Director James Ivory's film-making partner, Ismail Merchant, died last year, but their shared vision continues, he tells Donald Clarke
When veteran producer Ismail Merchant died last May, his obituarists, though consistent in their admiration for his personal qualities, tended to praise his work in the most couched terms.
Merchant first met the American director, James Ivory, back in 1959, and in the years that followed the two men went on to develop one of the most reliable partnerships in world cinema. Kingdoms may fall. Tectonic plates may shift. But every year or two a Merchant Ivory film - as likely as not a literary adaptation starring knights and dames - would make its stately way into our cinemas. Films such as Howards End and A Room With a View won Oscars and did well at the turnstiles, but outside the US the critics have never fully warmed to the veteran team. Their films, the pundits suggest, are enslaved by their source material. They are too respectable to be entirely respectable.
This perception was summed up in a notorious cartoon by the reliably grumpy British director, Alan Parker. The drawing shows two cinemagoers emerging from a screening of a Merchant Ivory picture.
"God, how I hate the Laura Ashley school of film-making," one says to the other.
"I know that it has always pissed off James Ivory particularly," Parker said of the cartoon recently. "Ivory is humourless and self- important, and that's why he gets his knickers in a twist."
When I meet up with Ivory in New York to discuss The White Countess, an epic romance set in Shanghai, starring Natasha Richardson and Ralph Fiennes, I tentatively read the above quote back to him. Parker will no doubt be disappointed to hear that, far from storming from the room, Ivory, a crinkly 77-year-old in a good suit, smiles wryly and chuckles.
"He is the one that has no sense of humour," he says. "What he didn't like was the joke I made about him. I suggested his cartoon would be remembered long after his films had been forgotten."
Ouch! Saucer of milk for table five, please.
Though he does seem able to take a joke, Ivory has always been regarded as less clubbable than his late producer. The Indian, a skilled chef and cheery raconteur, was always ready with the glad hand, while Ivory, it is said, is harder to draw out.
"What I observed was that Ismail was the showman, the rogue, the effusive, ebullient man," Natasha Richardson tells me. "And Jim was the much more soft-spoken, the more guarded of the two. They had a shared vision, but they were really like chalk and cheese."
As if to prove the point, Ivory reacts to this assessment with polite economy.
"Yes, you would have to say that," he agrees.
James Ivory was born in Berkeley, California, on June 7th, 1928, but grew up in Oregon, where his father ran a sawmill. Initially intending to be a production designer, he studied first at the University of Oregon and then at the University of Southern California (USC). Unimpressed by the theoretical bias of USC's film studies course, Ivory set about teaching himself how to be a documentarist. He first made a film about Venice and then, in 1959, The Sword and the Flute, a study of ancient Indian artifacts. It was at a screening of the film in New York that Ivory first met Merchant.
"He saw this film I had made and admired it and he felt that I was the only American he had met who had a sense of things Indian and could show that on film," Ivory says. "He then left for India and tried to get another production going that fell through. Then we had this idea to make a film of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novel, The Householder. When you are young you don't realise what you don't know. I had no idea how to direct actors and so on."
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, German-born but raised in England, went on to write the majority of the Merchant Ivory films. It is arresting to note the variety of the multiracial team's work before they took up adapting the classics with their 1979 film of Henry James's The Europeans. Initially, availing of box- office takings that American studios, hampered by currency restrictions, were unable to extract from India, Merchant and Ivory focused their attentions on the sub-continent. Films such as Shakespeare Wallah (1965) and Bombay Talkie (1970) remain interesting today.
Then, as the 1970s progressed, there came a series of diverse American pictures: Savages, The Wild Party, Roseland. Decades before the emergence of Miramax signalled a supposed boom in independent cinema, Merchant and Ivory were showing how it was possible to function outside the control of the big studios.
"Yes, I feel that still," Ivory says. "I read these all these stories summing up the lives of independent film-makers in the 1990s and I think, 'when those guys started out I had already been doing that for years'. I was making films when they were in high school. So it is a little irritating to read those reports."
Intriguing as the avant-garde Savages (1972) and the moving Roseland (1977) were, Merchant Ivory will forever be synonymous with Henry James, EM Forster, bustles, Helena Bonham Carter, cornices, carriages and lashings of coiled emotional repression.
"You know why that is?" he says, bristling somewhat. "Because those are the ones that made the most money. They are the films that got seen by the most people. They were the films most likely to get nominated for Oscars, and so on."
The company's big breakthrough came in 1985 with its fragrant interpretation of EM Forster's A Room With a View. Henceforth Merchant Ivory became a recognisable brand. Like Coke. Or Habitat. Or Laura Ashley.
"That film showed we had some gifts," says Ivory. "It was a business thing. We took a very small amount of money and created this huge hit that was highly praised and got eight Oscar nominations. So we obviously knew how to do something. It gave birth to that series of films up to Howards End."
Ivory did make a few detours into the contemporary, but the results were rarely satisfactory. Even those genetically indisposed to period drama would surely still prefer to sit through Howards End than the terrible Slaves of New York or the confused Le Divorce.
The White Countess, which is the last film made by the two old friends, might be regarded as hybrid between classic Merchant Ivory and their less typical work. The film is, indeed, a period piece, but it is based on an original script by Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novel, The Remains of the Day, provided the team with one of its biggest hits.
Fiennes plays a blind American diplomat who falls in love with Richardson's Russian emigrée. Among the film's attractions are beautiful impressions of 1930s Shanghai by the famously experimental cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, and an opportunity to see a significant swathe of the Redgrave clan in action. Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, Richardson's mother and aunt, turn up as her character's squabbling relations.
"Well, they look alike, which is a help," Ivory says. "That greatly helps the look of it. I had never worked with Lynn or Natasha before. Natasha was cast and then I thought why not cast Vanessa as her aunt, who was originally a very different character? Then I suddenly thought of Lynn."
As ever, financing proved complex, and recreating a period environment in a busy modern city such as Shanghai created any number of logistical conundrums.
"Well, it was the very hardest film we have ever made," Ivory says. "We were in the seventh week and this tax-shelter company who were supposed to put money in seemed oblivious to the fact we were in Shanghai with this 200-man crew. This was a terrible drain and strain on Ismail and it weakened him and, at the end, just before shooting finished, he broke his ankle and was immobilised. The strain probably contributed to what happened to him."
He is not suggesting that making The White Countess killed his friend, is he? "No. What killed him was something he had many times before: a bleeding ulcer."
The person from Sony Films, aware that we are approaching the end of theallotted time, is circling.
"But I wouldn't want to end the conversation on that awful note," Ivory says. "We are still going to make films. Shortly we are off to Argentina to begin shooting."
How will his working practices change now that Merchant is gone?
"Oh, that will change everything - how we raise money, and so forth," Ivory says. "He had tremendous tenacity and charisma and had an amazing ability to extract large amounts of money from the most unlikely people. And I am not sure that amongst the survivors there is anybody who can extract money in quite that way."
The critics will, presumably, continue to rail against the company that still bears the name Merchant Ivory. But I get the impression that such opposition acts as a spur to Ivory. Some time back, he said that the consistent opprobrium of Pauline Kael, the New Yorker's late film critic, merely made him more eager to persevere.
"Yes, it works like a kind of reverse voodoo," he says. "To have a strong enemy makes you stronger. The more she wrote, the more work we did. She used to complain about the number of our films she had to sit through. But we just kept on making them."
The White Countess opens on Fri, Mar 31
Five key Merchant Ivories . . . and a turkey
Shakespeare Wallah (1965) The team's second film stars a teenage Felicity Kendal as one member of a family of players dedicated to bringing Shakespeare to the Indian masses in the years following independence. Decorous.
Roseland (1977) Arguably Merchant Ivory's most successful foray into the (then) contemporary, this touching drama presents three stories set in New York's Roseland Ballroom. Restrained.
A Room with a View (1985) A surprise hit, and the film that secured the brand's reputation, this sumptuous adaptation of E M Forster's comic novel tends to win over even dedicated Ivory-phobes. Elegant.
Maurice (1987) Merchant and Ivory, though both gay, rarely touched upon same-sex relationships in their work. Their quietly passionate treatment of Forster's long unpublished novel on forbidden love is, therefore, of special interest. Delicate.
The Remains of the Day (1993) It's from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, a contemporary writer, but, wouldn't you know, The Remains of the Day is still set in the past. Anthony Hopkins is superb as the psychotically repressed butler who has confused feelings for the sensible housekeeper played by Emma Thompson. Refined.
. . . and the turkey?
There are, sadly, quite a few disasters to choose from. Surviving Picasso (1996) was unintentionally hilarious. The Wild Party (1975) was disconcertingly psychedelic. But Slaves of New York (1989), a horrendous desecration of Tama Janowitz's already unlovely stories of 1980s decadence, was a bona fide catastrophe.