“Then Fox gave us a film to do, ‘The Guru,” and I was launched. “What ‘The Householder’ made we put into ‘Shakespeare Wallah,’ which was a critical success,” Mr. Merchant sold the film to Columbia Pictures, Mr. Jhabvala, to adapt her novel “The Householder.” When Mr. Merchant, who had never produced one, and they enlisted another first-timer, Ms. Ivory, who had never directed a narrative feature, met Mr. Ivory grew up in Oregon, attended the University of Southern California film school, and was well on his way to becoming a documentary filmmaker: his “Venice: Themes and Variations” (from 1957), scenes from which appear in “Destination,” made what was then The New York Times’s annual list of noteworthy nontheatrical films. They don’t get into the personalities and characters of the people.”īorn in 1928 in Berkeley, Calif., Mr.
“If that wasn’t there, who’d want to do it? We get so many scripts used to, anyway that are set in the past, and they’re rarely very interesting. The upshot was a body of work that, despite a sumptuous public image (“elegantly dressed people getting in and out of carriages and stuff like that”), is unified by nuanced human relationships. Set among the baroque survivors of a suicidal novelist and the naïve academic who wants to write his biography, it stars Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Omar Metwally.
#JAMES IVORY MOVIE#
Which he has: “The City of Your Final Destination,” his latest, opens Friday, after years of financial uncertainty kept the movie from being completed. Ivory spoke like someone who has had five years to grieve, and to pull things together. He had a way of how do you say it? pulling the fat out of the fire.”ĭressed for early spring in tweed jacket, scarf and jeans, Mr. Ivory said, over a recent breakfast near his apartment. “He had a million friends and a million contacts and was very much liked, and that always helped,” Mr. And that’s meant a raft of new challenges for Merchant Ivory, a brand long synonymous with intelligent and sophisticated movies like “A Room With a View,” “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day.” Ivory’s longtime filmmaking partner, died during surgery for abdominal ulcers. But the 14th floor lost its most famous tenant in 2005, when Ismail Merchant, Mr. Ivory still lives there, as does the screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, when she isn’t in India. I lived on the 12th, and Ismail lived on the 14th.
“Ruth and her husband lived on the seventh floor. “We all lived in the building on different floors,” said James Ivory. FEW hansom cabs have ever stopped at its door, or countesses swept through its lobby, but the luxury co-op on Manhattan’s East Side used to be the unofficial headquarters of Merchant Ivory Productions.