Groundbreaking

Vanessa Redgrave with Madeleine Potter in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s adaptation of Henry James’s The Bostonians, directed by James Ivory

Stephen Soucy’s Merchant Ivory (co-written with Jon Hart) takes us into the extraordinary world of the creative quartet of producer Ismail Merchant (Oscar nominations for The Remains Of The Day with Mike Nichols and John Calley, Howards End, A Room With A View), filmmaker James Ivory (Oscar Screenplay win for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, and nominations for The Remains of the Day, Howards End, A Room With A View), screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Oscar wins for Howards End, A Room With A View, and a nomination for The Remains Of The Day), and composer Richard Robbins (Oscar nominations for The Remains of the Day, Howards End) through film clips and on-camera interviews with Ivory and Robbins, actors Emma Thompson (Oscar win for Howard’s End, nomination for The Remains Of The Day), Vanessa Redgrave (Oscar nominations for The Bostonians, Howard’s End), Helena Bonham Carter, Hugh Grant, James Wilby, Rupert Graves, Simon Callow, Sam Waterston, Mark Tandy, Madeleine Potter, Natasha McElhone, Greta Scacchi, Nickolas Grace, Felicity Kendal, Patrick Godfrey, Amanda Walker, Sam West, Adrian Ross Magenty, and James Fox.

Stephen Soucy with Anne-Katrin Titze on costume designers John Bright and Jenny Beavan: “They just tell these wonderful stories that James Ivory even learned from.”

We also hear from costume designers John Bright and Jenny Beavan (Oscar win for A Room With A View, nominations for Maurice, Howards End, The Remains Of The Day, and Sense And Sensibility), cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts (Oscar nominations for A Room With A View, Howard’s End), authors Tama Janowitz (Slaves Of New York) and Peter Cameron (The City Of Your Final Destination), plus many more insightful interviewees,

Merchant Ivory: An Extraordinary Partnership retrospective is screening Howard’s End, The Bostonians, In Custody, Maurice, Quartet, Roseland, and Heat And Dust at the Quad Cinema in New York through Wednesday, August 28.

From Palm Springs, California, Stephen Soucy joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Merchant Ivory.

Anne-Katrin Titze: Hello!

Stephen Soucy: Hi there, how are you?

AKT: Very well! How is James Ivory?

SS: He’s great, he’s 95-years-old and he is so sharp. It’s a marvel. He was just in London and did a screening of another documentary he was involved with at BAFTA. He’s inspiring.

AKT: That’s great. The Merchant Ivory family - you assembled them all. How did you become a part of that family and make this film?

SS: Now at this point I feel part of the Merchant Ivory family. The story is that I made a short animated film, called Rich Atmosphere: The Music Of Merchant Ivory Films. I wanted to make a film that explored the contribution of Richard Robbins, their longtime composer. He started composing for Merchant Ivory back in 1978. And I interviewed Jim for the first time.

Ismail Merchant, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and James Ivory Photo: courtesy of Cohen Media

I met James Ivory through my friend Peter Cameron, who was the writer of The City Of Your Final Destination, which was Merchant Ivory’s last film. I interviewed Jim twice for that short film, which started out as a short documentary and it then turned into an animated film. It’s a beautiful 5-minute film that Jim fell in love with. I pitched this film to him at that point. Jim has a long history of giving people opportunities. A lot of actors had their first major roles in a Merchant Ivory film - Helena Bonham Carter…

AKT: …Hugh Grant talks about it!

SS: Yeah, so Jim said yes and I embarked on making this film. Once I had Jim’s green light and approval, that’s when the doors opened. I shot 28 interviews in London and I met with so many of the Merchant Ivory family over there and then I just navigated the process and made the film.

AKT: You have many great stars talking but I like very much that you give room to, for example the two costume designers for Room With A View [John Bright and Jenny Beavan]. They explain how they had never been to Florence and then come the very telling details: James Ivory gave them a couple of Alinari photos, from the very first archives from the1880s, and Ismail gave them a colour brochure of Florence! It’s a fantastic story!

SS: It’s a great story and I do have some longer versions of interviews to put on the DVD as extras when Cohen Media releases that. There’s so much wonderful cinema history in this film. And people like Jenny Beavan and John Bright who you’re mentioning, they just tell these wonderful stories that James Ivory even learned from. They told a story about Howard’s End. It’s the opening of the film, Vanessa Redgrave is walking in the tall grass and her dress is moving behind her. It’s a very dark scene and John Bright, one of the costume designers, ran to the van and found a long necklace and had Vanessa kind of playing with it while she is moving through the scene and the light is glinting off the necklace. I showed Jim that interview and he said “I didn’t even know that. I had no idea!” Again, one of the cool things about James Ivory is that he trusts people. He feels that he hires the right people to do their jobs and in some instances he gives them a chance. Even like me, this is my first feature documentary film.

James Ivory on Ismail Merchant: “You have to be a conman to be a successful producer anyway…” Photo: courtesy of Cohen Media

AKT: Yet, it’s trust and verify - there is the story of the hair designer on the shoot at Fortnum & Mason, where Ivory picks out the one guy who doesn’t have the hair right! You do get the sense that everybody was working together and wanted the best outcome.

SS: Yes, it’s funny you say that, it’s so inspiring. Somebody talks about how some directors obsessively want to control everything that’s happening on the set. Jim’s style of directing was that he hires the best people and then he lets them get on with it. And to your point, he can spot and is aware of every detail, or as much as he can be. And that’s an example of somebody having the wrong look and he spotted that.

AKT: Emma Thompson of course is a great interview. I love the moment when she explains getting into a carriage. And she gets the note from Ivory: “It was boring. Do it again!”

SS: Just interviewing Emma Thompson was incredible. She had amazing experiences with them, Howard’s End, for which she won the Oscar and then Remains Of The Day, where she was nominated again. And then she never went back to Merchant Ivory. She followed her own trajectory. It’s interesting to talk to the people who stayed film after film and what that was like, that’s something I wanted to show with the film, too. It was that family environment. With Helena Bonham Carter, even if they didn’t make another film together, James Ivory still to this day is close to Helena Bonham Carter. There’s something about that Merchant Ivory experience that is kind of this lifelong connection.

Emma Thompson: “You required an immense amount of stamina to work for Merchant Ivory.” Photo: courtesy of Cohen Media

AKT: She is 'Little Thing' to him since Room With A View! The background to the four protagonists here, the Quartet, if you will, to quote the Jean Rhys title, it must have been difficult to give room to all of them. I did for instance not know that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was from Germany and that the family emigrated in 1939!

SS: I didn’t know that either. It took a while to figure out the best structure to tell this story. Merchant Ivory is of course Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. But it also was Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the screenwriter. We all know how important the screenwriter is to everything. And Richard Robbins. Many audience members I talked to said, it’s the music from Merchant Ivory that I remember. I felt that Ruth and Richard Robbins deserved a place in that Merchant Ivory story so I was very happy to be able to include them as much as I did.

AKT: Ismail Merchant published cookbooks and was cooking for the crew!?

SS: He at one point wanted to create frozen dinners to sell! He loved to cook and those meals on the set, I think somebody says it in the film, often they were used to deflect that he couldn’t pay people. So he was trying to create this goodwill environment. He was a very ambitious man, Ismail, and he fancied himself a writer and he was a director of films. He was very very ambitious.

Hugh Grant on Merchant Ivory: “Basically they made the films they wanted to make.” Photo: courtesy of Cohen Media

AKT: Different voices talk about his charm. Everything is forgiven, they want to kill him one day and the next day he charms them with a picnic. Even Anthony Hopkins in an archival interview says it. Did you reach out to him?

SS: We tried to. Emma Thompson reached out to Anthony Hopkins for me. I mean they had a rough ending with him suing them. So there was that. But Emma said that she thought he wasn’t the type who’d want to look back. We did ask but he politely declined.

AKT: You are linking back from Call Me By Your Name to Maurice to show how Merchant Ivory for the LGBTQ community was groundbreaking.

SS: I definitely wanted to highlight that. Maurice was so key and there are scenes from other films I show where they were kind of ahead of the curve.

AKT: The Bostonians, of course, yes!

SS: Portraying those love stories that were LGBT! Then the whole piece of the film where Paul Bradley, Merchant Ivory’s longtime producer, talks about how after they finished A Room with a View, I think he said “the world was at their feet.” They could choose any project. James Ivory wanted to do Maurice. That says a lot considering the time period and how risky that might have been. They never bowed down to other people’s expectations and I think that’s another inspiring takeaway.

Stephen Soucy with James Ivory holding his Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name Photo: courtesy of Cohen Media

AKT: The autobiographical mirroring that happens in the films is fascinating.

SS: One thing you said I think is just amazing. You called it a quartet! I had never thought of the four of them being a quartet, like Quartet, a very early film. I love that you highlighted that because of course I knew that I was setting it up with four people, but I didn’t make that connection and I love that. Because Quartet is one of James Ivory’s favourite films. I love that you brought that up.

AKT: I was actually looking for my copy of the book, because I also at one point was reading a lot of Jean Rhys. The Michael Stuhlbarg scene in Call Me By Your Name has James Ivory talk about how he had a completely different father. I believe it’s you who is interviewing him and you say, it was also different time! He makes it more personal that you do.

SS: I think I had six interviews and the last one was where he’s at the top of the stairs talking about that scene and his father. I would let the camera stay on Jim and I love his reaction in this moment when he’s talking and you can see the wheels in motion as he goes back in time in his memories. Sometimes I asked questions he wouldn’t want to answer, like on the steps in the Indian Consulate, where I threw out a question like, what was it like being gay in New York City in the early Sixties.

AKT: “How much time do we have?” he counters.

James Ivory with Ismail Merchant Photo: courtesy of Cohen Media

SS: Exactly! By him saying that, he means, I don’t want to talk about that. After that I rode in a taxi with him back to his apartment and there’s things that he would say off-camera and there’s things that he felt comfortable saying on-camera. His memoir, Solid Ivory, was published a couple of months before I did that final interview where I was able to have him talk a lot more about his open relationship with Ismail and Richard Robbins being a third component of that. He felt more comfortable addressing these things once his memoir was out in the world.

AKT: It’s interesting to listen to how he is talking. “It wasn’t a problem, because they didn’t know,” he says, then everybody knew because how could they not, because they were living together for 40 years. There’s still a lot of mystery in the story, although so many voices are heard. Thank you for including the moment when Vanessa Redgrave is scolding you! “That’s a little too dramatic,” she says.

SS: She is tough! She was a tough one. She’s notoriously difficult on interviewers. There’s a whole history. She didn’t like my questions, that was the main issue. She was giving me attitude and then I was giving her attitude.

AKT: It’s a great moment. I met her once at the memorial for Edward Said at Columbia University. It was not an interview, I just chatted with her, it was lovely.

SS: I will say, she warmed to me considerably after we finished the interview and my crew had left and I stayed for a few minutes. She grabbed my arm very tight when I was leaving and she said, Stephen, I just want to tell you how much I enjoyed that. So even though it was fraught, once she had a minute to let it settle, she made it clear to me that she enjoyed the interview and talking about Merchant Ivory because they were so important to her. So we left on a very positive high note. But while the cameras were rolling, she made me jump through a few hoops.

Helena Bonham Carter with Daniel Day-Lewis in Merchant Ivory’s multiple Oscar-winning A Room With A View

AKT: Tell me a bit about the other interviews and where they took place!

SS: I went to London and I interviewed 28 people in about two weeks. I had a location where I could invite people to, Helena Bonham Carter was there, Hugh Grant …

AKT: … Greta Scacchi!

SS: Exactly. They could come to me or I could go to them. Vanessa had me come to her. When I interviewed Emma, I came to her. Rupert Graves came to me. Sam West came to me.

AKT: Did you ever figure out why Ismail had so many early pictures with movie stars? Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Lucille Ball. It seemed mysterious even to James Ivory.

SS: Having access to those photos, the archive, that Jim has meticulously kept through the years both in his apartment in New York City and his home in Claverack! Those photos of Ismail - I wasn’t able to find out how he gained access but I do think he was doing things when he was in LA, like being an extra in various films. I think he was navigating that LA scene of Hollywood in the mid to late Fifties. It was pre him being a producer. I know he had a job working for the LA Times, I think he worked in a clothing store when he was in LA.

AKT: Of course! Everything imaginable, plus frozen food!

SS: Then I know he worked for the UN. He was a page at the UN when he was in New York City before he met James Ivory. And Ismail was making his first short film, The Creation Of Woman. So he was just living life as a guy in his early twenties in Los Angeles, as you do, right?

Merchant Ivory poster

AKT: Speaking of different professions, you said Peter Cameron is a friend of yours? I think I met him when I was working at a literary agency years ago and he had a book called Andorra.

SS: Yes, I love that book!

AKT: About five or six years ago, I was at a luncheon at Lotus Club and Fred Schepisi was also there and I believe he wanted to turn it into a film of Andorra. Do you know what happened to that?

SS: That just fell apart. But someone else has the rights to it, had it all cast, and I think they were trying to raise the money at the Cannes Film Festival and got money for it. Then the SAG, the actors’ strike happened. So it was put on hold. There were some really well-known actors attached to Andorra. I think it would make a fabulous film.

AKT: Everything is coming in circles. Say hi from me.

SS: I will.

AKT: Thank you for this!

SS: Thank you so much and thank you for engaging with the film. I’m so happy that you learned some things that you hadn’t known before!

Merchant Ivory opens at the Quad Cinema in New York on Tuesday, August 27 at 7:00pm followed by Q&A with Stephen Soucy and executive producer James Ivory.