human drama, ambition and its resulting folly, is never out of date. And while we're not doing anything wildly gimmicky like updating the costumes etc, we're not exactly going to be that sedate drawing-room comedy of manners-type film either. The film will pulsate with life, that's certain. If I can illuminate the spiritual question at the centre of the film - the question of what we aspire for in our lives, and when we achieve it, are we satisfied? - then this film, like Thackeray's great book, will always remain modern. Does it interest you that Thackeray was born in Calcutta and was the son of an East India Company official? Yes, of course it does. My belief is that the only time Thackeray ever experienced truly unconditional all-embracing love was in his first six years in India, until he was sent away to school in England and packed off from home to home. This memory of his first home nourished him throughout his life, and he weaves much of it into the great human tapestry that he wrote in Vanity Fair. Will this have a strongly British cast and production team? Reese Witherspoon, an American, will play Becky Sharp. The remainder of my wish list are mostly English: Daniel Craig, Tilda Swinton, Jim Broadbent, Alan Bates and so many other wonderful actors. The production team is essentially my film family that travels with me everywhere: Indians, South African, Irish, Americans, whatever. You haven't filmed in Britain before. Are you looking forward to this and do you think it will be a new kind of experience for you? Of course! What is there not to look forward to? (except the cold and damp...!) The idea is to live life fully, and I intend to do that in England as well!
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