James Ivory in Conversation: How Merchant Ivory Makes Its Movies

Setting the Scene

SETTING THE SCENE Robert Emmet Long: Merchant Ivory is known to be the independent film productionteamofthelastfewdecades ,achievingitssuccessonitsown,outside the Hollywood studio system—or maybe in defiance of it. But, in fact, what hasyourexperiencewithHollywoodbeenlike?Whatsortofdealingshaveyou had with the studios? JamesIvory:Therehasbeenthisidea—peoplehaveoftenspokenorwrittenin thisway—thatMerchantIvoryshunsHollywoodorfeelsthatitistoogoodfor it.Somethingofthatkind.Butpeoplewouldbesurprisedatthenumberofour filmsthathadabigstudioconnection,andalsowhenthatconnectionfirsttook place—attheverybeginningofourcareer.OurfirstfeaturewasTheHouseholder, whichwemadeinIndiaandthensoldtoColumbia(nowSony).Youmightsay thatithadevenbeenpartiallyfinancedwithHollywoodmoney.OneofourIndianinvestorsonthat filmwasatheaterownerinBombaywhomadeafortune oªTheGunsofNavarone,aColumbiahit.HeputsomeofthatinTheHouseholder, so we might claim in a way that Columbia Pictures itself invested in it. Long:So Columbia was your first backer? Ivory:Yes,butonlyinthesensethattheyboughtthefilm,asIsay,andgave us what’s called a “minimum guarantee.” The way Columbia paid us for The Householder (they bought the world rights) was with four hundred thousand of their blocked, or “frozen,” rupees—earnings from their films in India that theycouldnot,bylaw,repatriate.AlltheAmericanstudioshadfortunesinrupees sitting in Indian banks. Right away Ismail saw the advantages for us in suchasituation.Thestudios—MGM,Fox,WarnerBrothers,andsoon—were 1 free to spend that “frozen” money on productions in India. It was all quite regulated, you can be sure, and prying it loose was a bureaucratic nightmare; butallofourIndianfeatureswereshot,moreorless,inthismanner.Foxspent a million dollars on our third film, The Guru—the rupee equivalent, that is— which was a lot of money to us but nothing to them. Long: What about films you have made in the West? Ivory: When we began making films outside India, there was again some studio involvement. Quartet was made that way; Fox put money into it. The WildPartywasfinancedbytheHollywood-basedAmericanInternationalPictures , a sort of Miramax-like “little studio” setup, with a Harvey Weinstein– likebossnamedSamuelArkoª,who,likeWeinstein,loveddismemberinghis pictures. Long: Later, with the great success of A Room with a View, the studios came knocking at your door. Ivory: After A Room with a View, Hollywood welcomed us. They thought we had some secret; we could parlay three and a half million dollars into seventy million,andgetterrificreviewsandAcademyAwards.Therewereseveralthreepicture deals made with the studios then, which sounds exciting, but these usually fizzled out after the first picture (as in the case of TriStar and Slavesof NewYork).ButtherewerefilmslikeTheRemainsoftheDayandSurvivingPicasso, whichwerestudiofilmsfromthebeginning,filmsthatweremadefromproperties they’d acquired. We were hired to make these for the studios. Long: How much creative freedom did you have once you were in a contractual arrangement with the studios? Ivory: Some studios were absolutely princely, like Disney. Others were the opposite, penny-pinching and suspicious. But not one—no, wait, there was, or is one—gave us any real trouble over so-called creative matters. I always have had the final cut. I won’t do a film if I don’t get that, and up to now— with the exception of The Wild Party—I’ve always been given it. No film but that one has ever been recut (at least in the United States; outside the United States you don’t know what’s going to happen to your movie). Long: How do these studios treat you as independent filmmakers? And do you feel that you have anything in common with Hollywood? 2 s e t t i n g t h e s c e n e Ivory: The studio people are genuinely respectful; if there was a disagreement over some point, it was usually expressed in a di‹dent tone, almost murmured, apologetic. Well, you have to take that seriously; it would be very bad manners to go stomping about saying, “I’m the director!” We’ve made many friends in Hollywood. I’d hate to think of what our careers would have been like without them. And then both Ismail and I cut our teeth on Hollywood movies; in our tastes we precede the great days of international filmmaking , the French New Wave and all the other national “waves,” except, I suppose, the Italian. Hollywood set the standard for us when we were most receptive and the studios most creative. Strange, when you think how unlike a big studio picture any Merchant Ivory film is! Long:Anumberofindependentfilmmakingcompaniesexisttoday.Howis your company diªerent from these others, the indies, as they are called? Ivory: Our company is diªerent in that the three of us—Ismail, Ruth, and myself—arepermanent.Shewrites,Idirect,andIsmailproduceswhatwewrite anddirect.We’reallluckyinthatway.Mostproducerswhohaveaprojectthey want to do have to search for a writer and then a director; or a director has to look for a writer and producer when he finds something he’s keen on doing. It’sworstofallforthewriterinthatrespect.There’saconstantdelayandchanging...