Film director James Ivory, 82, relaxes at his cabin in Lake of the Woods, Ore. in this August 2010 photo.Lee Juillerat/The Associated Press
If any filmmaker can rest on his laurels, it's James Ivory. At 84, he's directed more than 30 movies, including some of the medium's most decorated and decorous features, Howards End, A Room with a View and The Remains of the Day among them.
However, if Ivory may be slowing down, he's hardly giving up. In the works is a screen adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard II which Ivory hopes to begin shooting next year.
Meanwhile, he's in Toronto Monday to screen a new 70-mm print of 1992's Howards End at TIFF Bell Lightbox and kick off a quirky survey/series there pairing some of his signature features with those of other directors (i.e., The Remains of the Day with Hitchcock's Rebecca on June 19). He was interviewed by phone at his home in Claverack, N.Y.
How involved were you in making the selections for Elegant Pairings?
Very much involved. There were certain films they [Toronto International Film Festival] wanted and while I agreed with [what] they wanted, I thought maybe this film would be better with that film than with that one. It was a back-and-forth discussion that went on for a month or two, mainly by e-mail. They wanted to show A Room with a View and I thought, Fine, why not? But they wanted to pair it with Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and I didn't think that was a good idea because I thought Age of Innocence should be paired with something else. I thought it would be more interesting to pair A Room with a View with another Daniel Day Lewis movie that, in fact, came out the same day [in March 1986] as A Room with a View, namely [Stephen Frears'] My Beautiful Laundrette. For the public to see those two early Daniel Day Lewis films together struck me as compelling. And TIFF agreed.
I recently saw what is one of your lesser-known films, Savages, which is being double-billed July 15 with Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel [1962]. It's pretty wild: The cast includes Ultra Violet from Warhol's Factory and a young Sam Waterston; the script's co-written by Michael O'Donoghue ofNational Lampoon fame and you have these semi-naked 'primitives' overrunning this deserted Westchester mansion and becoming 'civilized' in an absurd way.
That came out in 1972 and it was very much influenced by The Exterminating Angel, very much. It's a funny film to see now but it's interesting, I have to agree. I like it. When it came out in Europe, it was accepted as something interesting and semi-serious and enjoyable. But in America it was absolutely damned. There were one or two people who liked it - the Village Voice really did and The New Yorker pretty much did.
You're famous for your adaptations of books by Henry James [The Bostonians, The Europeans, The Golden Bowl] and E.M. Forster [Maurice, A Room with a View, Howards End] so it's clear novels from the late 19th and early 20th centuries are a sort of touchstone. Is there a work or an author you now wish you'd taken on for a film, perhaps something by Ford Madox Ford?
Not really, no. I occasionally read something from that period and I think, Gosh, this would make a nice film. But there's no great figure like George Eliot that I feel I have to do. In a way, all these choices in these films, you couldn't call them accidental choices but there's no sort of real planning of them. They didn't all come in a rush, really. I was not particularly a reader of Henry James when I was younger, and Ruth Prawer Jhablava [Oscar-winning screenwriter for several Ivory films] said to me, "Well you ought to be. Get going" … I had to read Howards End three times before I had the sense that I got it, well … not got it but at least that I could commit to directing it with sufficient authority.
Your collaborations with Ruth are well-known, of course, as was your relationship with Ismail Merchant with whom you formed Merchant Ivory Productions in the early sixties and produced dozens of movies. In fact, some people pronounce Merchant Ivory almost as one word, suggesting an inseparable identity. Is that bothersome?
No. Sometimes it's been a term of disdain and used pejoratively but we can't help that. You just have to live with it. In fact, I feel grateful and privileged having been part of a creative triumvirate. There's a line in Henry James in The Europeans where one of the characters says: "It's such a good thing when a young man goes to school to a clever woman." Well, I feel when I was young I did go to a clever woman who was Ruth and is Ruth. There was truth in what James said.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
James Ivory: Elegant Pairings begins June 19 and runs through Aug. 19 at TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto. The 70-mm Howards End screens Monday at 7 p.m. (tiff.net, 416-599-TIFF).