James Ivory in Conversation is an exclusive series of interviews
with a director known for the international scope of his filmmaking
on several continents. Three-time Academy Award nominee for best
director, responsible for such film classics as A Room with a View
and The Remains of the Day, Ivory speaks with remarkable candor and
wit about his more than forty years as an independent filmmaker. In
this deeply engaging book, he comments on the many aspects of his
world-traveling career: his growing up in Oregon (he is not an
Englishman, as most Europeans and many Americans think), his early
involvement with documentary films that first brought attention to
him, his discovery of India, his friendships with celebrated
figures here and abroad, his skirmishes with the Picasso family and
Thomas Jefferson scholars, his usually candid yet at times
explosive relations with actors. Supported by seventy illuminating
photographs selected by Ivory himself, the book offers a wealth of
previously unavailable information about the director's life and
the art of making movies. James Ivory on: On the Merchant Ivory
Jhabvala partnership: "I've always said that Merchant Ivory is a
bit like the U. S. Govenment; I'm the President, Ismail is the
Congress, and Ruth is the Supreme Court. Though Ismail and I
disagree sometimes, Ruth acts as a referee, or she and I may gang
up on him, or vice versa. The main thing is, no one ever truly
interferes in the area of work of the other." On Shooting Mr. and
Mrs. Bridge: "Who told you we had long 18 hour days? We had a
regular schedule, not at all rushed, worked regular hours and had
regular two-day weekends, during which the crew shopped in the
excellent malls of Kansas City, Paul Newman raced cars somewhere,
unknown to us and the insurance company, and I lay on a couch
reading The Remains of the Day." On Jessica Tandy as Miss Birdseye
in The Bostonians: "Jessica Tandy was seventy-two or something, and
she felt she had to 'play' being an old woman, to 'act' an old
woman. Unfortunately, I'couldn't say to her, 'You don't have to
'act' this, just 'be,' that will be sufficient.' You can't tell the
former Blanche Du Bois that she's an old woman now." On Adapting E.
M. Forster's novels "His was a very pleasing voice, and it was easy
to follow. Why turn his books into films unless you want to do
that? But I suppose my voice was there, too; it was a kind of duet,
you could say, and he provided the melody." On India: "If you see
my Indian movies then you get some idea of what it was that
attracted me about India and Indians...any explanation would sound
lamer than the thing warrants. The mood was so great and
overwhelming that any explanation of it would seem physically
thin...I put all my feeling about India into several Indian films,
and if you know those films and like them, you see from these films
what it was that attracted me to India." On whether he was
influenced by Renoir in filming A Room with a View "I was certainly
not influenced by Renoir in that film. But if you put some good
looking women in long white dresses in a field dotted with red
poppies, andthey're holding parasols, then people will say,
'Renoir.'" On the Critics: "I came to believe that to have a
powerful enemy like Pauline Kael only made me stronger. You know,
like a kind of voodoo. I wonder if it worked that way in those days
for any of her other victims--Woody Allen, for instance, or Stanley
Kubrick." On Andy Warhol as a dinner guest: "I met him many times
over the last twenty years of his life, but I can't say I knew him,
which is what most people say, even those who were his intimates.
Once he came to dinner with a group of his Factory friends at my
apartment. I remember that he or someone else left a dirty plate,
with chicken bones and knife and fork, in my bathroom wash basin.
It seemed to be a symbolic gesture, to be a matter of style, and
not just bad manners."
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