James Ivory

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0:30Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading artistic figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the director James Ivory. Along with producer Ismail Merchant, he formed the filmmaking company Merchant Ivory in 1961, and they went on to make more than 40 films, becoming synonymous with a particular movie genre in the 80s and 90s, often adapted from literary classics. Merchant Ivory won awards and acclaim for A Room with a View, Howard's End, The Remains of the Day and many more.

1:07In 2018, at the age of 89, James Ivory became the oldest ever Academy Award winner. Having been nominated three times previously for Best Director, he won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the coming-of-age drama Call Me By Your Name. He's now 96 years old. James Ivory, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. Very happy to be here. Your name is most commonly associated with the film company that you co-founded. Most people will have an idea of what a Merchant Ivory film is. But what are the hallmarks of a Merchant Ivory film to you, James? Well, they look good. They look good. That's always been important to me.

1:50And they sound good. They're well written. I try to have them be as well directed as possible. and they're about, I think, interesting people. In interesting times. Places and worlds. None of them have ever been very political. The one time we did make quite a political film, which was Jefferson and Paris, nobody liked it. But they're quietly political often, aren't they? Yeah. Reflecting the changes of the times, political shifts, social shifts in particular. Right. You were born in 1928, and you grew up in Oregon. What are your earliest memories of home life? My father was in the lumber business.

2:32He, with a business partner, bought a sawmill in Klamath Falls, Oregon, called Boy Scouts Mill, and totally redid it. And I lived in a small town, Klamath Falls. There was about, I don't know, 16 ,000 people there. You were adopted by your parents? I was adopted, yeah. Did you know anything about your birth parents? No, I know very little about it. I mean, later on I came to know a bit more when I discovered my birth certificate, things of that kind. But no, I didn't know, really. Were you a creative child? Very, I think, yeah. When I was in the second grade, so I must have been about seven, the teachers there saw my drawings and thought I really ought to have private art lessons.

3:20as with another boy also there. So he and I learned all the basic rudiments of drawing and painting. And we went out sometimes into the woods and painted. I still have those paintings. Really? Yeah. Interesting that a few moments ago when I asked you to describe a Merchant Ivory film, you say, they look good. So that's a lot to do with your artistic eye as well. Yeah. Well, they look good for a lot of reasons. I mean, I always had terribly good cameramen. We hired the best cameraman we could get, always. That's why they look good. I have a theory that there is something in the Italian landscape which inclines even the most stolid nature to romance.

4:01It reminds me somewhat of the country around Shropshire, where I once spent a holiday at the home of my friend, Miss Apesbury.

4:12And I divine it, Charlotte, you had an adventure there. Vain to deny it

4:28On This Cultural Life, James Ivory I ask my guests to choose the most important influences and experiences that have inspired their own creative work and your first choice that you've made is seeing Gone With The Wind at the age of 12 years old

4:46the film came out in 1939 so you must have been seeing it in the cinema shortly after its release probably i don't know how long it took to get to our town but i imagine very soon after its release it got to climate falls if you go where shall i go what shall i do Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. And I remember the nuns speaking darkly of it. I'm sure they had not seen it, but we were to stop up our ears when Rhett Butler said damn. So I don't know how the nuns knew that Rhett Butler said damn, but we were not to listen to him saying damn. They warned you in advance. They warned. They warned.

5:28Of course, my mother and father said damn all the time, so this is nothing new. So sometimes even God damn. Was it the story of Gone with the Wind? Was it the drama, the spectacle, the visual spectacle? All that. All that. I liked the story. Civil War thing. It was all great. Gone with the Wind, of course, is adapted from the bestselling 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell. You went on to adapt many great novels yourself. Were you a big reader as a kid as well? Yeah. And I read adult books and my parents never guided my reading. There was a period when I was very interested in the Old South, you know, the American Old South, because I'm half Southern.

6:06And I started reading Southern novels. I was reading stuff which probably my parents would have preferred I didn't read, but they didn't tell me that I couldn't. You know, when Gone with the Wind came out, it was such a huge success. So then authors began to write other Southern novels, that kind of romantic stuff. Did seeing Gone with the Wind spark an early interest in possibly going on to make movies, do you think? Probably. It's there, you know. Somewhere along in there, I decided that I wanted to be a set designer for movies when I was in high school. And we had an architect who came to work in our house, and I must have been about 16, and I got up the nerve, and I said, if you wanted to be a set designer in the movies, how should you prepare for that?

6:54and the architect said, would you go to architectural school? And that's exactly what I did at the University of Oregon. I went into the School of Architecture. But with a view to becoming a set designer rather than a designer of buildings. Yeah, with a view to becoming a set designer, exactly. And I had that idea for quite a while and all the time I was seeing movies and that must have encouraged me. But then slowly I began to think I'd like to make my own films. But it's interesting, isn't it? So many of your films feature great buildings. The physical landscape is one of those recurring features of the Merchant Ivory film.

7:35So architecture itself was a real interest. Yeah, of course. I always had a great interest in where we were shooting a film. And very early on, I decided I wanted to shoot my films in real places. I didn't want to go into a studio and build sets and so forth. We had to do that on one film. I shot them like the French New Wave films were shot in real rooms. On location. Real streets on location. We made so many films in England. and we had wonderful, wonderful houses to use as sets. This is the ballroom. Goodness. Like it? Proper. Even I know a good thing when I see it. Yes, but nowadays, with...

8:24Evie Orle was out with her fiancé, when I get home in the evenings, I tell you I can't stand the place. It would be very lonely for you. Yes. Do you ever get learning a snagel? After the University of Oregon, you went to the University of Southern California to study filmmaking? Yeah, I did, right. And it was during this time that you made your documentary, very early documentary. Well, I had made a trip that I made to France in the summer of 1950. I also went to Venice, and I was just blown away by Venice. It was an extraordinary place. I had to go back. And when I was then at USC, getting a master's degree in film, I decided what I would like to do is go to Venice and make a film about Venice.

9:12I suggested that to my teachers, and they said, sure, but we're not going to pay for it. But my father paid for it. And this was a film which I think was hailed by the New York Times in 1957 as one of the best non-theatrical films of the year. Yes, it was. But this was a documentary film. It was a documentary about how artists had seen Venice over the last 500 years. The design is of many colors. The shades of weathered brick, the tints of stucco, of amber marble, and unknown oriental stones. For centuries, the painter has found a subject in these shifting patterns.

10:00Your next choice, James, is meeting the producer Ismail Merchant and the writer Ruth Jabvala, whom you describe as your life partners. They are the people with whom you went on to form the company Merchant Ivory. Let's start with Ismail Merchant. When did you first meet him? It would have been 60, probably. In New York? In New York, yes. I had made a film about Indian miniature painting. He'd been to see my Indian film, The Sword and the Flu. It was shown at the Indian consulate. And then I remember after the screening, I came out and I was standing there. And this fellow came up that was Ismail and said how much he liked it.

10:40And he said privately to other people, he was surprised that an American knew how to make such a nice film about India. So then we went to have coffee. But all the time he was on the telephone while we were having coffee. We went to a place on Madison Avenue and had nice coffee. And he was on a pay phone, you mean? Yeah, I guess so. But he was on the telephone the whole time. Yeah. 1960. Exactly. It was a payphone. He was going away to talk on the telephone. During your first meeting? During our first meeting, sure. But did you hit it off personally straight away? Terribly, yeah, sure. And what was he doing in America?

11:18He was a student who had gone to the NYU Film School. And he made a film there with some other Americans about Indian dance. and it was so successful and so much liked that it was nominated for an Academy Award. And he had gone to California with that film for the Academy Awards. He didn't get into the Academy Awards and it did not win an Oscar. So anyway, he was now on his way back, passing through New York, on his way to Bombay. So a really fortuitous meeting then in New York. How long was it before you decided to work together that there would be some kind of professional partnership? The thing is, I was given a grant by the Asia Society of New York to go to Delhi and make a portrait, a historical portrait of the city of Delhi.

12:04So I knew that fairly soon I myself would be going back to India. After several months, I followed him and also went to Bombay. And then once I was there, he showed me a novel. I've never been able to find the copy of that novel. I don't know what happened to it. of Ruth Javala's novel, The Householder. But someone out in California had handed him the novel and said, they'll never make a film like this in Hollywood, but you go and make this film. So he was following up on that advice. He wanted to make a film out of The Householder. Well, in order to do that, we had to get, of course, the permission of the writer, Ruth Javala, who lived in Delhi.

12:45So he and I went to see her in Delhi. And we told her what we wanted to do, and she had not seen any of my documentaries or anything. She didn't know who we were, but she must have liked us both. Though her husband, who was there at the meeting, said, you watch out for them. They're probably con men. You watch out. But anyway, we told her we wanted her to write the screenplay for the householder. And she said, well, I don't know how to write a screenplay. I've never written one. And his mom said, well, I've never produced a film, and Jim has never directed one either. So we all agreed to make The Householder.

13:22That's an extraordinary start to the Merchant Ivory story. Ishmael, when you made that film, did you think it would be your only collaboration? Immediately there was this chemistry, you know, which we all wanted to be together. Ruth, Jim, myself, we developed a kind of more than just a working relationship. It was almost like an instant friendship. Not even for an instant, we thought that we would not do films together. It was just right from the very beginning. Was there a sense of making it up as you went along at the start? I don't know. We were... Not really. Yeah, we were novices, but somehow we managed.

14:03Why do you leave my mother sitting alone upstairs? Have you had a quarrel? I don't quarrel. What do I do? Shh! Quick, get us a more tea. broken pieces of bread and hash words that's the law for mother-in-law we sold that film and we made it in two versions one in hindi and one in english the american film companies had a lot of money in india and they couldn't take out they couldn't expatriate the money so we took that money that we got from columbia pictures to make shakespeare wallah And Shakespeare Waller tells the story of a travelling family troupe of players putting on Shakespeare. Putting on Shakespeare, going around India and putting on Shakespeare.

14:47And it stars very young Felicity Kendall. Right, she was 17 then. Do you like acting? Of course I like it. Well, I mean, I've never known anything else. Sometimes I get depressed, though. When nobody comes, we play to an empty house. Romeo, Romeo, where for that thou? That's all I remember. A real actress, someone like my mother, she plays for all she's worth right up to head. I'd like to be like that. When you're like that, it means you're the real thing. You also mentioned to us that the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Rai was a big influence on your work. You met him there in India, didn't you?

15:27I went to see him, yes. Well, I had seen Pathak Panchali, and I just thought that was the most wonderful film I'd ever seen, practically. So when I arrived in Delhi, people who knew his film said, oh, you must see the music room. I said, well, how can I see it? They said, well, just ask Ray to show it to you. I said, well, how will I find him? And they said, he's in the phone book. Just look up his number in the phone book and call him up. And I did exactly that. I went to Calcutta, and I called him up, and I said, I'm an American documentary maker, and I was wondering whether it was possible to see the music room.

16:03He said, sure, I'll show it to you. And we went to the Tali Gunge studio, and he ran it for me and sat next to me, and he would translate important bits of dialogue for me that I needed to hear. And what's the film about? It was about a great connoisseur of music who, in a way, is ruined by his love of music. The music was ravishing. It had all these great Indian maestros.

16:40So did Rai become a big influence on your later work? Then, yes, he did. After I made my first feature, which was The Householder, and we made it in two versions, one in English and one in Hindi, it was a big, unwieldy movie, you know, too long and so forth, and I thought, I need some help, I ought to show this to somebody who could help me slim it down a bit and make it more concise. I got on a train with Ismael and several trunks containing the film because it was all in 35mm. There was no other way to see it. I went to Calcutta to show him. And he was very encouraging. Very encouraging. He liked the film very much.

17:20And then I said, you know, it's an unwieldy kind of awkward film. I don't know how to trim it down and so forth. And he said, I'll do it. But he said, I'll do it for you. It'll take three or four days. But I have only one request, is that you let me do what I want to do and you don't stop me from doing any of it. If I take out things that you like very much, you can always put them back in. So I let him do it. So Sacha Achit Rai is the film editor on the household. Well, you can't call him the editor because he brought in his own editor to do all the work. Does he have a credit on the film? On that film, no, on the next film very much so because he composed the music for it, Shakespeare Waller.

18:13And after the success of Shakespeare Waller, Merchant Ivory established itself and went on to have such incredible success and it became an almost byword for a particular genre of filmmaking in the 80s and 90s, lavish period dramas, often adapted. Well, that made me cross. It makes me cross when I read it now. Lavish period dramas, that's all people talk about. I made so many films in the United States. They weren't period films, except for Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. So I made a lot of films in France. I made films in China. I made films in Argentina and so on. But they always talk about the English films, which, of course, were box office hits, so I don't blame them.

18:54I mean, they need to talk about it, but they never talk about the other films I made. I find that irritating. And most people haven't bothered to look at them. But many people would immediately associate you with Howard's End or Remains of the Day or Room with a View or Heat and Dust. That's fine. Which are lavish period games, aren't they? Yeah, exactly. But there are others. What sort of films did you set out to make? Films that we wanted to make, that we liked. We liked the stories, we liked the actors. We had a group of actors in India that we worked with a lot. Meanwhile, I was always seeing the Ray films.

19:29I mean, the Ray films were there as a kind of spiritual guide to what we might be doing. Sometimes when I look at my later films, I mean, films that are made in the United States or in Europe or wherever, and I see they look the way they do because of my experience of working so closely with my Indian cameraman, Shubhutamitra, who was Ray's cameraman, and they have a look about them that they wouldn't have had, had I not had that experience with that cameraman. Miss Kenton, you mean a great deal to this house.

20:11You're extremely important to this house, Miss Ginton Am I? Yes Yes Now look here If you're really sure about this young woman You'd better call her back in Actors over the years have described your style on set directors unusually quiet and restrained compared to other directors. How would you characterize your approach to directing? Well, I don't believe in telling talented people that you've hired because they're talented. I don't believe in telling them what to do. I want to see what they are going to do. I have to leave them to do it. The role of actors and directors, they're quite different.

21:00Actors are deep, and particularly when they're developing a character, God knows where their knowledge of that character comes from. It comes from personal experience. It comes from their own souls somehow. It comes up out of them. They're bringing it out of the depths of their being. So that's why actors are deep. But directors are shallow because we have a million things we have to look after. And we never get into any of them all that deeply because we have thousands of things we have to pull together. So there are two different kinds of forces at work there. One's the shallow overlook of the director, and the other is the deep look of the particular artists who are working with you.

21:38And that doesn't just mean actors. It also means set designers, costume designers, the woman who does the hairstyles, all those kinds of things. They have to be allowed to show you what are they bringing up out of their souls for you. You have to let them show you that. And then if something is wrong, then you steer them away from it into something else. But that's rare. So it was very much about trust from your perspective, trust in your cast and your crew. Exactly, exactly. Well, these are artists. You hire artists because you trust them. You know, you wouldn't hire them otherwise. Why would you work with somebody that you didn't trust?

22:14You just wouldn't. And that trust was also most important when it came to the relationships with Ismail Merchant and Ruth Jabvala because you formed this company and you were very, very close. How did it work on a professional basis then, in terms of deciding the next project and developing? Well, we worked very closely, and the first films we made, I was a co-writer with Ruth Javala of the screenplays. I mean, Shakespeare Walla, The Guru, Bombay Talkie, those are all original stories, and I'd sort of concocted the idea, and then I worked with her on it, and then that gave her something to work with, and then she came up with the screenplays.

22:50I mean, films for me are in two stages. One, when I write the script, and I'm more or less on my own. and that's the nice bit. And then there comes, for me, the unpleasant bit when they all go out and 100 people and film sets and actors and lighting people and camera and sound. I stay awake. When they go to the editing room, then I come in again and work. That's the bit I like. But do you like it? Do you like that bit? After all, aren't you looking at that point at what they've done to your baby, as it were? Oh, no. A film is not like a book. It's not a writer's baby at all. I mean, so many people have put in their talent by that term.

23:29But nevertheless, there must come a point at which, and I think your husband said you're perfectly capable of screaming at the other two, you must have some screaming. Oh, they scream much louder than I can. What was the secret of the success of your filmmaking partnership, do you think? Did you just bring out the best in each other? Well, each of us had our, you could say, assigned roles. It's rather like the American government. You have a president, that was me. You have a Congress who does everything, finds the money. That was Ismail. And you have a Supreme Court who decides what is good and not good.

24:02And that was Ruth. And that was our setup. It worked incredibly efficiently then, didn't it? It worked very, very well. It did and still would work if they were around, but unfortunately they're gone now. Once a week in the evening I cook a meal for my crew and actors and their guests. So it could be from somewhere 50 to 80 people or 100 people would come to dinner. And then we are all, even in this small budget, we have very good wine or champagne and a wonderful meal. So it's like a family getting together. It gives them something to look forward to. People don't want huge salaries when they work with us because they know the producer and the director have gone through a hardship to come to the stage of really filming it.

24:43So they all realize that and then they work with dedication. And I think that we are very grateful and lucky that this has happened, you know, because not many people can boast about it. Ismail Merchant was both your business partner and your life partner for over 40 years. It's something that neither of you ever spoke about publicly. Why was that? Was that out of respect for his family primarily? Pretty much, yeah. He came from a very conservative Muslim family in Bombay. And I've never been... If you want to read about all that sort of thing, you can read my book. I've read that, but the people listening to this program, not everybody will read that book.

25:20Well, they can go out and buy it. It's there in the bookstores. So is it still something that you don't particularly want to talk about, your personal relationship with Ismail? Yeah, I mean, it's not easy to really, yeah. But the people that you were working with must have known the dynamic of your personal relationship. Yeah, they did. And it was fine with everybody. It was another world in those days anyway. and that relationship with Ruth and Ismael working relationship you were also living very close to each other as well weren't you yeah in our building we each had an apartment on a different floor we had the same view out out the back to the New York skyline Empire State Building and everything I was on the 12th floor Ismael was on the 14th floor and Ruth and her husband were on the 7th floor and then she had another apartment on the 7th floor for her grown-up daughters.