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James Ivory, wearing a shirt featuring the face of star Timothée Chalamet, with the Oscar he won for best adapted screenplay for Call Me by Your Name in 2018.Credit: AP
“It’s footage of a completely lost world because Afghanistan is no longer what I photographed,” he says. “So I said OK.”
He agreed to be in the documentary, which meant “a lot of me going around in a bathrobe and turning over ancient rolls of film” and talking about his early life.
In the documentary’s narration, Ivory says he grew up at a time in the US when “furtive glances were the closest a young gay man could get to expressing his desires”. So did he feel more liberated about his sexuality overseas, during an apparently carefree summer filming village life and meeting Afghans who sometimes invited him back to their homes?
“Oh listen, I’ve always been liberated to be myself,” Ivory says with a laugh. “I’ve never had that problem of not being myself.”
But he does admit he would have been “terrified” getting involved with anyone from such a different culture.
There were no such reservations when Ivory, who was raised in Oregon as a Protestant, met Merchant, an Indian Muslim, who had come to California when he was nominated for an Oscar for a short film.
They started their collaboration by asking Jhabvala to adapt her novel The Householder.
James Ivory, left, with Ismail Merchant as they arrived for an auction of movie memorabilia in New York in 1999.Credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
In the late 1980s and ’90s, Merchant Ivory’s lush literary adaptations A Room A View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day were all up for best picture and director at the Oscars. They gave celebrated roles to the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Daniel Day-Lewis, Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Hugh Grant.
The company’s costume dramas, which often featured characters whose roiling emotions were constrained by social class, included The Europeans, The Bostonians and The Golden Bowl.
With Merchant dying in 2005 and Jhabvala in 2013, Ivory has outlived his two great collaborators.
An Afghanistan from a very different time in 1960 in A Cooler Climate.Credit: The Bureau
“I miss them very much, of course I do,” he says. “But I’m still here and people are interested in working with me and they think I can come up with the goods and so I try to.”
Ivory focuses on writing now and considers his time directing movies is over.
“It takes a lot of energy,” he says. “I was at it until I was 80. But I think now, after another 10 years, I probably wouldn’t have the energy. And I’d never get insured, don’t forget. Nobody would ever insure a 95-year-old film director.”
Insisting that he still likes every one of his films, Ivory thinks there should be more attention on his lesser-known work.
“Most people don’t realise that I made just as many films in France as I did in England,” he says. “The French films never had the success that the English films did. That’s why people don’t know about them.
“A good example of that is the film we made in France set in the 18th century, Jefferson in Paris. Everybody just hated it. Then I made a film about Picasso, Surviving Picasso, that had the same sort of reception. I like those films very much.”
Email Garry Maddox at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.