James Ivory

In Conversation

Oscar winner James Ivory, whose oeuvre includes some of the most impressive films of the latter 20th century, will be honored with a two-day celebration at Hudson Hall at the historic Hudson Opera House September 16th and 17th.

The festival will feature appearances by Ivory who will be present for all screenings; Peter Spears, producer of Call Me by Your Name, for which Ivory won his most recent Oscar (at age 89); and Firoza Jhabvala, daughter of Ivory’s longtime collaborator, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

The weekend will feature screenings of Ivory films from different decades, from 1965’s Shakespeare Wallah, to 1984’s The Bostonians to Call Me by Your Name for which Ivory won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. It is now considered to be one of the best films of the 21st century.

An overview of Ivory’s films over the past 70 years would seem to reveal a focus on social pretense and the struggles of the protagonists to break through those strictures. In partnership with Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ivory’s films shone a light on the hypocrisies and discrimination of different eras, frequently plumbing the seemingly unadaptable novels of authors such as E. M. Forster, Henry James and Kazuo Ishiguro.

For instance, Forster’s 1908 novel Room with a View told the tale of Lucy Honeychurch in the restrictive and repressed Edwardian Age and her love for a free-spirited young man, George Emerson. Merchant Ivory’s 1985 treatment of the story was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning three.

The production company struck gold again with two other films that earned nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay: Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993). The four films together earned Ivory a total of 10 BAFTA, Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, taking top honors three times. Subsequently Ivory carried home gold again as best screenwriter for his adaptation of Call Me by Your Name in 2017.

But despite the theme of social conscience in his works, the director says that was not a motivating factor in determining the scope of his work. “If a movie is based on a novel, what the author wants to write about comes out in the film,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I tend to like stories because of their characters and the atmosphere of place—what makes the characters dramatic and interesting.”

He continued, saying that the social strictures found in his films depend on nationality. “If you are making a film based on a Forster novel, that is one thing; if it is set in the United States, it’s quite different. In England, all society is blocked off into sections—it’s one way of living—but ours is more of an economic blocking off.”

As director, he elicited masterful performances from many of the legendary actors of his age: Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Hopkins, Ralph Fiennes and the Redgraves: Vanessa, Lynn and Natascha.

“It was not difficult to draw out actors if they were interested in the roles and stories,” he said. “They were talented and very much involved which makes it easier on the director. No one said, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ Everyone was really keen to show what they could do, to show what they could create. They thought the roles through endlessly and I trusted my actors and let them me show me what they had developed. On whole, they are artists, and you must respect what they have done.”
Similarly, he says, adapting novels to the screen is “an art, a definite art, that has its own rules.”

“If you have a good screenwriter, they come up with something you can work with. I have been lucky to have a wonderful screenwriter. If it were something that was being adapted, I might say, ‘I miss that (element of the story) or I wish that was there.’ Something clicks or it doesn’t.”

He said that most people know his English films best and do not fully comprehend the scope of his work over the decades. “They never see the things we did in France or China—and my Argentina film was so long ago it has disappeared.”

Now 95 years old, and with both Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala long dead, Ivory says he has not worked much in filmmaking recently. “At 95, I am not working on anything of a film nature right now. I might give a little advice but it’s hard work. I doubt that I could do it for a long period of time,” he said.

But that does not mean that the embers of his creativity are burning low. He recently provided much of the footage used in production of A Cooler Climate, which, he says, “is a very nice movie that I like a lot.”

“We shot a lot of footage in Afghanistan in the 1960s but then we just left it alone,” he said. Thousands of feet of perfectly preserved 16-mm film offered a unique visual record of Afghanistan in a period long before the days of the Soviet invasion, or the Taliban.

During a conversation with Paris-based filmmaker Giles Gardner, with whom Merchant Ivory had worked in the past, Gardner mentioned he was editing a film about Afghanistan. Ivory recalled his trove of archival film and offered to let Gardner see it.

Gardner was stunned by the beauty of the images and Ivory gave him a free rein in how to approach the subject matter. What resulted is a feature documentary through which Ivory narrates his life as traveler, outsider and artist.

One critic describes the film as “determinedly minor,” and says it “endeavors only to show us the interior of one man’s inward-facing crisis. In the next century, we have blogs for this; it’s a gift that Ivory’s navel-gazing takes such frequently lovely shape.”

A Cooler Climate had screenings at the New York Film Festival but most of its artistic impact has been abroad, Ivory said. “It’s mainly had its life in Europe,” he said. “That’s pretty much okay for me.

Ivory, scion of a wealth lumberman in Oregon, began the “hard work” of filmmaking with documentaries. “My first serious film was Venice: Theme and Variations, my master’s thesis for grad school,” he said. “I was young and inexperienced, and you don’t need a crew or actors for a documentary.”

So skillful was the maiden journey into filmmaking, The New York Times named it one of 1957’s ten best non-theatrical films. He then shifted his focus to India where he made The Sword and the Flute (1959), through which he met his business and life partner, Ismail Merchant, and The Delhi Way (1964). Ivory and Merchant eventually formed a four decades-long partnership that produced forty films, twenty-three of which were scripted or co-written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Asked which of his films he believes to be his best, he names the American-made production of Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, the story of a traditionally minded family Midwestern family in the 1930s and 1940s who were grappling with changing mores and expectations. It starred the real-life couple, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

“I think that was possibly the best thing we came up with,” Ivory said. “Some things, like Howard’s End, Room with a Viewand some of the French films, I like very much but probably Mr. and Mrs. Bridge was the best—it was almost autobiographical about my life in America.”

Ivory has lived and worked in many places over the decades but maintains homes in New York City and Claverack NY. “I liked all those (foreign) places at various times and for various reasons but now I am happy to be in the United States,” he said.

The celebration of his work at Hudson Hall will feature screenings of The Bostonians, Saturday, September 16th at 2PM; Call Me by Your Name, Saturday September 16th at 7PM, with a pre-film discussion with Ivory, Spears and special guests and Shakespeare Wallah, Sunday, September 17th at 3PM. At 5PM, the conversation will continue over drinks at the Red Dot Restaurant & Bar. No reservations are needed for the latter event.

Hudson Hall is located at 327 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534; (518) 822-1438; hello@hudsonhall.org.