He interviewed the director of Vanity Fair for The Chicago Tribune:
"Movie director Mira Nair has a great, warming, infectious laugh and a mind that works like a steel trap. And, much like Becky Sharp, the seductive but smart, nice but naughty anti-heroine of Nair's latest movie, 'Vanity Fair,' she seemingly never lets life get her down. Nair, 46, the Indian-born, Harvard-educated, internationally admired director of 'Salaam Bombay!' and 'Monsoon Wedding,' might seem an odd match for 'Vanity Fair': the lavishly produced new movie adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's classic 19th Century British novel. Similarly, her film's star -- lively 'Legally Blonde' ingenue Reese Witherspoon -- might seem too Hollywood-ish a choice for 'Fair's' classically unscrupulous, seductive Becky, one of English literature's juiciest, most provocative females. Yet, as Nair points out, 'Vanity Fair' -- which she first read as a schoolgirl in India -- is a book she has read and loved for most of her life. And Witherspoon was Nair's first choice and, as it turns out, a memorable Becky -- winning us over equally or more than Miriam Hopkins in the trailblazing 1935 Hollywood Technicolor 'Becky Sharp' (directed by Rouben Mamoulian) or Natasha Little (star of the deservedly praised 1998 BBC TV-film, and a supporting player, as Lady Jane Sheepshanks, in Nair's all-star cast)."