Ismail Merchant tells Donald Clarke about the Merchant-Ivory way of making films.
In one - and probably only one - respect, the film-making team of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant resembles The Monkees. It would be nice to believe that all creative partnerships are so amicable that, like that 1960s pop group, the artists involved hang around together in the same house when not working. Sadly, this is rarely the case, but Merchant and Ivory have remained fast friends since they met in the early 1960s and, even now, share a home in up-state New York. So it feels particularly strange to be talking to producer Merchant without director Ivory.
I imagine interviewing Ernie Wise without Eric Morcambe must have been a similar experience.
Before talking about the sequence of literary adaptations - A Room With a View, Howards End, The Remains of the Day - which has brought them both acclaim and a certain degree of ridicule, I ask just how they have managed to remain so close for so long. Working and living together is surely a recipe for friction.
"Heads are torn off, but they grow back again" he laughs. "If you look at a placid stream that runs the same way all the time, it is not interesting. A stream that has ups and downs, that is much more interesting. I am like Shiva with the sword; I cut off heads and they grow back."
Merchant was born in Bombay in 1936, and studied both there and in New York. He first met Ivory in 1961 when the US director was in India to make a documentary about Delhi. Their early films together were all set in Merchant's home country - The Householder, Shakespeare Wallah, The Guru among them - and utilised the talents of the German-born writer, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who remains their most regular collaborator.
What has changed for the colleagues since then? "Our views have not changed. We still want to explore other worlds. The work methods that were there in 1961 still go on. After 40 years, some people would retire or narrow their worlds but we keep expanding our worlds."
Merchant, who, like most producers, is a forceful salesman, is very keen to put this line forward. He is adamant that the films they make have consistently showed a desire to break new ground and experiment. Yet their work since 1984's The Bostonians (from Henry James) has focused almost exclusively on literary adaptations. Have the film-makers' own voices been drowned out by those of Forster, James and the other Dead White Males?
"No. Your voice still comes out. Look at Howards End. Ruth adapted that with such clarity. She has added scenes that resonate with E.M. Forster's voice, but that is her voice actually. It is a special gift to be able to take those writers' voices and transform them into film." But isn't this just a sophisticated form of ventriloquism, with their movies as the dummies? "No. No," he says and goes on to contradict himself by explaining how well Jhabvala caught James's tone in their version of The Golden Bowl.
But, despite his dedication to the party line, Merchant is an easy man to like. Glossy, precise and with the kind of clean, cut-glass English that you only get from urbane Indians, he is a long way from the classic caricature of the cigar-chewing producer.
Le Divorce, an adaptation of Diane Johnson's 1998 novel starring Kate Hudson, Naomi Watts, demonstrates the difficulties that come with being either Merchant or Ivory. This is their first film since 1989's Slaves of New York to be set contemporaneously, and, like that Tama Janowitz adaptation, it has been roundly thumped by the critics. If they stay with the bonnets and the bustles, they are accused of lack of adventure; if they try to engage with our own century, they seem to get into deeper trouble. "Oh, we don't care," he says. "They try to throw dirt, but that doesn't affect us at all. It would be foolish to be scared by it and behave differently."
In Le Divorce, Hudson plays a young American woman who visits her sister in Paris, where she is introduced to the charms and pretensions of chic French society. Merchant has a flat in Paris, and has always felt at home there. "In one sense, France has always been a little like Bengal - quite chauvinist. They are very much into their own world: language, playwrights, food, fashion. Bengalis will always shun the rest of India and think first of their Bengali culture."
Merchant's work has intermittently engaged with the land of his birth. Three of the four theatrical features he has directed have dealt with characters from the sub-continent. Meanwhile, Merchant and Ivory - an Indian and an American - have become pillars of the British establishment, a fact recognised by their BAFTA fellowship in 2002. "I feel like an international citizen," he says.
Their next film will be made in China from an original script by Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of The Day. And the friendship between Merchant and Ivory seems as secure as ever (the two men, who are both gay, have been described as "long-time companions", but the exact nature of the relationship remains ambiguous).
Confirming the image of a high-brow Monkees, Merchant say Jhabvala frequently stays with the two men. "We never really get sick of one another. Sometimes the other person doesn't speak, but you enjoy them being there. It is almost like a secret language; you know what the other person wants. Families live together. They enjoy one another, but they have quarrels. Sometimes, they drift in other directions. And it's the same with us."
Le Divorce is on general release
