American Cinematographer - September 2004 - 49

Vicious Circles

Becky is able to
parrot the
refinements of
her

wealthy

benefactors
while

impressing them
with her clever
and resourceful

stratagems.

element that

sets

Vanity Fair apart

from other costume dramas. "Period

films

really suffer from stateliness,"
Preferring a more visceral
quality, Nair and her collaborators
looked to other sources of inspira¬
tion. Early on, she and Quinn
happened upon an etching in a print
shop in Bath, England, where all of
Nair.

notes

come

in with their

why at the
beginning of Vanity Fair, we show
Lord Steyne clad in a silk coat and fur
walking through the pigs and mud. I
wanted that kind of realism: height¬
ened and visually interesting."
Quinn introduced Nair to the

paintings of John Grimshaw, a Leeds

shot. The

artist from the late 1800s whose

etching showed Bath's main boule¬
just with a few cows and
somebody padding them along with

images inspired their thinking about
atmosphere and lighting. "Many of
his paintings feature dusk light or
moonlight mixed with candlelight
on wet cobblestone streets along the
docks," says Quinn. Another source
of inspiration was Ridley Scott's The

the films exteriors

were

vard "with

a

stick," recalls Quinn. "That stuck

with

aesthetic

dirty old
grand new build¬
ings. That mixture of dirt and the
new
appealed to us, so we show, for
example, beautiful clothing with
us as an

cows

-

mixed with

Duellists, for its handheld

camera¬

work and its

mud caked around the bottoms of

ability to see beyond the
grandeur of the period to the frayed

the skirts and

collars, unwashed clothes and ill-

on

the shoes."

"We wanted

to

make

Vanity

Fairs streets look like the streets in

Salaam Bombay," adds Nair, referring
to

her

1988

directorial

"London in that time
nous,

36

aristocrats would

boots and frills. That's

September 2004

debut.

cacopho¬
filthy and smelly. Then the
was

fitting wigs. Nair also referenced
Pyaasa, a 1957 film by Indian direc¬
tor Guru

Dutt, who

was a

master

in that Indian
losing the plot, but
going forward with it through song,"
-

not

she says.
Unlike

and Nair's
Vanity Fair
was filmed in Super 35mm. "I had
done very little in Super 35 or
anamorphic, and I thought this was
the film to do it in," says the cine¬
Quinn

earlier collaborations,

matographer. Prom Nair's stand¬
point, the format suited the film's
sweeping scale: "I didn't want to
make a talking-heads movie; I really
wanted

to

make Gone With the

Windy
"There

bigger issue,
though," adds Quinn with a chuckle,
"and that was Reese Witherspoon's
pregnancy. We could keep her belly
out of the frame more easily and get
was

characters

more

a

into

the

same

frame."
Nair wanted to make much

of

sequences. "Because Becky
Sharp sings her way to the top of
English society, I could make three
song

full-on song sequences

tradition

greater use

of wide-angle lenses than

she had in her earlier films. "I wanted
a

juxtaposition of really wide lenses,

Feoactcouurrfste.sy
Phot s
American Cinematographer - September 2004

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