Page 10 - Fujifilm Exposure_12 The Golden Bowl_ok

Ismail Merchant and James Ivory - the twin peaks of quality cinema’s most durable part- nership - first met properly nearly 40 years ago over a delicious dinner cooked for them in New York by Madhur Jaffrey. Since then - some 43 films later with, currently, a star- studded adaptation of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl co-starring Nick Nolte, Anjelica Huston, Uma Thurman and Jeremy Northam - food and drink have continued to play a vital part in this extraordinary chemistry.
When he’s not playing producer, Merchant is famous for creating his own on-location meals. In between films, he has also managed to write several books, including six on cooking, most recently a mouth-watering, Gallic-leaning tome, sub- titled Filming And Feasting In France (favourite recipes, Provençal Rice, Drumsticks with Coriander).
When he’s doing none of the above, Merchant has come up with yet another tasty recipe - somehow finding the time to direct his own shorts and features.
To date - in between an Oscar-winning
celluloid roll-call that majestically includes
The Remains Of The Day, A Room With A
View, Howards End, Heat And Dust, The Europeans and, going way back to the beginning, Shakespeare Wallah and The Householder - Merchant has personally
directed some four full-length films, most notably In Custody and, just last year, Cotton Mary, also filmed in his beautiful native India.
Merchant left Bombay in his teens to study for an MBA at New York University. Even then cinema began to encroach and at the turn-of-the-Sixties while working for a top advertising agency, he produced The Creation Of Women, an Oscar-nominated theatri- cal short narrated by Saeed Jaffrey. Jaffrey had, coin- cidentally, also been providing the voice-over for a documentary called The Sword And The Flute, direct- ed by the Berkeley-born Ivory, eight years Merchant’s senior. The then-married Jaffreys decided the two needed to meet.
Three years later, with writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (who’d become one of their most regular collaborators), they filmed her novel The Householder in Delhi on a shoestring budget. Merchant Ivory Productions, which would later, with justification, be nicknamed “The Wandering Company” was effectively up and running.
However it took another six films at least - including ambitious forays into America like Savages
own guns. Merchant explained: “Our sort of film- making hasn’t really changed for years. If some- thing excites us or pleases us, we just go ahead and do it. To get the money, to sell to the right distribu- tors, you have sometimes to go through hoops, but if you don’t feel passionately about it, there’s no point in doing the film. Do I get fed up with hustling for money? It’s not as terrible as it sounds. Studio executives have seen our work for years now.
Everybody wants to have a winner, so why not go with a winning team?
“You then just go where the films take you. That can be India, America or Europe. There’s no hard fast rule. The films grow from your own experiences, own energies. We don’t have to stop because we’re waiting for someone to give us something to do. It’s all generated by us.”
Merchant, 63, admits that he and Ivory are offered many scripts but in the end pre- fer to develop their own. A rare example of a project arriving “in turnaround”, as it were, was The Remains Of The Day, which was first set up as a $38 million movie to be directed by Mike Nichols with Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in the leads. History relates that it eventually became a classic slice of MIP, co-starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson... at just $12 million.
It isn’t all roses. Two of their most important films in the Nineties signally failed to get the box office frantic - Jefferson In Paris (“misunderstood and misjudged by the critics,” com- plains Merchant) and Surviving Picasso, at $17 mil- lion their most expensive movie to date. But even that failure is comparatively modest when you judge it alongside the normal scale of mega-budgeted, star-
studded film-making.
So how have they continued to make films so inex-
pensively? “Because we don’t have the trappings of waste. For instance, we’ve been in our current offices [a delightfully dowdy set of rooms off a quiet courtyard in Soho] for almost 15 years. We haven’t changed our phi- losophy or style of living. This partnership is one of those blessings that’s very rare in cinema,” he smiles.
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THE MERCHANT
THE MERCHANT
OF MOVIE MAGIC
OF MOVIE MAGIC
The Art of Film-making is food and drink to the prolific Ismail Merchant
and The Wild Party - and more than a decade before what Merchant describes as “our breakthrough” final- ly occurred with The Europeans, MIP’s first Henry James adaptation. The film ran at the Curzon for nine months. Then there was Heat And Dust, another Jhabvala original, which cost $2 million and made $15m. From the mid-80s on, beginning with the triple Oscar-winning A Room With A View, their first excur- sion into EM Forster-land, they became genuinely “hot” in more traditional Hollywood terms.
But even as films like Mr and Mrs Bridge, Howards End , another Oscar-winner, and, finan- cially most successful of all to date, The Remains Of The Day, followed, MIP continued to stick to their
Photo above: a relaxed Ismail Merchant directing Cotton Mary; opposite page main: James Ivory, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Ismail Merchant
EXPOSURE • 8 & 9