When I grew up there weren't any sort of terrible things that happened. I had very understanding friends and my parents didn't live that long. I had a blessedly lucky youth and growing up.
James Ivory
I wanted to make a movie once at Lake of the Woods, where my parents had a cabin, which I now have. We actually planned, we wrote a whole screenplay about a kind of Indian spiritual group that was at Lake of the Woods. We weren't calling it that but it was Lake of the Woods. We wrote a whole screenplay about it but we couldn't get funding for it.
When I went to Europe for the first time, I went to Paris and then to Venice. So after Paris, Venice was my first great European city, and it just blew me away.
There's a cabin in Oregon I go to, which belonged to my parents. It's never been winterized. It's not a place you want to be after the first of October or before the first of June. I go for about three weeks every summer.
You can't go back and change everything because it is incredibly expensive to do. You just have to learn to live with your mistakes. If there aren't too many of them and they aren't too big, people generally don't seem to notice them.
The conscious decision, early on, was that I was going to live in New York. That was it.
Helena Bonham Carter was 19 when we made 'A Room with a View'. She came for the interview in these extraordinary boots and a black dress, and sat with her feet out in front of her.
I like a lot of good dialogue if it is well-acted.
Political consequences have never really come into my thinking. I didn't think about it when we made 'Maurice' or when I said first I would co-direct and then write the screenplay of 'Call Me'. I was just making something I thought I would enjoy creating.
But our writer, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - it was very much in her mind. After we had done 'A Room With a View' and 'Maurice,' she urged us to think about 'Howards End' as another candidate for adaptation.
The writer, Ruth Jhabvala, livedin India but was German. My partner Ismail Merchant was from Bombay but was educated in England and he had a different view on the world. Probably they had to contend with some sort of Oregonian-ness in me that they didn't understand and didn't know where it was coming from.
In India, I tried never to show enthusiasm for the things I wanted most, but instead to focus it falsely on something showy, ask the price of that and then make a disappointed face when told.
I went to Europe in '52 or '53, and when I came back, I stopped in New York. I remember looking out of a window on a glorious October morning and there was New York. And I thought, 'I'm coming here. This is for me.'
You know, a lot of people give up their religion, but, oh, my goodness, they go through such agonies. I never did.
Mind you, as a little boy, I always had other interests from most kids. I was not a boy who rubbed around baseball bats. I always had the storytelling instinct, even as a child. I was a very imaginative little boy.
I've seen it happen with other directors. Sometimes there's a period where, if they're lucky, they get the financing where they can make two films in a year.
I can tell you that when Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, our writer, when she would work on some of these grander novels like, say, a book like 'The Golden Bowl', that would take her months and I wouldn't know what she was doing, really.
I was in New York one day, and this guy ran off a bus, grabbed me, and told me that 'Maurice' had changed his life. I've also had it many, many times in England.
You can't make up Timothee Chalamet to look, say, 40. That would be terrible!
My interest in India began with my interest in Indian painting and music and that grew.
Did I develop any ruses of my own in order to buy what I wanted at a reasonable price? In time, of course, anyone who has ever done real business in an oriental bazaar will learn the tricks and feints of buying and bargaining there.
It came right on the heels of A Room With A View. And that was such an enormous success, so I think people were hoping that Maurice would also have that kind of success.
You know, if the filmmakers were satisfied with the film they just made, they could jump right in and make another one, instead of lingering on the last one.
See, nobody understood how we were able to make a film like 'A Room With a View' so cheaply, for about $3.2 million, and have it look as good as it did.
I've never had to search for themes. My films just come naturally out of my interest.
My father built me a theatre behind the house where I could put on plays. Dear me, I'm making it sound a bit grand, and it wasn't an amphitheatre or anything like that, just a little place with a roll-up curtain box and I'm sure the plays were childish lopsided things.
I was constantly going to the movies. My parents let me see whatever I wanted to and they only pulled me out of one movie in my life. That was 'Gunga Din' and they thought it was too violent.
I think you can study too much. I've seen that happen. Young people get immersed in the work of other directors and end up imitating them rather than finding their own identity.
A director must be patient and unflappable. I think I was always pretty relaxed. I don't find shooting as traumatic as some directors do. Some hate it. But you also have to be strong-willed and persistent enough to get what you want.
You can just start shooting things and see how it goes. But time is still money, so you have to know when you are finished. It's not like painting a picture which you could go on refining for 20 years - with a film you have to stop at some point, and that is no bad thing.
In 'A Room With a View' there's a lovely scene with Julian Sands and Helena Bonham-Carter in a wheat field. It was simply the right time of day: late afternoon, that golden light, wheat and poppies... So romantic. But I had no idea it would turn out that well, since we so rarely shoot in a studio.
It's important to see the work of as many directors as possible but you must not become self-conscious. You have to accept that your first attempts are going to be quite rough compared to the finished works of great masters.
Love is the absolute basis of my career.
This may sound corny, but I've always liked to make things that were beautiful.
I never work on a computer. I can't write on a computer. It's just not possible for me to do that.
Most of my films are set in an upper-middle-class world of well-off people who may have all kinds of emotional problems, but they live well.
When you tell a film financier that you want to do a Shakespeare film, their face drops. Shakespeare films don't have a very wonderful history at the box office.
Maybe there's something in the Oregon character that pushed me into the kind of life that I took up.
I think the Merchant Ivory brand really means literate dialogue. I think it starts with that. When people say something, you know it has some sort of ripples to it.
My 22-minute film, which I called 'The Sword and the Flute', turned out to be a romantic film about India made by someone who had never been to India, but who already had very romantic feelings about everything Indian.
In October 1959, I could scarcely wait to get off the plane that had brought me to New Delhi so that I could go to the Indian Arts Palace in Connaught Place and begin buying miniature paintings.
A lot of directors don't bother to go back and look at their films, but I do.
If I hear that a film of mine is going to be shown on a big screen somewhere and I haven't seen it in a while, I make a point to get to see it. I just want to see it up on the big screen.
It's always a matter of convincing the insurance people. They seem to think that after a certain age, you're just going to fall over or something.
In 'A Room With a View,' you have three young Englishmen running around naked and laughing and whooping and jumping in the water. It's something the English don't apparently find troublesome.
I found in making and directing films that the less you have voiceover, the better it is.
I love a well composed shot. It doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful, but it must be well composed.
I learned to paint in a historical method. First through watercolours and then through oil. Then, when I went to college and to the school of architecture, I took up modern painting.
I'm a great looker at pictures and paintings, and so forth. That's what I look for - a kind of formal beauty. I want that in my photography. It isn't always what we conventionally think of as beauty.
It was okay but then I found myself in that position of being merely a screenwriter. And you are merely the screenwriter, and there's no way around it. You don't have the same clout as the director.
