June 7, 1928– James Ivory is a great American filmmaker. When asked to name a favorite film, I usually answer A Room With A View (1985), although that choice changes from moment to moment, the movie is really in a ten-way tie, but I name this one, based on the 1908 E. M. Forster novel, because of the time and place that I saw it and because it eventually led me to the trip of a lifetime, a month in Italy in 1991.
A Room With A View was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, it won three: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costumes and Best Production Design. A Room With A View won BAFTA for Best Film, The National Board Of Review Best Film, and in Italy, the film won the Donatello Prize for Best Foreign Language Picture and Best Director for Ivory.
90-year-old Ivory is a four-time Academy Award-nominee. Earlier this spring, he won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the gay-themed Call Me By Your Name, adapted from André Aciman’s 2007 novel of the same name. Plus, he won a Critics’ Choice Movie Award, Writers Guild of America Award and BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film.
Ivory was previously nominated for directing A Room With A View, Howards End (1992) and The Remains Of The Day (1993). He has directed 34 films in a career that started in 1953.
For his script for Call Me By Your Name, he also won the Critics’ Choice Movie Award, Writers Guild Award, and BAFTA Award.
In his acceptance speech, Ivory said:
“All people, whether straight or gay or somewhere in between, can understand the emotions of a first love…”
Besides being the oldest Oscar-winner, in history, Ivory remains the only person of any age to ever receive the Best Timothée Chalamet Tuxedo Shirt Award. 22-years-old Chalamet, nominated for Best Actor for Call Me By Your Name, is an inspiration for many reasons, even, or, especially for fashion. Ivory’s tux shirt was hand painted by artist Andrew Mania with Chalamet’s likeness.
Ivory is known for his long collaboration with Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The trio formed Merchant Ivory Productions in 1961. Their films have won six Academy Awards. Merchant was also Ivory’s longtime partner in life and love as well as in art. Their professional and romantic partnership lasted until Merchant’s death in 2005. Ivory said they kept their relationship a secret because his Mumbai-born partner belonged to a deeply conservative Muslim family.
He also memorialized his two longtime creative partners during his acceptance speech:
“I wouldn’t be standing up here without their inspired help.”
Merchant Ivory will always be most noted for their smart literary adaptations, restoring characterization, subtlety and period details to films in an era of explosions, aliens and special effects escapism. At first, their films were dismissed as yawners. Yet, A Room With A View, with a production budget of $7 million, grossed $55 million and left much anticipation for the next offering, the gay-themed Maurice (1987). Maurice is an impassioned love story. The author E.M. Forster was gay in a period when homosexuality was a crime in Britain. He had demanded that the book, written in 1914, be published only after he died. Forster left this world in 1970.
Forster’s literary executors tried to push Merchant Ivory toward the writer’s other works. The team found it hard to find investors for their gay love story. Jhabvala, declined to write the screenplay. Ivory co-wrote the script with Kit Hesketh-Harvey, an actor who had graduated from Cambridge where much of Maurice takes place. Just before shooting began, Julian Sands, who had co-starred in A Room With A View, opted out of playing the title role claiming personal reasons. Ivory was warned that during the new plague, a tale of gay passion was probably not a good bet for the box-office. The R-rated film shows men courting, kissing and making love. Ivory:
“It would be wrong to turn our faces from the homosexual community. We wanted the audience to root for a happy ending for the film’s male lovers. People should be saying: ‘I know what’s in their hearts, I can feel for them’. Although the book was written over 90 years ago, it’s completely relevant to today. The laws may have changed regarding homosexuality, but people’s feelings, the dismay, panic and compromises, they endure remain the same.”
In 1987, Maurice debuted at the Venice Film Festival where it received the Silver Lion Award for Best Film, Best Film Score and Best Actor Awards for co-stars James Wilby and Hugh Grant. The film received excellent reviews and made a profit.
Ivory and Merchant are the most impressive, impassioned, inspired and influential gay partnership in film history. The films of Merchant Ivory will always be loved for their visually sumptuous, smartly acted period pieces of literary works produced on tiny budgets. The couple and their work are so closely intertwined that film fans assumed that “Merchant Ivory” is the name of one individual.
Other Merchant Ivory films based on gay literary sources include their adaptations of Forster’s Howards End, Carson McCullers‘ The Ballad Of The Sad Café (1991) and Henry James‘ The Golden Bowl (2001).
Ivory had no problem gathering A-list actors willing to work for union scale: all of those darn Redgraves worked in his films, plus: Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Sam Waterston, Alan Bates, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Bernadette Peters, Christopher Reeve, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anne Baxter, Stanley Tucci, Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day-Lewis, Julie Christie, Ralph Fiennes, Nick Nolte, Leslie Caron, and Jeremy Northam.
Oregon’s own Ivory studied at the University Of Oregon, majoring in Architecture and Fine Arts and at the University Of Southern California Film School. He wrote, photographed, and produced Venice: Theme & Variations, a 30 minute documentary thesis film for his degree at USC. The film was named by The NY Times as one of the 10 Best Films of 1957.
In 2005, Merchant took his final bow, after a short illness. Ivory’s last film as director was The City Of Your Final Destination (2010), based on openly gay Peter Cameron’s novel. It is the only film he has made on his own. Ivory:
“Ismail was very much there to plan it, he bought the rights to the book and we went down to Argentina together to scout the location. We then went to China and made The White Countess and when we returned to London, that was when he died. I had to finish The White Countess without him and how can I put this?… It took me some time to recover.”
According to Call Me By Your Name‘s director Luca Guadagnino, plans are going forward for a sequel, with Ivory doing a screenplay adaptation of a portion of the novel that wasn’t used in the first film, in which the two main characters Elio and Oliver meet up again in America six years later in the 1990s. The director had no trouble getting lead actors Chalamet and Armie Hammer back for the sequel, describing the production on the first film as being akin to a “huge family being together for a long holiday”.
Ivory lives in the three houses on the three continents that inspired his work in art and life with Merchant. They made 35 films as a duo. Theirs is one of the great love stories.
