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in memoriam: Ismail Merchant
MERCHANT OF MOVIE MAGIC
n the last issue of Exposure, our cover story was on the making of The White Countess,
found time to come up with yet another tasty recipe.
As well as producing an award-
another Jhabvala original. From the mid-80s on, beginning with the triple Oscar-winning A Room With A View,
I
“Ismail was full of fantastical ideas... His sweeping statements were already an ongoing joke and we would tease that he was to be the next Cecil B De Mille. Little did we know how we would eat our words. At this point he was a bouncy boy with a lot of energy and enormous ideas to go with it, but he was just our Ismail and no one took him seriously. Only time would tell how powerful his methods of persuasion would become.” Felicity Kendal writing in her memoirs about meeting Merchant in 1960
the 47th film in the remarkable history of Merchant Ivory Productions, that justly cele- brated “Wandering Company”.
Last word in the article went, as usual, to the irrepressible Ismail Merchant as he reflected wisely on the company’s first-ever film-making venture in China: “You have to go with a completely open mind and not be set in your ways. Learn to adapt.”
Last words indeed, for within weeks of publication, Merchant had died in London following surgery for abdominal ulcers. He was 68.
Merchant and James Ivory first met properly at the turn of the 60s over a delicious dinner cooked for them in New York by Madhur Jaffrey.
Over the next 45 years, food and drink, as well as many remark- able award-winning films, continued to play a vital part in this extraordi- nary chemistry.
When he was not playing producer, Merchant was famous for creating his own on-location meals, while in between films he managed to write several books, including more than half a dozen on cooking. When he was doing none of the above, he even
winning celluloid roll-call that majesti- cally includes The Remains Of The Day, A Room With A View, Howards End, Heat And Dust, The Europeans and, going back to beginnings, The Householder and Shakespeare Wallah, Merchant also directed films like In Custody and The Mystic Masseur.
Merchant left his native Bombay in his teens to study for an MBA at New York University. Even then cinema began to encroach and while working at a top advertising agency he pro- duced The Creation Of Women, an Oscar-winning short narrated by Saeed Jaffrey. Jaffrey had, coincidentally,
also been providing the voiceover for a documentary, The Sword And The Flute, directed by Berkeley-born James 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 bcome the third part of this “triptych of talents”, they filmed her novel The Householder. Merchant Ivory was up and running.
It would, however, take another six films to achieve what Merchant described as “our breakthrough”, The Europeans, followed by Heat And Dust,
determinedly maverick MIP suddenly became “hot” in more traditional Hollywood terms.
But despite the acclaim and decent box-office, they would continue to plough their own furrow. As Merchant once told me: “Our sort of filmmaking hasn’t changed for years. If something excites us or pleased us, we just go ahead and do it. To get the money, to sell to the right distributors, you sometimes have to go through hoops. But if you don’t feel passionately about it, there’s no point doing the film. Do I get fed up hustling for money? It’s not as terrible as it sounds. Studio executives have seen our work for years now. Everybody wants 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 [or Trinidad or China, he might later have added]. 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.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
Photos from top l-r: Greta Scacchi in Cotton Mary; James Ivory, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Ismail Merchant; James Fox in The Remains Of The Day, Om Puri and Ayesha Dharker in The Mystic Masseur Natasha Richardson and Ralph Fiennes in The White Countess; Helena Bonham Carter in A Room With A View, Nick Nolte in The Golden Bowl; Glenn Close and Kate Hudson in Le Divorce; Anthony Hopkins in Surviving Picasso; Merchant and Ivory on location with The White Countess; Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in Howards End;
Ivory takes a photo of DP Christopher Doyle HKSC and Merchant; Custody; Ivory and Merchant on the set of Le Divorce
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