Mira Nair’s flair for novelty

NEW YORK — When Mira Nair landed in her native India for a quick, two-day shoot on “Vanity Fair,” which opened in area theaters Wednesday, that’s when star Reese Witherspoon went from being merely impressed to awestruck.

Seemingly in no time, Miss Nair had marshaled a crew of 200 people speaking in three different languages and — why not? — four elephants.

“She’s just a very special person,” Miss Witherspoon says, lamenting there aren’t more like her in Hollywood.

James Purefoy — one of several British actors cast in the movie, which was filmed primarily in Bath, England — was impressed by that same organizational brio, in this case her encouragement of actors to join her for early-morning yoga sessions.

No way, Mr. Purefoy said of the 6 a.m. invitations, citing leisure-appreciation: “I’m British.”

It took a certain fearlessness for Miss Nair to take on a classic of English literature, William Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” an ensemble saga centered on Rebecca Sharp (played by Miss Witherspoon), the audacious, low-born social climber of Georgian England.

First of all, Miss Nair is, well, not a Mr., and Hollywood’s big-epics Rolodex is filled with names like Ridley Scott, Wolfgang Petersen and Mel Gibson. “Sadly, there aren’t a whole lot of female directors out there,” Miss Witherspoon says.

Miss Nair, 46, started her career making documentaries such as “Jama Masjid Street Journal” and “So Far from India.” She’d gotten a full ride to Harvard University and set only one deadline for herself: Make a feature by age 30.

“Salaam Bombay!” came out in 1988. She was 29.

Only recently did Miss Nair break through to mainstream American audiences, with the 2002 comedy “Monsoon Wedding.” She’s long kept India’s Bollywood system at arm’s length — though that extravagant, carnivalesque aesthetic does inform her movies.

Miss Nair is a self-styled outsider, which is why she jumped at “Vanity Fair,” a project that Focus Features offered her without realizing she’d snuggled in bed with the novel since she was a teenager.

Thackeray was “the ultimate outsider,” she believes.

“He was born and raised in Calcutta and was shipped to England to be an English gentleman,” Miss Nair says in an interview in midtown Manhattan, not far from the Upper West Side apartment she calls home eight months of the year. (She spends summers in Kampala, Uganda, with her professor husband.)

Miss Nair is short, dark and striking, dressed in traditional Indian clothing with vivid purples and reds. She calls herself a “helpless fan of Thackeray” and feels she can relate to him.

“Thackeray spent his happiest times in India. He always looked at his own society with the same eyes Becky Sharp did.”

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