Merchant Ivory will always keep going: James Ivory

James Ivory, one half of the famous Merchant Ivory Productions, was in Mumbai recently. Their latest, 'The White Countess,' starring Ralph Fiennes and Natasha Richardson is going to be screened at the forthcoming MAMI film festival as homage to the late Ismail Merchant, who died last May. The 78-year-old film maker who worked with his partner Merchant for 44 years, warns this isn't the end of the production house. Merchant Ivory, he told Labonita Ghosh, will be around for a long time.

What brings you to Mumbai?

I haven't really been here since 1993, though I came to India a few times. This Mumbai trip has been mostly about Ismail's estate, of which I'm an executor. I'm staying with Ismail's family right now.

The question everyone's asking is: after Ismail where will Merchant Ivory go?

It probably won't go as fast or as far as if he'd been here, but it'll still keep going. We're going to make a new film in Argentina this fall, called The City of Your Final Destination, and after that I don't know quite what we'll do, but we'll do something. I know I won't be the only director. We've always made films with other directors and there are a number of people who would like to work with us.

Will it still be called Merchant Ivory? Are Ismail's family members interested to be producers?

Oh of course, it'll still be Merchant Ivory. Ismail's niece Rahila Bootwalla, has been a producer for some of the films. She's interested. His nephew Nayeem Hafizka has also produced for us. And of course his brother-in-law Wahid Chowhan has produced a lot of our Indian films, and is keen to continue.

What do you remember of Ismail, your best (and worst) memories of your partner of so many years?

A lifetime of wonderful memories of all the work we've done together and all the places we've gone, and our whole lives making films. I couldn't really pick out anything in particular. But what I enjoyed the most was when we started out in India. We made the first four features together in India—The Householder, Shakespearewallah, The Guru and Bombay Talkie. I think that was the most enjoyable time. We were just starting out. I met Ismail in New York and started work on The Householder, from Ruth's (Jhabwala) fourth novel. I think just shooting it in India, where the obstacles were overwhelming, was the most interesting. As for things which were not fun, that tended always to be the eternal problem of getting money to make our movies. But Ismail always did manage.

Merchant Ivory was a pioneer of the crossover-collaborative filmmaking that is so popular today. How do you feel about that?

Ismail had this dream of making films set in India but for an international audience. That was what he started out doing in his 20s with his very first film, The Creation of Women. It was nominated for an Oscar. When we began working together, I couldn't really make films in Hindi or in a foreign language. I had to make them in English. Our writer also wrote in English, and we always hoped that these films would be a success in the US and Europe. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. Some of them were immensely successful, like Heat and Dust and Shakespearewallah. And others like The Guru were not successful at all.

Critics have called your films as classy and costumed, but also slow and meandering, caught in a kind of time warp.

(Laughs). That depends on the audience you're making the film for. You basically make a film for yourself and other people like you. Those who are not like you may not have the same interests, and so you might fail completely in conveying your ideas to them. Some films we made were probably rarified, and possibly meandering. But they weren't all costume films, as people seem to think now. They don't know about contemporary films because they've haven't seen them. Luckily, there has always a core audience—an educated audience made up of people who were not happy with Hollywood or even Bollywood films—for our movies, and this grew over the years. That's why we've lasted so long.

You're saying the films were never box-office driven?

They weren't. But you can't very well take other people's money unless you have a firm belief that what you're doing, is going to pay off at the box office. So when we have had a box office success, it surprised us as much as anybody. Who would've thought that Remains of the Day, about a completely inhibited loser, would have the kind of fame it has. Or a film that was two hours 24 minutes long, in which the characters never stopped talking for a second [Howard's End] would be this huge a success?

What are the "classic" Merchant Ivory themes?

We've done a lot of stories about an outsider coming to grips with people of another culture, and either succeeding or failing to be happy. Films about people's passionate affairs with another culture which sometimes lifts them up and sometimes drags them down. That's the sort of thing that's been in a lot of our films, including the latest one, The White Countess. It's all about the foreigners in China, involved in making money. Europeans who fled Hitler or the Bolsheviks. English, American and Japanese who came to make huge fortunes in Shanghai, rather like the English who came to India. Our film is about those kinds of people. It's not about the Chinese at all.