Original subtitles

- The whole lot of them are totally unusual.

It was just like you could have done a, what's the word?

A big dolly shot of Ruth writing in one room,

Ismail shouting in another room, Dick practicing.

They all lived together, they worked together.

It was a really symbiotic relationship,

all those four people.

But then individually they're all utterly unique.

I mean, it all reads like a novel.

That's the thing, is being part of them backstage,

you'd think, "No one would've written this."

And this was reality.

- At the side of the everlasting why, there is a yes.

- I first saw a Merchant Ivory,

it was probably "A Room with a View."

- The oddest people, the queerest people,

but we rather liked them, didn't we?

- You know, of course I fell heavily in love

with Julian Sands, and the beauty of that piece,

and the fact that it was just so delicate.

- England has always been disinclined

to accept human nature.

- Both "A Room with a View" and "Maurice"

seemed to be profound works

on how one should live one's life.

Be true to your nature, trust yourself,

as E.M. Forster says, which is, "Only connect."

- We're not odd, really,

we're just over expressive, that's all.

- The more a lady has to say, the better.

- After 25 years, not all films look quite as important

or impressive as "Howard's End" still does.

It really, really works

and I feel hugely privileged to be any part of it.

- I'm certain His Lordship

is acting with the highest and noblest motives, sir.

- Don't you see, that's exactly what makes it so abominable.

- Of course, in those days

we fancied each other on film sets.

Now everyone's just looking at their phone.

There's no interaction at all.

But in those days, film sets crackled

with subliminal lust.

- I mean, first of all, there's Jim and Ismail.

It was very unlikely that meeting

of minds, and bodies, and love.

There was a love story at first.

- These are two of the most laid back, pleasant,

civilized, literate filmmakers I've ever met,

and their work reflects that.

- The two together are formidable.

One of the most particular things about James

is he's meticulous.

Ismail, to me, represented the finest

of Indian intelligentsia.

Oh, those were the days.

- Have you come to forge a bridge

between east and west?

- No.

- I really can't think of any other director and producer

who've made such a variety of films.

I mean, basically they made the films they wanted to make.

- This glamorous couple appeared in our dull Indian lives.

And my father said to my mother,

"Don't have anything to do with them.

"They're crooks and cheats."

And he's still saying that 45 years later.

- For years and years I remember things got so bad,

I wondered how they had the courage to carry on.

But they always did.

- These projects are very special projects

and you have to fight for it, hustle for it, cajole people.

You have to seduce people.

You know, all this is a part of this game.

- You always felt that you were in the presence

of really fascinating pirates

charting their own course, and making their own way,

and making it work somehow.

You could think that it was all bedlam and all that stuff,

but you couldn't stay mad.

- The money, the time, the staffing, and everything.

And the compensations are it's always

gonna be a brilliant script, brilliantly cast,

and probably be something you're wildly proud of.

But time and money both together are fairly tricky.

- 166, take one.

- You required an immense amount of stamina

to work for Merchant Ivory.

At the end of every movie, everyone says, "Never Again."

Not because they're not wonderful people

who make great movies, but because it's low budget.

It's just tough.

- People worked for very little money.

And Ismail said,

"How can you not want to work for Merchant Ivory?

"Do I not take you to these wonderful places?

"Do I not feed you?"

- He'd cook these incredible meals

and there were lots of sort of raised voices and passion.

Of course there was a dysfunctional element

to a lot of the dynamics,

but it was a very open dysfunction.

- Ismail was particularly keen on this idea

that there was a sense of family about it.

Not in a sort of Norman Rockwell sense,

but family in the sense of a great, big sprawling mass

of people arguing with each other,

but believing in the end we would survive

any argument that we had.

- It was extraordinary.

You really didn't want to be around

when you could sense sometimes the friction.

- Yes.

Ismail, and Ruth, and Jim, and Dick,

they knew that they produced good shit.

- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala for "Howard's End."

- Ah.

- Emma Thompson for "Howard's End."

- Jenny Beavan and John Bright for "A Room with a View."

- And they weren't going to sacrifice that

because of emotions.

- Their personal relationship was very, very volatile.

And when you've got your producer and your director

who are actually a couple.

I wasn't even aware of that. It was so not alluded to.

You could never quite work it out, you know,

the relationship between Dick Robbins, and Ismail, and Jim.

You didn't ask.

You were English. You were too polite.

- And the Oscar goes to-

- James Ivory, "Call Me by Your Name."

- Well that's-

- Like personal conflicts.

- Yeah, I don't know whether that was that easily done,

in fact, and whether we...

I think maybe that's something of an overstatement.

- Why is love like Rasputin?

- Haven't the faintest idea.

- Because you can poison it,

and you can stab it,

and you can knock it down in the mud,

but it will always get up again.

- Ha.

- Don't you think that's good?

Don't you think that's funny?

Love will not die.

It simply will not die.

Just like Rasputin.

- I think we chose certain projects

because they were particularly interesting to us

for all kinds of reasons.

It appeals to you in some kind of way

and you don't really know why perhaps.

And you don't think of it in terms of your own life perhaps,

or that in some sort of deep emotional

or psychological way it's necessary

for you to make such a film.

I mean, I didn't think like that.

And so many of our projects, like adaptations of books,

were just simply the fact that there was a book lying there

and out of curiosity I picked it up

and read it and I liked it.

And then I thought, "Well let's make this into a film.

"This would be a great film." Like as simple as that.

Like "Quartet" was an example of that.

Ruth was reading Jean Rhys' novels one after the other

and she left "Quartet" lying around.

I read it and I thought,

"Well I'd love to make this into a movie."

Ruth was against making it.

She said, "Oh, Jim, it is so low spirited.

"You don't want to make a film out of this book."

And I said, "Yeah, I do."

It was set in Paris in the 1920s.

I've always been interested in Paris in the 1920s.

And we sort of made it less low spirited

by having all those nightclub scenes in it.

- You just want to shut me off and shut me in,

make me into a tame husband.

- As if anyone could do that.

- Then later on, after we made it,

I began to see in the film, well there are things going on

in the relationship between the couple

and the whole thing of Marya coming in

and I can identify with all that,

which is to say there have certainly

been convoluted relationships in our lives, so.

- Most audiences associate

Merchant Ivory Productions with their films

from the 1980s and '90s, mostly period pieces,

many British costume dramas.

But before "A Room with a View",

they produced 15 films shot on location

almost entirely in the two homelands

of Merchant and Ivory, India and America.

So it's fitting that they first met

at the Indian Consulate in New York City.

- My old neighborhood, this was.

I lived on 62nd but also on East 80th.

I came here in May of 1961.

I'd been showing one of my Indian documentaries,

"The Sword and the Flute,"

and afterwards he was here and he walked up to me

and said, "I'm Ismail Merchant."

He said how much he liked the movie

and then asked me if I'd like to come

and have a cup of coffee with him.

And I said, "Sure."

And we tried to talk, or I tried to talk to him,

but he was always on the telephone.

- No, no- - Oh yes, oh yes.

And you actually- - I was concentrating.

- Someone you had known for 20 minutes.

- I was concentrating- - No, Ismail.

- On this American who

was a very sensitive man. - No, you weren't.

He was on the phone all the time and borrowed the nickel.

- At the time, Jim was 32

and had made his first films, both documentaries,

and Ismail was 24 and had just gotten an Oscar nomination

for his short film, "The Creation of Woman."

- He was a friend of Madhur Jaffrey's and Saeed Jaffrey.

They're the ones who sent him here

because Saeed had narrated that film.

And I mean, we got on, and we talked,

and we decided that we would go and see a Satyajit Ray film

that we thought was playing.

It wasn't in fact, but we made a date for two days later.

- And it was a date?

- Well, you know, dates had different connotations then.

This was a friend asking me to go and see a movie

that he thought we would both enjoy.

Date today means another thing.

- I wouldn't say that, no.

Maybe second sight, I would say.

- Prior to the release of "Call Me by Your Name,"

Jim's sexuality was rarely, if ever, discussed publicly.

He has since become a gay icon,

but it's not something he's always eager to talk about.

- Isn't that all rather a different kind of topic?

I mean, do we have time for what it was like?

Many people I interviewed

were reluctant to go on the record

with stories of Jim and Ismail's personal relationship.

Many said it was out of respect for Jim.

What we know is that they quickly became inseparable.

They'd only spent two weeks together in New York

before they reconnected in Delhi

with a plan to meet novelist Ruth Jhabvala.

- The year before I'd gotten money

from the Asia Society of New York to make a film,

a sort of historical portrait of the city of Delhi.

And I wanted to go back and do some more shooting.

While I was there, we began to think seriously

about doing a feature together,

which was a novel of Ruth Jhabvala's,

her fourth novel, "The Householder."

- The story goes that Ismail phoned

and asked for Mrs. Jhabvala.

She very rarely answered the phone

'cause she didn't want to speak to strangers.

She was quite reticent and secretive.

So she pretended to be her mother-in-law.

But they were very different to people she had around her

or people she'd met in India.

And they were very interesting people.

Ismail was such a dynamic, handsome young man.

You can't resist him.

I think she enjoyed the razzmatazz that came with it.

- We said, "Well, why don't you write the screenplay?"

And she said, "Well, I've never written a screenplay."

So I said, "Well, I've never produced a feature film,

"nor has Jim directed a feature film."

- For advice, Jim looked to Satyajit Ray,

the legendary Bengali filmmaker

whom he had previously sought out for mentorship

during the production of "The Delhi Way."

Merchant Ivory would hire many

of Ray's family of collaborators on "The Householder"

and their subsequent Indian films.

- Well I was amazed because the train arrived from Calcutta

and then the crew started unloading

boxes upon boxes of camera equipment,

and all this stuff came off the train

and there was a mountain of it. And I looked at it in amazement

and I had no idea what we'd gotten ourselves into.

- You can't go. - Can't go?

You will see tomorrow, 11 o'clock train.

- Indu, please listen to me.

- I've listened enough, to you and to your mother.

- I was making a film about people and families

of which actually I knew very little.

I mean almost everything we did

was entirely new and foreign to me.

Somehow, because of the actors themselves

who were easy, and approachable, and gifted,

it all came together.

But it was amazing that it did.

- The whole film was done for $90,000

in two languages, English and Hindi.

- Little more, I think.

- Well.

My sentiments and emotions are connected with it

because on this film I was the driver,

I was the production manager, I was the accountant,

I was the cook, I was the lawyer of the film.

You know, this was like baptism by fire

and I don't mean an ordinary fire,

I mean an extraordinary fire.

- We did run out of money

before we had finished shooting in Delhi

but I was glad in a way

that that had happened because by that time

it was 105 degrees in Delhi.

It was hard for me to shoot in that kind of heat.

I thought, "Well, it's good to have a little rest

"and we'll come back in August once the monsoon has begun."

I just had to hope for the best.

I never ever gave up hope.

I mean, I always knew he'd pull it together,

and he always did.

We did the further shooting

and at that point it was okay as edited,

but it was just too much of it and it was kind of clunky.

And so we took it to Ray and we screened it for him,

and he liked it and offered to recut it for us.

And then he turned the whole film into a flashback,

which was an unexpected thing,

but it lent itself to that anyway.

So yeah, it was great.

And then by some miracle it seemed to me almost

Ismail succeeded in selling it to Columbia Pictures

for a worldwide release

and that's really how we got going.

- Well, I think I was about 12, 13, maybe just 14.

And they, I think were going to make "Householder"

with Shashi, my brother-in-law,

Shashi had worked actually with my father's theater company.

Ruth was one of my sister's closest, if not closest friends.

Jim and Ismail became friends.

They came around to the flat.

They were just a very young, cool couple.

And I didn't pay them much notice really.

I remember going once to a cinema

and Ismail was there eating crisps.

And he said, "Do you know, one day,

"I'm going to put you in a movie."

- Do you like acting? - Of course I like it.

Well, I mean, I've never known anything else.

- Ruth wrote the screenplay from my father's diaries.

So it was based on truth, but with a Merchant Ivory twist.

I think I just happened to be 17, and there, and cheap.

I think I got 175 rupees.

And they said, "Oh well, you can play Lizzie."

It was really as casual as that.

Well I think the last little scene was shot outside Bombay

and they only had enough film

and finances left to do one shot.

And I remember them having,

and that's all and it had to be timed.

If it didn't work, that was the end of it,

we didn't get the scene, and we did it in one shot.

- You know, you don't look like an actress.

- Of course I do. - Uh-uh.

With our Indian actresses you can always tell, but you,

you look like a nice little English girl.

Ooh!

Come you.

Come back and you.

- We made that out of the money that we got

from Columbia Pictures for "The Householder".

But Columbia Pictures didn't want to pay us in dollars.

They wanted to pay us in blocked rupees

because in those days,

you couldn't repatriate your earnings

if you were a movie company or any other kind of company,

you had to keep the money in India.

And the studios, the Hollywood studios

all had millions of dollars

just blocked sitting in Indian banks

and they did pay us

and we used that for "Shakespeare Wallah"

and then "Shakespeare Wallah" really took off.

- The film, which they didn't know

was going to be a huge success,

went to the Berlin Film Festival

and the London Film Festival and Ismail said,

and this was the beginning of

you could suddenly see the feathers,

you know, going up a little bit,

they're growing a little bit more colorful,

"Right, well, we're all going to the film festival."

- I am Manjula!

Where I go, hundreds, thousands follow me.

- I was in bed, with just a cover on me, naked.

I just had a shower and gone into bed.

And then Jim called me from downstairs.

He said, "Come down immediately."

And he said, "You won."

I said, "What?"

He said, "The Silver Bear."

It was a total shock.

I never thought it was even possible.

I think I was in a daze still

the time I went up to get the award.

- You could say that "Shakespeare Wallah"

was a complete fluke really.

I mean, Jim,

he didn't really know what he was doing

and he was out in the wilds of North India.

I mean, it's a miracle really

that the film came out so well, but it did.

- When you see their film "Shakespeare Wallah",

about this wandering company in India,

I often found myself thinking that it's the model

that Ismail and Jim had for their own group,

this almost vagabond group of gypsies

moving from one place to the other

creating and just living this kind of circus life.

- After four films set in India,

Merchant Ivory began working in America

as well as London and Paris.

With the addition of composer Richard Robbins,

the Merchant Ivory style was fully formed.

Beautiful music, worldly sensibility,

lush settings, and complex characters.

Their films appeared at major festivals

and attracted the talent of actors like Raquel Welch,

Julie Christie, Christopher Walken, Lee Remick,

Maggie Smith, and James Mason.

- Mostly he said,

"Mrs. Penblock says you are a degenerate."

"What is a degenerate," he asked me.

- In an era that rarely saw

LGBTQ representation in cinema,

Merchant Ivory chose to depict characters and situations

that today seem ahead of their time.

They also took on major literary works.

In 1984, Merchant Ivory adapted

Henry James's "The Bostonians"

with Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Reeve

as rival cousins competing for the same woman.

- Promise me not to marry.

- Vanessa Redgrave was Oscar-nominated

for the role of Olive Chancellor.

Perhaps more unique than the Merchant Ivory style

is the way in which the films were produced.

- What are you gonna do about makeup and hair

with the organist?

They don't need those people around.

- You may just get us profile. You'll have to have, I mean-

- We don't have them- - If you hire them-

- You did say that the hands are the only ones

that are important.

Organist hands. I can't understand it.

I'm finished.

I'm just not going to make any more films. That's all.

That's the end.

- He's been saying this since "The Householder".

- I could tell, at a very early stage in the career,

that they were yin and yang.

Jim was calm and gentle behind the camera,

and Ismail was a firecracker.

And he would just turn up on set and say, "Right, action,"

and nobody had even rehearsed the scene.

- There's a free expression: "Shoot, Jim, shoot. Shoot!"

- "Shoot, Jim. Shoot, shoot!"

- "Shoot, Jim. Shoot, shoot!"

- The argument always seemed to be between Jim and Ismail,

that from Ismail's point of view,

Jim was gonna bankrupt the business commercially

by insisting on mere perfection.

And Jim thought that Ismail

was gonna bankrupt it artistically

by insisting on every possible economy.

- Jim was very obsessed with things when he was shooting,

and he needed Ismail to prod and to push.

And it was better that way.

You couldn't dwell on one particular scene

or one particular line because Ismail

short films on pennies and his budgets were ridiculous.

- The fact that he managed to get these films made

for goodness sake.

Especially a feature film based on some of the great novels.

I mean, when you're going into that territory,

you enter into a world where illiteracy is rampant.

But with Ismail's ingenuity

as well as his implacable determination

plus a sense of fun,

he would set out to find a solution

to absolutely every single problem

and finding solutions very quickly.

Because if you don't find them quickly,

you spend another $100,000.

- In some cases, Vanessa Redgrave herself

was responsible for creating those problems.

I was told privately that she and Ismail

had frequent shouting matches on the set of "The Bostonians".

In 1985, Jim penned an essay for Sight and Sound magazine

titled "The Trouble with Olive".

He wrote, "In the end,

we parted as friends and collaborators.

In the course of the intense relationship,

tinged with lunacy, that a film shoot forges

between director and star."

And it's not hard to believe,

given my own experience of interviewing Vanessa.

- Oh darling, films are not family affairs.

Please don't let's go down that road, come on.

- It's not the questions.

Now you're getting a bit dramatic.

I'm not sitting out to make you uneasy.

I'm sitting out to give you the best.

Why am I talking to you about Merchant Ivory?

Because actually I care deeply about them.

Don't you believe in the coming of a better day,

that it's possible to do something for the human race?

- We offered her that part at the beginning,

and she didn't wanna do it.

She was with an extreme leftist party in England

that wanted to overthrow the government

and all this kinda stuff.

And what she mainly wanted to get from that meeting

was for me to give some money to this party

to overthrow the British government.

I said, "Well, I don't really think I can do that, Vanessa."

And then Vanessa, it was assumed that she was anti-Semitic

because she went off to Palestine

and was photographed

holding a Kalashnikov rifle or something.

And then we cast Glenn Close,

but she wanted to make a film simultaneously with us

and with Robert Redford in Buffalo.

Ismail wasn't, you can't have that on a, you know,

when the leading lady likes to come,

then she comes, otherwise.

And he fired her.

Vanessa came and did her part,

got nominated for Academy Award and all the rest of it.

But meanwhile, Vanessa had run into all kinds of difficulties.

And she was busy suing, I think,

the Boston Symphony Orchestra at that time.

- I was got rid of from a contract already agreed.

And I knew it was a political decision.

Ismail and Jim flew out to explain, as witnesses for me,

the huge damage done to my reputation as an actress.

And forever and ever I love them.

That doesn't mean I wouldn't disagree with them,

of course, on things.

The more you love someone,

the more you're ready to disagree with them in my book

because you really care about them.

What I want to say to you

is that when there is a great cause,

the individual is of no account.

You've come to hear not the voice of one individual,

however sweet, however harmonious,

but the cry of all women.

- They had various issues on that film.

I mean, they'd had to cut the budget drastically.

They had no facilities, no caravans or makeup buses

or anything like that. I think the story was that

some of the money had dropped out

when Vanessa Redgrave was cast,

and so nobody got paid for three weeks.

And of course Vanessa became the kind of,

the shop steward, union leader

organizing all the meetings at night.

"When are we gonna get paid?"

- This wasn't the first or last time

Merchant Ivory would have budgetary issues

in the middle of shooting.

Their previous film "Heat and Dust",

based on Ruth's Booker Prize-winning novel,

was planned as a celebration of their 21st year.

And while it would go on to be

Merchant Ivory's biggest hit since "Shakespeare Wallah",

its production was so perilous

that it nearly brought down the company.

- Every last shot of "Heat and Dust" was my sweat and blood.

- Well, that could be true, but-

- I thought.

- One of the financiers had run away to Hong Kong

and the other one had gone to Latin America.

And Ruth said, "Well, why do we have to do it?

We can just sort of, you know, call it off

and everybody can go home."

Well, we are already 40 people sitting there in Hyderabad,

you know, waiting, and contracts were all done and signed,

as in, no, no, this is not possible.

We just have to forge ahead.

- I first met Ismail in 1980.

He said, "You know, we're making this film 'Heat and Dust'.

We will all go to India.

And I'd like you to start a London office

because we're basing everything here,

and you'll be at the very center of operations,"

which as I'd never worked in film production before

and hardly knew how to use the photocopy.

It was pretty daunting.

He was rupee rich, and everybody lived very well in India,

but we were pretty sterling poor in the UK.

And I had to field high-rate calls from wives,

still friends, husbands of the crew

that were not being paid.

People talk about independent producers

acting on a leap of faith.

They trust that the last portion of the budget will come,

starting off with 70, 80%.

I think we probably had 30%, 40% of the budget

when we actually started filming in India.

- I remember that time

that the actors were sitting around in the restaurant

and there had been already some bad feeling.

Kevin, our first AD, came to us cap in hand and said,

"We've got the caterers

demanding that they get paid in advance,

otherwise they're not coming to the set tomorrow."

So if the caterers don't arrive,

then the crew have already booked their flights out.

- The actors' agents were sending telegrams to the hotel,

saying, "Stop working, no money's coming through."

And Ismail will get up early in the morning

and he would steal all the telegrams

so the actors never found them, so they carried on.

- And everyone was very angry with Ismail.

And, you know, people were just not talking to him.

But the next day, sure enough,

he'd had a palace opened that nobody could get into

and everyone was dying to see.

And not only had it open so we could see it,

but he had arranged a picnic.

You don't want to forget what he's doing to you

and how he's conning you,

but the next moment this glorious picnic is all laid out

and we are at a place we could never be

and everyone's having a wonderful time.

And you come back saying, "This rascal has done it again.

Again he's charmed us."

- It was extraordinary how in one day

you could have the whole gamut of experiences with Ismail

and he would always, at some point, be gleeful

about what he had achieved against all odds.

- He's got infinite charm and part of persuasion.

Like, I didn't wanna go to a certain film festival

and I begged my agent, I said, "Please be firm with Ismail.

I don't wanna go."

And I get ready to give him a fight

in terms of, "Go to hell."

The phone ring, "Tony," he said, "the film is so wonderful.

You are so great in the film, oh."

I mean, he could charm the birds out of the trees.

- Ismail Merchant was born in Mumbai in 1936

to a devout Muslim family,

shortly before the partition of India,

a violent period when many Indian Muslims

were displaced to Pakistan.

As a teenager, Ismail formed a close relationship

with a family friend, the Bollywood actress Nimmi.

- There was a friend star called Nimmi.

And I call my friends and I would go see all her films.

We even sometimes went three or four times.

- He fell in love with the movies

and went to America, seeking,

as he often said, name and fame.

After getting a business degree from NYU,

he set out for Hollywood.

- He had made "The Creation of Woman".

So he went out there to get it nominated

for the Academy Awards, which he did.

To get to California,

he took a train from New York to Los Angeles.

But he said on a press release that he was arriving,

and he expected, I suppose,

that there'd be a lot of people at the train

with cameras and lights and stuff and asking him questions.

And he got off the train

and there wasn't anybody there to receive him and exalt,

that he had come to, you know,

shake things up in California.

But he met a lot of people,

particularly he met great many actresses.

I don't know how he got past their security guards,

and maybe they didn't have them in those days.

There's so many photographs of him with stars, so.

But that's the kind of thing he did.

- As many people would've told you by now,

he wasn't a conventional producer.

Very often films got made and you'd say,

"Who's the money behind this film?"

And at that point, there was no money.

He still had to get it.

- Ismail was very vivacious.

And he was just a great character.

He was like a film impresario, the kind that you read about.

He just had the gift of the gab.

And he used to say things like, "You know, I'm a magician,

because I can make this film out of nothing."

- There was no one like him,

because if Ruth and Jim and Ismail decided

that they were gonna make a film out of a script

or one of Ruth's books,

Ismail would raise the money.

There was no question he would do it.

And you don't find many producers

able to do or say that.

Hello, Merchant Ivory.

- I remember staying with him in New York

and I went to the office and I had to wait,

I don't know, maybe a ride to the airport or something,

I was there for hours.

Ismail was on the phone, phoning up everybody.

He'd phone up tens and tens of people.

He knew their kids' names, what they were doing.

His ability to seduce, that got him through,

but it's a precarious way of financing a movie.

- He had that very aristocratic quality

of making everyone feel at ease.

He could be in a hovel in India or a Maharaja's Palace

and he'd be equally comfortable

and he'd make the people there equally comfortable.

He wasn't a snob at all.

He was always surprising,

totally unpredictable, never dull.

And you never went to bed

without trying to dream up ways of killing him,

but you couldn't not love him.

You couldn't not love him.

- Ismail, you've written several cookbooks.

- Yes, when we make a film,

I always cook once a week for the cast and crew.

So we are about 40 to 50 people or sometimes 100.

And then the whole crew and cast would be there

and it gave a wonderful feeling.

- In the early '70s,

around the same time Madhur Jaffrey

introduced Indian cuisine to British television,

Ismail began cooking regularly for the crew on his films.

While he liked to say

this was to create a family atmosphere,

it was also one of many ways he deflected

when money was short.

- It was always really tight and it was very emotional.

And all you have to know about Ismail,

and I may have said this before,

is that he grew up in a market alleyway in India

where, when he made his first movies,

he was paying people out of a plastic bag in hard cash.

So he never got out of that.

- Jim once said to me, "Oh Kathy, don't pay him any mind.

He's just like, it's a bizarre mentality

as in bizarre, you know.

He's a bargainer."

And that always offended me.

Now, Ismail made those movies happen.

He wheedled and cajoled and dealt and so on,

but it wasn't pleasant for a lot of people.

- How was all this financed?

I mean, was it just- - You ask Ismail. God knows.

I really just don't want to know what he does, so.

You know, what he juggles and what fearful illegalities.

I only had this one vision.

Wherever we go, I look around where the nearest jail is.

I said, "One day I'm gonna visit you in there."

- Ismail had like a guru side to him.

I think that the guru figure

that you often see in Ruth's fiction

is on some level a bit of Ismail.

- He's passionate, passionate about art

and a film sandman on some level.

You know, it's both.

And that's what made him a great producer

and revolutionary in a way.

I mean, it's sort of the first

of the great independent producers.

- I don't care what they think. I really don't.

He was a con man.

I mean, you have to be a con man

to be a successful film producer anyway.

- I have a pet theory about Miss Honeychurch.

Does it not strike you as odd,

that she should play Beethoven with such passion

and live so quietly?

I suspect one day music and life will mingle.

- I trust that day is at hand.

- It was my luck to be involved

because that was the cornerstone, in a way,

of my whole career.

And I remember Ismail phoning me really early on going,

"No, you don't understand, Helena.

This is changing your life."

I always think, but maybe wrongly,

that it was the first big commercial hit

of a costume drama.

Before period costume dramas are always art house.

They don't think they could actually make money.

- We almost didn't make "A Room with a View".

Ismail had already made a deal with King's College

for the rights, but Ruth and I were working on a screenplay

for a contemporary film.

And at that point, I didn't want to do

another costume film.

I didn't wanna do another period film.

- It does frustrate me that,

often if you talk to many people in Britain at any rate,

for instance the director Alan Parker

and you mention Merchant Ivory,

they just have a particular image.

- There was a lot of criticism at the time

that it was sort of Laura Ashley film making,

which I thought,

you're just looking at the pictures,

you're not looking at the story.

'Cause the story, it seemed to me,

almost the exact opposite of that.

- I mean, these are not films

that are in love with the aristocracy

or the old ways of doing it. If you read the scripts

and listen to the dialogue carefully,

they're often quite subversive about things.

They're quite critical.

- I believe in democracy. - No, you don't.

You don't know what the word means.

- When Jim was looking around to prep "A Room with a View",

he rang me up and invited me out to dinner, and he said,

"Tony, you know," he said,

"You know, the most exciting thing

that happens in a Merchant Ivory movie is a tea party.

Is that right?"

And I said, "Yeah, that's great, Jim, it's fine.

I'd love to do it."

The next thing I knew I was doing a murder sequence

with Ismail running around saying, "What is this? Is this a horror movie?"

I guess there was blood everywhere.

- Oh, you should see the dailies.

- I think they had a huge influence

on how we thereafter did

what are really irritatingly known

as period movies actually

because every movie is a period movie.

I suppose people associate them with frogs.

As my mother said to me, "Are you sure you want to play

another good woman in a frog?"

- Mind you, you know,

when I started out doing these costume films,

I didn't know anything about costume.

I didn't have a clue.

I knew a lot about interior design

because I'd been to architecture school,

but I didn't know anything about costume

or makeup and hair and all those kinds of things.

I had to learn absolutely everything

from the people who worked in my films.

- Merchant Ivory scripts,

you always knew you were gonna get a good script.

And for me, that's always the absolute basis of everything.

Normally, when the day finished for cosprop,

we'd make a cup of tea.

And I used to do the breakdowns,

and John would already be rummaging around

in the deeper recesses of cosprop

to find wonderful clothes.

- "Out of Africa". Goodness.

"Dad's Army", "King's Speech".

So this is a group of Merchant Ivory clothes.

"A Room with a View".

This is from the evening scene where Mrs. Vyse

meets Lucy for the first time.

We went to the Linley Sambourne House in Kensington

and they had a lot of Chinese lanterns,

so we created a dress that was like a Chinese lantern.

This is Maggie Smith.

This is Mrs. Honeychurch at the garden party.

Helena at the magic pond or whatever it was called.

- This is the Sacred Lake.

- They go out on exhibition. I mean, a lot of the stock

that was used in "A Room with a View"

it's been out and again.

And I'll see something on television, I think,

"Oh, I know that blouse."

But no one else would, because on somebody else

it looks completely different.

- For "A Room with a View", I'd never been to Florence

and I didn't know what our backgrounds would be.

Jim gave us a handful of Alinari photos,

and Ismail gave us a colored brochure of Florence.

Actually a colored brochure was quite useful.

- Quite useful.

- The crowd, often up to 150, were dressed by myself,

six months pregnant, Elena Politi,

a local, very lovely Italian costume woman,

and William Pierce.

Nowadays, you would have four people on the set,

one running the truck,

the crowd supervisor, fitters, and dressers,

and the designer would not be in there doing it.

It was DIY productions.

So it was incredibly tiring, but satisfying

'cause you walk then on to the Piazza Signoria

and you saw a recreation of an Alinari photograph.

- Merchant Ivory, you know, it was just a golden period.

I have good memories,

but then I think human nature does tend

to gently brush aside- - Soften the edges.

- Soften the edges, yes. - Yeah, it does.

- I was once told, "You know, Jenny, Jenny,

I got you your Oscar. Why do I now need to pay you?"

- Yes.

That's good. - Well, do you know what?

It doesn't pay the mortgage, Ismail.

It's jolly nice to have, but I still have to feed my family.

- Jenny Beavan and John Bright for "A Room with a View".

- Jenny and I are really pleased to have won this award

on behalf of Merchant Ivory.

- It's one of the few scripts I've read where I thought,

"This will do really well." It was a brilliant script.

Changed my life completely. Changed all our lives actually,

all of us who worked on "A Room with a View".

- "A Room with a View" exploded.

It was huge. It was a massive film.

- In England certainly,

and I believe, to some extent, in America.

A lot of young people would sort of dress up

as the characters or have "A Room with a View"

parties or evenings.

- Whatever does it mean?

- I think it's a mixture of profundity,

deep spiritual issues,

but told with a beautiful lightness

and a very beautiful palette, too.

It's just very easy to watch.

- It looks a very sensitive sort of film, is it?

- Yes, I think it is, yes.

I'm not the most sensitive character in it, though,

but I think the film is, yes.

It's been directed very sensitively.

- One of the lovely things about James Ivory,

which you kind of understand or appreciate later,

is just how relaxed and unneurotic James is.

And I assumed that all directors are gonna be like Jim,

but they're not.

Of course you have to fight some directors.

I mean, he's a proper collaborator.

He feels his job is to bring together what people give.

- I was so surprised because, see,

I never watched a film being directed or anything.

And I figured the director was like

one of those films with the guys in his director's chair

with a big mega, yeah,

I didn't realize Jim was just very quiet

and let everybody bring their own interpretation to it.

- The detail work.

They were very, very good at giving you

the opportunity to develop that, which is very, very rare.

Especially when there's a lot of money around, you know.

The whole thing has been kind of mapped out

in quite a lot of detail,

and then you're just expected to make it all happen.

Whereas with Jim, you're still part of the development.

- I sometimes had trouble with trimming scenes down

and getting them tight.

Jim would tell you about how he'd like to have waited

'till the sun reached round to light the lace cap

before editing out.

So he knows about this.

And, you know, I'm not telling tales out of school.

And I was finally, as helped by Jim

on "A Room with a View", and he said,

"I want this picture to be tight."

I said, "It's good, good. It'll be a success then."

- I learned so much from Jim. I mean, so much from Jim,

because his taste, his knowledge was extraordinary.

We were filming in Fortnum for "Howards End"

and literally we must've had 100, 150 extras,

and then one man had said to one of my guys,

"I can't have a haircut."

So they'd sort of cheated it and I didn't know.

Jim stopped and he said,

"There's someone there with a wrong look."

Nothing went past him.

Once you say, "Yes, I've got it,"

he trusts you to just do it.

When we were about to do "Jefferson",

I knew it was gonna be a huge product

and I really wanted to get inside it if I could.

Helena's aunt knew all about Mary Antoinette.

She had more artifacts of Mary Antoinette

than any private collector.

So Helena said, "Go and see my aunt."

And Jim came to join us, and he said to me,

"Just soak this up.

It's not about hairdos or makeup.

Just soak it all up."

- Some directors take the view of the hiring of the people

and then they tell everybody exactly what to do.

Jim takes the opposite.

That is hire the best people you can,

then let them get on and do it.

- I think he had this wonderful gift,

which some directors are graced with:

the skill to cast, it's a gift.

- He was brilliant like that.

And, you know, we used to have endless,

endless casting sessions, which were enormous fun.

We never auditioned.

They'd just come in and sit and talk.

But anybody he ever met,

he would remember for films much later on.

And he's got wonderful taste.

- I don't go in for being superior.

- Don't you? I do. The thing about, for my money,

all good, interesting directors

is they appear to not be doing very much.

And Jim is like that. I'm not for a moment suggesting

that he isn't doing very much, he's a very articulate man,

but he doesn't articulate much to actors.

- Well, he's quietly determined. He's very laid-back.

But he has that elegance of knowing exactly what he wants

and being able to get it. He was collaborative,

but he was very sure of his own vision.

- He loves actors. He loves what we do.

So he goes to the theater a lot,

and Ismail allowed him to follow his instinct

about who to cast.

And when you look back at who he allowed

to have important roles in his films,

a lot of them were unknowns.

- I remember in our press junket, people would ask me,

you know, how it was to be directed by Jim,

and I had said something like, "Oh, he doesn't direct.

He's just really nice."

And then he came up to me at lunchtime or something,

and he said, "I don't know if it's so great

to say that I don't direct."

Actually what he did was trust.

- You're left very much alone.

So he'll just sort of sit in the corner of a room

and watch all these actors doing their thing.

And then Jim would let you have a bit of time on set

without any cameras, without anyone around,

to just wander through your scenes.

- He's incredibly visual. Jim sees something's not right.

"You know, I don't like it when you touch your ear."

And you think, "Well, really what's so wrong with that?"

And then you'd sort of work out.

I had the wrong thought in my head

at that moment in the scene.

- I don't like being given notes anyway.

I really just think that it's much better

to just wind me up and set me off.

There was one particular scene, I was getting into a carriage,

I just remember Jim sticking his head and going,

"Oh, it was really boring."

- Yeah, he was just, "Do it again,"

and you make it more interesting.

It was boring, okay.

It's marvelous that there was no cotting.

There was no, "Oh, that was so fantastic, oh."

I can't bear that.

"I didn't like it. I was bored. Let's do it again."

Fantastic.

- James Ivory grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon

during the Great Depression.

Adopted at birth, he had a largely privileged

and all-American upbringing.

His father managed the Ivory Pine Company,

whose clientele included MGM Studios.

He encouraged Jim's artistic ambitions

and funded a number of his early films.

With dreams of becoming a Hollywood set designer,

Jim attended the University of Oregon

where he studied architecture

and the University of Southern California's

School of Cinematic Arts

where he made "Venice: Theme and Variations",

a half hour documentary.

- "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" was autobiographical for me

in the sense that it was a family like my own family.

Klamath Falls was a much smaller town than Kansas City,

but it had all the rituals and associations and so forth

that you see in that film,

and the whole sort of class thing.

- What does his father do?

- Mr. Davis is a plumber, I think.

- I see.

- And I can remember scenes very like Paul Newman

going through the World War I trunk

and taking out the uniform and this and that.

I can remember those very same things with my father,

the semi warnings of my father about how his health

is perhaps not gonna be so great forever.

- It seems that there is some irregularity.

It may not be serious,

but I feel that some preparations are in order.

I wanted you to be aware of that.

- I mean, I had all those kinds of conversations with my father.

I never had the conversation with my father

that you have at the end of "Call Me By Your Name".

That's a completely, completely different kind of thing.

A different kind of father.

- Yeah.

- How you live your life is your business.

Just remember,

our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once.

- Well, let me put it another way.

I never felt uncomfortable.

I never had the sense of guilt, which is lucky.

And in high school, I mean I just went along

and had close relationships with certain guys.

But, you know, we were careful.

We didn't go talking about it. You didn't make anything of it.

It's not like now.

I've met people, you know, who were maybe 50, 60

and I think in a way have led an,

romantically, led an uneventful life

and I feel sorry for people like that.

- Mm-hmm.

- Fine.

I mean, the family would not have accepted it

and would not have understood it and,

but it was not presented to them.

It was never an issue that they had to deal with.

I was just his American friend.

In his lifetime, it was not really something

that one wanted to talk about

because it would be so upsetting to his family,

who are very conservative Muslim family.

But now most of that family's gone,

and the sisters have all died, and so on.

There's only one sister left.

It was unheard of that their son would not get married,

and of course he never did.

- No.

Nothing.

But I think my father, I think my father was,

I don't know, he perhaps, he dealt with it.

It was not a problem.

And I mean he loved Ismail.

And he was glad that Ismail was there to take care of me.

It was never talked about, but it was just understood.

If you live with another man for more than 40 years,

that's not exactly private.

They all knew. Of course they did.

Even the crew knew when we were, I remember in "The Householder",

they called us Jack and Jill.

I just wanted to say that...

I live in New York

and sometimes I'm going along the streets

and people come up to me that I don't know

and they take my hand sometimes and they say,

"I wanna tell you that you changed my life."

But they're not saying that.

They're not saying that about "Call Me by Your Name"

because it's too soon.

They're talking about "Maurice".

which I made almost 30 years ago.

- "Maurice" was the second of three adaptations

Merchant Ivory made from the novels of E.M. Forster.

Completed in 1914, the book remained unpublished

until after his death in 1970.

The characters were inspired

by a close friend of Forster's, Edward Carpenter,

a well-educated middle class intellectual,

and his partner George Merrill,

a working class man from the slums of Yorkshire.

Forster himself spent 40 years in a discreet relationship

with a married policeman, Bob Buckingham.

At the time the novel was written,

men in the UK could be imprisoned for sodomy

and acts of gross indecency.

In the 1980s, when Merchant Ivory set out to make the film,

the AIDS epidemic had created a new crisis for gay men.

- You know, the world has changed so much for men,

but I think "Maurice" was hugely important

to a whole population that in many ways was invisible.

Many, many, many people weren't out.

- I used to get letters from people in prison saying,

"If I'd seen 'Maurice',

I probably wouldn't where I am today."

It's certainly very moving as an actor

to have been part of a piece of art.

That it can have that sort of effect is extraordinary.

- We were going through a slightly homophobic phase

in this country.

There was certainly an increase in homophobic attacks.

Thatcher just brought out a thing called Clause 28.

- Children who need to be taught

to respect traditional moral values are being taught

that they have an inalienable right to be gay.

- The atmosphere was febrile, to say the least,

around this particular subject.

Television was full of Gothic horror adverts

funded by the government of collapsing black tombstones.

I remember being almost intimidated by the prejudice.

I was taken aside on a meeting

and asked, with some amazement,

"Why is Merchant Ivory making this kind of film

when they could make almost anything they wanted

after 'A Room with a View'?

The world is in your feet,

why should you make this kind of film?"

- I'm an unspeakable.

The Oscar Wilde sort. - Rubbish.

- I think that Jim's personal psyche

is courageous beyond belief,

but he comes from that world.

He comes from that Edwardian world

where such things were not mentioned

and such things were definitely not approved of.

I became involved in "Maurice"

because Jim wanted somebody who knew accurately

the upper middle class of Britain,

the settings, the court in it of it at all.

He's so precise on detail,

which is why his movies are so beguiling, I think.

Ruth had of course, naturally, been asked to do the screenplay,

she was occupied with a major novel at the time,

and he felt it wasn't really her territory.

It was a tremendously quick writing process, far too quick.

Ismail was in two minds about doing "Maurice" anyway.

He was on edge and tetchy, you could see.

I think his concerns about it were principally budgetary.

I mean, Merchant Ivory was going through a tricky time

despite the success of "Room with a View",

and I don't think they recouped

an enormous amount of its success,

that went to the distributors and whatever.

They weren't flush.

But Jim was determined it should be made.

You put them together in a room,

you would expect that Ismail would override Jim.

In fact, Jim's quiet, dogged determination

always actually won the day.

- Hall. Hall.

- Durham. Where did you get to?

- I know you read those books in the vac.

- How do you mean?

- You'll understand then. I don't have to explain.

- Understand what?

- That I love you.

- Don't talk rubbish.

- I'd pretty much given up acting at that point.

I'd segued into writing comedy sketches

with a couple of friends

and we also used to write and produce

a lot of radio commercials.

I very rarely spoke to my agent.

And then one day the agent did ring, he said,

"Oh, they want to see you for this Merchant Ivory film."

And I said, "Oh, I can't be bothered."

And my brother, who I was living with at time said,

"No, no, don't be ridiculous. You have to go. They're classy."

Astonishingly, Jim seemed to think I was right.

It was very easy to say yes.

And apart from anything else, my first film,

I mean, you know, dazzling prospect.

I think what happened was Julian Sands was gonna do it.

Then, for mysterious reasons, suddenly he wasn't.

- This is what I understand,

is they were all at the Venice Film Festival

with "A Room with a View" and Julian stood up and announced

that he was going to leave that minute, Venice,

his agent, his wife, and he couldn't do "Maurice".

And it was about a month before principal photography,

and Jim said, "Well, there was this blonde actor

who came in and looked too like Julian,

so I couldn't have him in the film."

- So he came around and we practiced a bit

in my house in Shepherd's Bush,

and then he did the audition and got the job.

- And I think Ismail was very close to pulling it.

I was completely, I'd never done a film before.

- I do, do beg you to resist the return of this obsession.

- I don't need advice.

And flesh and blood, Clive,

if you'll condescend to such low things.

I've shared with Alec.

- Shared, shared what?

- Everything.

- I remember when we saw the first screening of the film

and I was sitting behind Ismail, I think.

When the credits rolled, I just saw, you know,

I just saw his shoulders doing that

and tears rolling down his face.

He turned around to me.

"I mean, it's so beautiful. God."

But it was entirely genuine.

- I think it's, in some ways, a finer movie

than "A Room with a View".

I mean, it's stupid to compare the two

'cause they're very different.

But because of the subject matter

and because of the society at the time

and because the time when the movie was out,

it kind of goes deeper, I guess, into the characters' anxieties.

It's beautifully made.

James and Hugh are brilliant in it.

Really, really brilliant.

- I'm just terribly grateful

that "Maurice" has finally achieved

its place in the pantheon,

and with the retrospective

of really quite a lot of gay films

that have been made since. You suddenly realize that,

yeah, this was the granddaddy of it all

and it was very brave of Jim to make it at the time.

One could quite see why Ruth was uneasy about it.

Although she was on hand obviously

to lend her extreme wisdom

and made one or two very, very good suggestions,

which were incorporated,

particularly the Lord Risley epithet.

- No. Hmm-mm.

- And she never- - As she said, I mean, you know,

it was not a first-class Forster,

and so that made it not,

automatically not first-class Ivory.

I think what bothers most people about "Maurice"

is Clive's change of heart.

Clive goes off to Greece and comes back and then says,

"I'm no longer like that," about being homosexual.

That's not something that people can accept.

You would definitely, if you were a novelist,

find that a weakness in the novel.

And one of the ways we got around it

was to have Clive's change of heart come about

because of the arrest of Lord Risley.

- I am satisfied that you will pay for this

for the rest of your life.

Take him down.

- Which is Ruth's idea. Isn't that interesting?

- Yeah, she did.

- God, Eleanor, you're so lucky.

I mean, you get to live in New York,

you have a boyfriend who's a famous artist,

an interesting life. - In the early '80s,

The New Yorker was publishing my stories

and Ruth, unbeknownst to me,

kept passing 'em on to Jim saying,

"Listen, you should make these into a movie."

And it turned out Jim had wanted to do a film

set in contemporary New York.

What they didn't realize was that Andy Warhol

had already bought the rights.

Andy died in '87,

and then Merchant Ivory came along and said,

"Look, we'll buy the rights." So I was like, "Oh my God."

Stash is a genius.

And so of course he's a little eccentric,

and I'm the type of person who mates for life.

You know, like a goose. - I was very surprised.

I thought there would be a harder edge to it.

This is pretty lightweight material.

- If lightweight is the word for it, it flows right out of the theater.

One of the things that shocked me

is that they didn't have the nerve or the imagination

to make these people a little smarter than they were.

- I agree with you.

- Critics were so vicious about the film when it came out.

And I always felt so bad.

Like, I felt like I personally had ruined

and destroyed everything by my terrible film.

But all of them were so supportive of me, so nurturing,

and I love them so much. You have no idea.

They treated all the writers

like an essential part of the group.

And even Ismail took out an ad in The New York Times saying,

"We, Merchant Ivory, thanks the writers who are our roots."

- We are proud of our roots,

from Forster to Ruth Jhabvala to Tama Janowitz and Naipaul

and, you know, all, this is our philosophy.

- It's obvious in their films,

you know, that they love books and that they respect books.

So as a novelist, they're very appealing filmmakers

because you feel like they're gonna change it

and make something different.

But they're going to make a film

that in some way values the essence of the book.

Whenever I thought about having a film made of my books,

I always first thought about Merchant Ivory.

There'd been a review in The New York Times

of "The City of Your Final Destination".

Jim told me that Ruth had seen that review

and clipped it out and sent it to him.

It was a dream that I always said

that always seemed like a fantasy.

- The films as a whole

are kind of like a three-part autobiography, I feel,

because they do represent our interests

in various things at various times.

And so we were always a bit like the US government.

I mean, I'm the President, Ismail's the Congress,

and Ruth is the Supreme Court.

And Ruth was like that.

I mean, if we came up with something or other

that, from her point of view, was illegal,

speaking in terms of literary, I mean we didn't do it.

- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

was a two-time Academy Award winner

for Best Adapted Screenplay,

although she never attended the ceremonies.

Author of 12 novels, contributor to The New Yorker magazine,

Booker Prize recipient and a MacArthur fellow,

Jhabvala was one of the most accomplished writers

of the 20th century.

She lived most of her life in England, India, and America.

But Ruth was born to a Jewish family in Germany

in the 1920s.

- She and her brother and her parents

lived a perfectly normal German middle class life,

until of course 1933 when Nazis came into power.

They stayed on 'till 1939.

And they came to England.

Within six months, she mastered the English language.

She was writing since she was six years old really.

Suddenly she said she was flooded

with this feeling of what was her destiny was to write,

and she never stopped 'till almost in her last days.

She met my father in London.

They got married and then she went back to India with him.

She lived through pretty awful time

during the war, post-war.

So going to India was suddenly

the opening up of these senses, which she's written about,

the color and the smells and the sweets.

That was wonderful for her at the time.

- My first encounter with Ruth was in 1958.

My first husband, Charles Wheeler

had been sent to India as the foreign correspondent.

A plaintive-looking young woman in a sari

came up in the garden path and said, "I am Ruth.

I'm your neighbor.

Have you brought any books?"

And I said, "Yeah, sure."

My God, she took the book

and she gave this tiny scream of horror, and said,

"But I've already got all these."

- I did an interview once with Catherine Freeman.

I said, "Well, tell me about Ruth, Catherine."

And Catherine said, "Well, she's like the guest

who comes to your door, presses her nose to the window,

and sees all this wonderful jollification

and people hailing affairs and all that."

It's the notion of the outsider.

- There was a sort of very Forsterian quality about Ruth.

One of the points about Forster is that he was at an angle.

As a gay man, he had a different eye on society.

And Ruth had a different eye on society.

- In her novels, there's a lot of outsiders.

And very often she takes the foreigner's point of view.

And the same with me.

I mean, I could not imagine myself as Indian.

I didn't think like an Indian, I wasn't an Indian;

I was an outsider.

And same with English, I'm not English;

I'm an American from the West Coast

and who am I to deal with E.M. Forster?

I didn't really know that world of E.M. Forster,

except as it's expressed in his writing.

But that's powerfully expressed.

After we had made "Maurice", Ruth said,

"Look, there is a mountain there you really ought to climb,"

and that's the mountain of "Howards End".

- I left my office and walked right out of London.

I was walking all Saturday night.

- In the dark?

- So dark I couldn't see my own hand.

- Mr. Bast, you must be a born explorer.

- "Dear Jim,

this is a sort of work in progress report

on "Howards End",

which is proving to have unsuspected difficulties.

An overall problem is that

it's so much a novel of the landscape,

a song of the Earth, or must appear to England.

How to bring that into the script?

It has to be more than just directions

for beautiful camera work.

I feel we need something more than just ordinary scenery."

- When I was walking through the bluebells,

an iconic picture,

which a lot of the time represents the film,

which is extraordinary, I said,

"Jim, just in the book, when I'm walking all night,

and the sister say-" - Was it wonderful?

- And Leonard, with unforgettable sincerity, said...

No.

It was only gray.

And suddenly all the pretension falls off him

and you see the spine that might've been straight.

As Forster says,

"The man who swapped the dignity of the animal

for a tailcoat and a couple of ideas,"

that wonderful phrase.

And I say, "But I'm walking through a field of bluebells,

it's beautiful, and I'm calling it not beautiful."

And Jim said, "Oh, but Sam, it has to be beautiful.

Otherwise, where are we?"

There are literally hundreds of decisions

that could've been less well made with that film

from casting and shooting and script and art direction.

And they all combine somehow,

and it's an enormously impressive thing still.

- All the Schlegels are exceptional.

They are, of course, British to the backbone

but their father was German,

and that is why they care for literature and art.

- The characters are absolutely perfect.

And the same might be said of the entire book.

Paradoxically, that seems to be the trouble.

Too perfect.

- Emma Thompson was not an actress that I knew,

and she was just really starting out in films at that time.

There were a number of actresses who did come to read

and she was the last one.

She didn't have the script

as she read it straight from the novel.

Well, she got this job on the spot.

I mean, I had my Margaret.

- He says that I read from the book,

but I don't remember doing that. I remember reading from Ruth's

extraordinarily beautiful script.

I wrote him a letter when I'd left,

which I've never done before or since,

and I just said, "I absolutely know how to play this woman,

because she reminded me so much of me

in the sense that she was interfering

and loud and opinionated and wanted to make the world

a better place, but was also quite keen on blokes."

And I had a women's group,

Margaret's constantly having women over

to talk about issues of the date.

- So what do you think

is the most important thing in the world then?

- Well, I suppose it is whatever matters to you most.

- Like love, for instance?

I remembered reading a script and loving it,

and being quite relieved 'cause, for me,

when I was doing "A Room with a View",

I was sort of resentful 'cause I just thought

I'm the ingenue,

and I basically knew that I was a character actor.

And when I got Helen, I thought, "That's it.

She's more of a character."

- Why should you worry about me?

- Because we like you!

That's why.

You noodle.

- There's no cause to call a person names.

- Oh yes there is.

When a person is being tremendously stupid.

I thought she was funny. I loved her passion.

There was a kind of connection,

a sort of eerie connection between that and my grandmother,

Violet Bonham Carter.

She would've been the same age as Helen.

So I read her autobiography actually

'cause I thought you're my direct peer.

And years later, I found out Forster

was a personal friend of hers.

I wondered if he ever based some of the Schlegel

because Violet was a liberal radical on her.

- I didn't think people like you existed except in books.

And books aren't real.

- Oh no, they're more real than anything!

When people fail you, there's still music and meaning.

- That's for rich people

to make them feel good after their dinner.

- "Then of course there are the Basts.

Leonard, a genteel clerk with literary aspirations

and dialogue to match, is not an attractive character

at the center of a film.

But I do see Leonard as attractive,

with all the eagerness of youth

brushing away the cobwebs of the depressed clerk

he appears to be at first sight."

- I didn't think Forster necessarily knew Leonard

as well as the other characters.

And I thought I knew him better than Forster did

and perhaps Jim trusted me on that.

Leonard is a South London boy who talked a bit like that,

you know, which is how I talked when I grew up,

very close to where he grew up.

But it is a very complicated story, "Howards End",

and it needs a filmmaker at the top of their powers

to juggle and shuffle and control those three families.

- "I also have trouble with Mr. Wilcox,

and indeed all the Wilcoxes.

They're so dead on target

the jolly, hearty empire building Englishman

that it might be difficult to get any sympathy for them.

Why should Margaret want to connect

with such awful people?"

- You're too kind.

You behave too well to people, and then they impose on you.

I know the world and that type of man.

- Oh, but he is not a type, Mr. Wilcox.

- Tony had just become more famous than God

by being in "Silence of the Lambs",

and he was completely pure and natural.

And Vanessa was just so brilliant

at portraying something so completely different to herself.

- You will laugh at my old-fashioned ideas.

I will not.

- When we finished editing "Howards End",

Ruth and I came out from the editing room,

she wasn't quite satisfied with the final form of it,

and she said, "Well, whatever it is, it's what it is."

And that was sort of her last word on it.

"Whatever it is, it is."

- I think that the moment that I knew

that we'd made a really great film that we were all proud of

was when we opened it in Cannes.

- A strong favorite to win the Palme d'Or,

the jury at Cannes instead gave "Howards End"

a sort of consolation prize they called

the 45th Anniversary Award.

It went on to become Merchant Ivory's most decorated film

with nine Academy Award nominations

and wins for Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction,

and Best Actress.

Almost immediately, a second consecutive film

went into production with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins

in the leading roles.

- Andy Marcus, who edited "Howards End",

I remember having a drink with him

when he was doing "Remains of the Day".

They'd gone down to Devon to do it

and it felt like quite a small crew,

and he just said, "It's kinda legendary.

They've hit something."

That's the holy grail as a filmmaker, isn't it?

To find the people that you know can embody these parts

and just, "Let's go and do it,"

and that was them at their height of their powers.

- History could well be made under this roof

over the next few days.

You can, each and every one of you,

take great pride in the role you will play

on this momentous occasion.

- "The Remains of the Day" is, in a way,

the jewel in Merchant Ivory's crown.

I think it was the combination of that marvelous country house.

Almost every interior shot was beautiful.

And of course, the relationship

between Anthony Hopkins playing Stevens the butler

and Emma Thompson as the housekeeper,

particularly when they, not quite at the end

but the climax of the film, confront each other

and almost say what they think about each other.

- Flowers. - Hmm?

- Flowers.

You're reading. - Yeah.

- Very dim in here. Can you see?

- Yes, thank you.

- What are you reading?

- A book.

- Yes, but what sort of book?

- It's a book, Ms. Kenton. A book.

- I remember that day very well

because I came in a state of sort of tension.

I was heightened.

And I came in and we played it a couple of times.

And I thought, "Not quite working."

I said, "Ton, I'm not getting this.

I don't know."

And he said, Tony said it's one of those afternoons,

but there's a very tired bee buzzing around,

or a fly actually, nothing is romantic as a bee

against the glass occasionally hitting it.

It's a sleepy afternoon.

He's reading, you come in, you have no intentions.

Relax, and let's see what happens.

Why won't you show me your book?

- This is my private time.

You're invading it.

- Oh, is that so? - Yes.

- I'm invading your private time, am I?

- Yes.

- What's in that book?

Come on, let me see.

And then what happens is this extraordinarily sexual,

erotic moment where at the end of each take,

you know, I've felt quite faint.

Quite faint. And of course, Ton.

It's not scandalous at all.

It's just a sentimental old love story.

The way in which he looks not at her eyes but her mouth,

and then the hand comes down

and you think he's going to touch her, but he never does.

- I really must ask you, please

not to disturb the few moments I have to myself.

- If your heart isn't broken by that scene,

it will not be broken by anything.

- It's a towering performance. Absolutely.

It's perfect.

- My God, he was good in that film.

If someone said to me, "Show me perfect film acting,"

I'd show them Tony Hopkins in "Remains of the Day".

And, in fact, I'd say "Remains of the Day"

is one of the best films I've ever seen, let alone being in.

- It is absolutely my favorite.

It's one of my favorite films

of anything I've ever worked on and things that I see now.

Sometimes I think there are projects

that meet actors right in the center of them.

And that in the same way

as Margaret Schlegel met me in my center,

met Tony right in his center

'cause he was, you know, from a very poor

working class family.

And I think that the story of "Remains of the Day"

met Jim and Ismail and Ruth right in their center.

Why, Mr. Stevens?

Why do you always have to hide what you feel?

It's about people in disguise,

people who can't really be themselves.

That film somehow incarnates a lot of that struggle

and the false personalities that we are forced to,

events, forced to put on because society,

because culture, because the world is what it is.

- "The Remains of the Day"

found nearly as much a claim as "Howards End"

with even more success at the box office.

It may have conquered awards season, too,

if it wasn't for another World War II era film

released the same year.

- The Oscar goes to...

- Michael Kahn for "Schindler's List".

- Steven Zaillian for "Schindler's List".

- John Williams for "Schindler's List".

- The Oscar goes to, this is a big surprise...

- Yes!

- Steven Spielberg for "Schindler's List".

- Dick had been nominated for an Oscar

for the "Howards End", but he didn't win.

But he had been nominated.

He had been Ismail's closest friend, apart from myself.

And then they sort of broke up.

And suddenly Ismail said,

"Well, he's not gonna do the music. He can't.

I don't want him to do the music."

And then Ruth and I were just horrified at that

because by that time it seemed to us, and to me certainly

and I think to Ruth, too,

that Dick's music was absolutely vital

to the beauty and the success of a Merchant Ivory movie.

That a Merchant Ivory movie would not be

a Merchant Ivory movie without Dick's music.

So what were we gonna do if now, and we're embarking on this,

this huge project of "Remains of the Day"

if Dick isn't gonna do the music?

Dick was here in Claverack, in his own house,

and we weren't even supposed to see Dick.

So it was like that.

- Hailing from Massachusetts,

Richard Robbins was raised in a musical family

and became a multi-instrumentalist

at a very young age.

He was classically trained at the New England Conservatory

and went on to become the director

of the Mannes College of Music in Manhattan,

where Ruth's daughter was a student.

In 1976, he made a documentary about the school

entitled "Sweet Sounds",

which was produced by Merchant Ivory.

After helping Jim select source music for their films,

he began composing scores.

Influenced by the compositions of Steve Reich and Philip Glass,

he combined his knowledge of period music

with the emerging style of minimalism.

- I went to a Steve Reich concert in Carnegie Hall,

and I just thought, I thought that was fantastic.

And I came out afterwards, and Dick hadn't been there,

and I said, "Why can't we have music like that?"

And by that time,

I'd probably heard some Philip Glass music.

And he said, "You want that kinda music?"

And I said, "Yes."

- I think Dick's most polished score

was "Remains of the Day".

It is the most complete, cohesive score.

And it is powerful, and dramatic,

and conveys so many emotions.

- Miss Kenton, you mean a great deal to this house.

You're extremely important to this house, Miss Kenton.

- Am I?

- Jim and Ismail's films almost always have

this sense of internal turmoil,

yet there's always this calm facade.

And Dick managed to do that by creating this very motoric,

almost at times frenzied minimalist motor

that would drive the score forward,

but yet on top of it there would be this very serene,

calm, melodic, oftentimes filled with suspensions

that would create that kind of tension.

Just like there was Bernard Hermann to Hitchcock,

you know, Rota to Fellini.

Dick's music is critical to the Merchant Ivory experience.

I selected period music for several Merchant Ivory films.

And Dick said that I was a part

of the Merchant Ivory music department,

as he liked to call it.

And I was very much changed by working with Dick

and Jim and Ismail.

I learned so much from all of them.

Anyone who has been within that Merchant Ivory vortex

is forever changed, were imprinted.

It was an extraordinary convergence of diverse people

who had this drive to create

these extraordinary works of art.

And we were all connected by the fact

that we had made these wonderful things together.

- In the 1970s, Ruth moved to New York City.

And around that time, Jim bought a house in Claverack

in Upstate New York.

What started as a weekend retreat became the center

of the entire extended Merchant Ivory family.

- Ismail and Jim, and Ruth and Jhab

all lived in the same building

on East Fifth and Seventh Street.

And when they went to the country,

they all went en masse together to the same house.

- The four together worked very well.

They almost lived together. It was very much a family unit.

They had the same sense of humor.

They would laugh at the same things and crack jokes.

And my father's all making jokes at their expense,

and they thought that was funny as well.

- I can't tell you enough how much fun it was

just to be in this whole ambience.

You'd get into Ismail's insane Mercedes-Benz,

which kinda smelled like, you know, how an old car

has like the petrol fumes coming up from the floorboards.

So we'd get into that car

and go touring around the countryside.

And the dynamics between Ismail and Jim, they were so funny.

Jim would be sitting there like, "Oh my God."

And Ismail would be just like carrying on,

saying every insane thing.

And it was like a Laurel and Hardy routine.

And Ruth was always in her room and just writing or, you know.

Jhab and Ismail were always fighting

in the kitchen over cooking.

- It's this sort of weird idyll in Upstate New York.

This halcyon setting with a lake

in which we used to go and swim every evening

and eccentric characters bonding day and night

at this ravishingly beautiful house

who are personally connected or not.

You could never quite work it out.

- In one barn on the property,

Jim and Ismail hosted art exhibitions,

parties, and performances.

- They would have these events at the mill.

It was incredible crossroads for people.

Every luminary artist type would be here.

And that would be one of the ways that,

frankly, Ismail would, he would make it

so that people would wanna work for him.

It was very familial, and he knew that.

- In another, they edited their films.

- I wish the room was still set up for you to see it,

but this is the old upright Moviola,

which is the one piece that Jim is not gonna give away

because it's a piece of cinema history.

Use a grease pencil and mark on the actual frame

that you're cutting on.

Pull it out, cut it, hang it in the bin,

wind it back up by hand. It's all very physical.

Then we move to these.

This is the machine that a lot of the films were cut on.

It's an eight-plate Steenbeck.

So you'd put up one roll of film here and another roll here.

Benches with rewinds.

This kinda sound was constantly going on

while you're editing.

All the leaders are still here.

The tape is still here, you know.

It was a workshop.

The assistant would often live downstairs.

You know, it takes a certain kind of person

to give up your life for a few months

and come up to the country and live in an apple barn

where the editing is happening above you.

But we would work in this space every day.

And in the winter, we'd have a fire

in the fireplace downstairs.

It was very homey.

- Eventually, Dick rented his own house

just down the road where he composed music.

- I adored Dick.

He was just the loveliest, dearest, kindest person.

Dick would've composed brilliant music wherever,

whatever he had to compose for.

There was one year in Cannes when he'd had enough of it.

He just wanted to leave.

And one night, we were supposed to be going out to another,

it's this one social thing after another in Cannes,

and we both were exhausted.

So we just grabbed a couple of bottles of wine and escaped,

and we crawled out into the garden

and went and hid behind the bushes with our wine.

And we could hear them shouting for us 'cause,

"We are ready to go.

Come, we're going to leave without you."

And we want them to leave without us.

And he just left one day. He couldn't take anymore.

It was all getting too much for him.

And Ismail had to get and bring him back.

There was a lot of tension for a lot of reasons.

'Cause I know one of your questions

was about the open secret.

- Dick's relationship.

But I have to say this, but I can't say more.

But it wasn't an open secret

for the people who were closely involved.

Dick left Boston to come and live in Claverack.

And it was Jim who wouldn't let Ismail move in with Dick.

And of course when Michael came along,

Michael made a play for Dick.

And when that happened, Ismail was,

I can't even begin to describe the heartbreak.

It was dreadful.

- It's not easy to sort out the intricacies

of every relationship within the Merchant Ivory family,

but it's clear Dick Robbins was romantically linked

not just to Ismail, but also Helena Bonham Carter.

- I was totally besotted by Dick, yeah.

We ended up being mates for, in all senses but one,

for about six or seven years, yeah.

I was completely in love.

I was the ingenue in this group of extraordinary people,

you know, at Claverack,

and it felt like I was in my own film.

I was definitely a surrogate for all of them, I think,

the little thing.

It took me years to work out why they called me little thing.

And then they said, "Well, you don't remember?"

- So you do love me, little thing.

- I was half Dick's age but, you know, I meant it.

I was totally in love, you know.

And I think he was in love with me, too,

as much as his mom would allow him.

- Jim, too, had affairs

during his long partnership with Ismail,

including with the famed

British travel writer Bruce Chatwin,

which he revealed to Chatwin's biographer in the late '90s.

- "From then on we were together,

united in a purpose,

and that purpose was to make films together.

I came to feel that two gay men,

united in their commitment to each other,

single-mindedly pursuing a common goal,

could end up ruling the world."

- I do feel that.

- Right. Well, you know, and at a certain point

Ismail began to have other partners.

And they were those

who'd would usually be rather intense relationships.

And for quite a while, they would go on.

And then usually whoever was with Ismail

became dissatisfied and left.

And I suppose it's because I was there.

So many of my friends said,

"Well, I don't see why you stay on with him.

I mean, he's there with so-and-so,

why would you do that?"

But then they weren't making films with him.

It's better if you read that in my book.

I mean, there are complicating sentences and thoughts

just coming out like that, may not sound so good.

That doesn't mean that Ismail had no other partners,

he was a highly-sexed man, or that I would not.

One or two of these were very seductive,

and when they were, we shared them.

I was never going to leave him

because of his temporary infatuations,

and was I ever voluntarily

going to give up our work together.

I was a bit like a powerful French matriarch,

it occurred to me, who knows her husband has mistresses,

but who also knows that she's at the center of his world,

his home, his children; and if she's clever, his very life.

And in another way, which made me laugh,

when I thought about it,

I recognize that his Muslim husband

would probably in time take a second wife,

and the third, and finally a fourth,

which is all the Quran allows.

In this way he and I went on for more than 40 years,

weathering everything good and bad, together.

- Yeah, well, there would be tensions on the films

about certain kinds of things.

I mean, people who were really very important

would come and say, "Jim, we can't do this

for that kind of money."

I could not make promises to anybody

that they would get more money,

but I could bring pressure on him, which I did.

- Jim and Ismail used to argue,

and a Merchant and Ivory argument

was almost a national event.

Jim would shriek at the top of his voice.

Ismail would go a deep shade of purple

and bellow at the top of his voice.

On two occasions, our neighbors in the next office

actually called the police to come to our offices

because they thought somebody was being horrifically murdered.

The intense and constant pressure

of making independent films of huge ambition

with limited resources put pressure on both of them

in very different ways.

When Ismail came on set, he was full of smiles and laughter,

patting backs and instilling confidence and joie de vivre.

Back in the office and in meetings, it was chaos

and teetering on a financial edge,

cliff edge most of the time.

What held everybody together, I think,

was a belief in the stories, a belief in the films,

a belief in the product.

This was fundamental to their very existence.

This wasn't work, this was an almost physical part of them

that they had to keep going no matter what.

- In the mid-1990s,

Merchant Ivory chose to work with major studios

like Disney and Warner Bros.

While grander in scale, these films were less successful

with critics and at the box office,

and didn't connect with the Merchant Ivory audience

in the same way as their earlier work.

- The last films,

the films that came after "The Remains of the Day",

they've been dismissed on the whole.

A number of huge studio films,

"Surviving Picasso",

"Jefferson in Paris",

"A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries",

a wonderful film set in Paris and in the United States

based on the novelist James Jones.

Ishiguro's second film for Merchant Ivory,

"The White Countess", set in Shanghai just before the war.

And of course "The Golden Bowl",

the last of the adaptations of Henry James

that came after "The Europeans" and "The Bostonians".

Although "Howards End" is perhaps

Merchant Ivory's most fully realized film.

I would say that "The Golden Bowl", for me,

is unequal footing.

And Ruth once said to me, "With a book, it comes out,

it gets a bad review or it gets an indifferent review,

that's not the end.

If the book's worth anything, it can have a second life."

Now, she said, "With a film, it's all or nothing."

- I suppose it spoils your picture of me.

That perfect one you have inside your head.

- Well, I thought that was rather defeatist.

If people really looked at these films,

they would see these films had merit.

And as the years have gone by like vintage porch,

they've actually got better.

- You don't know how we live in Monticello.

It's unspeakable.

- God Almighty never meant for human beings

to be like animals. We has a soul.

You do what I says and you and me is free.

- Every time I see "Jefferson in Paris",

which isn't all that often,

but whenever it's shown on a big screen,

I go and see it 'cause it's,

you never get a chance to see your films.

And I do feel this is, you know, this does hold up,

and this is very much in people's minds now, the story.

But that film was damned by the press. They hated it.

They said that was impossible,

that a fine man like Jefferson

would've actually had a Black mistress

and father of her children.

That was really the feeling of all these people.

A lot has happened since then.

I mean, the examination of the DNA

of those Jefferson descendants disproves that it happened.

But it was a hated film.

It's interesting because there were two films

that were like that, that were hated.

One after the other.

The next was "Surviving Picasso".

- To make a woman, you first have to wring her neck.

- And I suppose it's because Picasso was a god

and Jefferson's a god.

And to show the human qualities of these great men,

who had problems with women, people didn't like that.

- People have said, and I think they have a point,

that those films lacked the intimate charm

of the earlier films.

There didn't seem to be that kind of close relationship

with an audience that films like "A Room with a View"

and "Howards End" and "Remains of the Day" achieved.

Financing was easier.

The budgets slowly began to creep up,

as did the ambition in terms of casting

and production value.

What didn't scale up to manage that

was the actual mechanics and construction of Merchant Ivory.

We were still operating on a pretty meager basis

with a very low overhead

with only a few people in key positions.

And also, Ismail started making his own films,

almost in parallel to Jim's.

- He started with a short film in Bombay

about a very poor boy, a beggar on the beach,

and then he made a very, very good documentary

called "The Courtesans of Bombay",

about the singing and dancing girls

who inhabit a quarter of Bombay called Pavan Pool.

And then he decided he wanted to make a film

of the novel "In Custody" with star Shashi Kapoor,

and it was a story about an old Urdu poet.

Urdu is very much the literary language of North India,

and always was, and it's associated with Muslims,

though millions of Hindus also speak Urdu and write it.

- Urdu, a language which I grew up on,

and poetry gives me the greatest satisfaction.

And then suddenly this division has been created.

So the time has come to speak out about the language

that is being, you know, languishing in India.

A relationship between a Hindu teacher and a Muslim poet

that also brings the culture,

you know, we've shared things in India.

We want oneness, a feeling of togetherness, you know.

- Then he wanted to make this film with Jeanne Moreau,

which he made, called "The Proprietor".

Some of which was shot in New York

and some of which was shot in Paris.

He did another feature called "Cotton Mary",

starring Madhur Jaffrey, which was about an aya.

An aya is like a nursemaid, who goes crazy.

And then finally he made a film in Trinidad

called "The Mystic Masseur"

based on a novel by V.S. Naipaul.

And that was particularly interesting

because the story is about a man who invented himself

and invented his role.

- I go write books.

- You start drinking rum. That is it.

- Mrs. Cooper, one day I go stand at the center

of world literature.

- It was sort of a portrait of Ismail in a way.

And I'm not saying that Ismail

was a totally self-admitted character, he wasn't.

But his personality took on more and more sides to it,

and that sort of ultimately becoming a film director was.

The only further thing he could've done

apart from becoming a government minister,

which is what happened in that film.

- There has to be a special feeling about your work,

a passion about your work, a commitment about your work.

And if that is the case, then it never dies.

You see, anything is possible.

- During post-production

on "The White Countess" in London,

Ismail underwent surgery for abdominal ulcers.

He died unexpectedly during the operation on May 25th, 2005.

He was 68 years old.

- Ismail's sudden and shocking death really winded us all.

But Jim was absolutely lost.

I remember I went out to see him in New York.

I was waiting in a diner, and it was a six-lane avenue,

Jim started crossing and then stopped

in the middle of the traffic and the lights went green

and these great big juggernauts were descending on him.

And I was panicking, and I sort of ran up and rescued him

and got him to the pavement.

And he said the most heartbreaking thing, he said,

"I was prepared for the emotional effects of grief.

I wasn't prepared for the physical effects of grief."

And he went into a long, long widowhood,

and we kind of thought, "Well, that's it, you know.

He needs his Ismail.

He needs somebody to galvanize him and persuade people

that what they were doing was worthwhile," which it was.

- Action!

- Merchant Ivory's only project

after Ismail's death

was "The City of Your Final Destination".

Shot in Argentina, the film follows

an American graduate student

seeking permission to write a biography

of a recently deceased writer,

leaving his unconventional family to manage his legacy.

- How could any outsider understand this place?

Or what it was like to all live here together?

Or what it's like now without him?

- The first time since Ismail died

that I had actually felt happy

was during the shooting of that.

Ismail had gone actually to Argentina with me on a scout.

That big house that we used in that film,

Ismail was actually there. - I know that it was a film

that Ismail felt passionately about.

I know it was a film that Jim felt passionately about.

It expressed something very evocative of their other films,

but it was completely different.

There's a very, very strong feeling

whilst we were making the film,

that it was like a sort of perfect end.

- Well, I just wanna say to you all,

it's been the most enjoyable movie I've been in many years.

Thank you for having me back.

- I think to embark on

"The City of Your Final Destination"

so soon after Ismail's death

was a difficult job for everybody involved.

It didn't have its figure who was central

to everything we did around the film set,

and that was unsustainable.

- Without an adequate budget in place,

principal photography began in 2006.

Producer Richard Hawley attempted

to fulfill Ismail's role

in securing financing.

- Richard took on Ismail's attempts at spreading confidence

and telling people not to worry

and everything was going well,

while underneath he was struggling around,

financing, borrowing, begging,

anything he could from any source that he could,

legal or slightly otherwise

to keep the whole ship afloat.

- That film was made on credit cards.

One of the producers who had worked for us for years,

he could never, ever get the money together.

You know, actors will come on and act

whether they're paid or not, but they have to be paid.

You can't just not pay them.

But we didn't have any money to pay them.

We had no money to edit with.

So that's when Anthony Hopkins sued.

But then we were able to, you know,

get it together finally.

- Yeah, absolutely. It did.

- After years of pursuing

his own projects with no success,

Jim was approached by Hudson Valley neighbors

with an offer to adapt Andre Aciman's novel,

"Call Me by Your Name".

- I wouldn't be standing up here

without the inspired help I received

from my life's partners who are gone.

Our writer, Ruth Jhabvala, who received this award twice...

and our fearless producer, Ismail Merchant.

Working with them for close to 50 years of Merchant Ivory

led me to this award.

Thank you very much, everyone.

- At 89, James Ivory is the oldest person

to have won an Academy Award,

and he hasn't stopped there.

Following his win, Jim continues to write.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic,

he stayed in Claverack, adapting the Edouard Louis novel

"The End of Eddy".

Changing the setting from Louis's homeland

to Jim's own in Oregon.

In better times, he travels the world

attending film festivals and retrospectives.

- If you'd asked me years ago, right at the beginning

when I met them back in the 18th century,

who was gonna last the longest? It wasn't gonna be Jim.

And now he seems to be going backwards.

He seems to be getting younger in spirit.

There are not many people who really are happy

in their old age.

And I think on some level, although he might say I'm wrong,

I don't think I've ever seen him happier.

Maybe Jim has been able to grow

in a dimension that he wouldn't had Ismail lived.

I don't know.

I've just loved this last time.

He's much more on the surface and available and open,

and is curious and excited to be alive.

Maybe I'll die before him, but, the way he's carrying.

- Perhaps, though I got a relatively late start

as a director, perhaps I'll go on longer than some,

I mean, maybe another 20 years, I don't know.

I hope so.

- Well, I'd hate to be, you know,

one of those people that gets kicked upstairs.