The Remains of Their Days

Ismail Merchant had been pursuing the film rights to a book by the famously prickly Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul for three years when, finally, the expansive, debonair producer-director tried the direct approach.

“I wrote to Vidia and said I would come and see him,” Merchant recalls. But word of Merchant’s negotiating skill had reached Naipaul. “He wrote back: ‘Don’t come, because I know of your persuasive powers. Work it out with my agents.’ Shortly afterwards, we bought the book outright.”

“The Mystic Masseur,” which opened Friday, is the 45th collaboration between Merchant, 65, and the fastidious, white-haired James Ivory, 73, whose film partnership has become almost a brand name to moviegoers.

“Merchant Ivory” is shorthand for a certain kind of film: a story adapted from literature featuring imposing houses stuffed with expensive bric-a-brac, women in bonnets and corsets, men in white linen suits or tuxedos. Period dramas enacted against the ravishing backdrops of rural England, Italy, France, India or America’s eastern seaboard.

Class and money surface as issues, but discreetly so; these are restrained films, without profanity, violence or fast-paced action.

Today the partners, with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, mark 40 years since the first Merchant Ivory film, “The Householder,” went into production. In the cutthroat film industry, four decades is an unusually long run.

Not every Merchant Ivory film has been successful, either with critics or audiences. Five films from the last decade--”Jefferson in Paris,” “Surviving Picasso,” “Cotton Mary,” “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries” and “The Golden Bowl”--have not been commercial hits.

The reasons may be partly generational and partly stylistic. For years, the wonder of Merchant Ivory was that they managed to make such handsome films on shoestring budgets. But tastes in the independent sector altered sharply with the advent of films like Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies, and videotape” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs.” Suddenly it seemed possible to make low-budget films with wide appeal outside the studio system that were contemporary, visually urgent and visceral. To a younger generation of filmmakers and their new audiences, the Merchant Ivory films began to look static, cluttered and a little dull.

But despite a recent lean patch, few would rule out the possibility of Merchant Ivory successes in the future. The team is now shooting its adaptation of Diane Johnson’s novel “Le Divorce” in Paris with the hip young actresses Kate Hudson (“Almost Famous”) and Naomi Watts (“Mulholland Drive”). At the advanced stage of Merchant and Ivory’s careers, they will certainly stay together--and they have proved they can make both commercial and critical hits.

Their halcyon days came between 1986 and 1993, with three costume dramas involving British characters that came to define Merchant Ivory’s house style. “A Room With a View,” “Howards End” and “The Remains of the Day” were worldwide hits that garnered a cluster of Oscars and Oscar nominations.

Yet Indian-born Merchant, who directed “The Mystic Masseur,” becomes irritated if Merchant Ivory’s name is linked solely to costume drama. “People misunderstand,” he complained in an interview at his London home earlier this year. “If you wear a costume and you’re in a stately home, yes, it’s a costume drama. But people don’t say that it’s also a good story. Our very first film had a good story, delightful characters and wonderful locations. That territory hasn’t changed.”

Merchant argues that the team’s recent films have diversified, and no longer concentrate solely on the English upper classes and stately homes.

At the same time, other filmmakers have muscled in on the costume drama business: Martin Scorsese with “The Age Of Innocence,” Ang Lee with “Sense and Sensibility.” Robert Altman has said of his Oscar-nominated hit “Gosford Park,” set in an English country house, “We’re straying into Merchant Ivory territory here.”

The partnership had inauspicious beginnings. In 1961, Merchant, then 24, and American James Ivory, a director of short films and documentaries, visited German-born novelist Jhabvala at her home in New Delhi, India, with a proposal. If she wrote a screenplay based on her novel “The Householder,” the two said, they would make the ensuing film. She was astonished; she had never even written a script before.

No problem, Merchant reassured her: He had never produced a full-length feature film, and Ivory had never directed one. Jhabvala’s Indian husband, Cyrus, warned her to be wary of these two; he suspected they might be fly-by-nights.

Forty years on, no one in the Merchant Ivory camp has flown anywhere. Instead, the three co-conspirators remain a creative clique. Yet the way they approached “The Householder” created a template for the company’s subsequent productions.

The budget was desperately tight, cast and crew working for next to nothing, and the money ran out halfway through the shoot. Merchant, an accomplished cook (and later an author of cookbooks), ordered in massive quantities of food from a New Delhi restaurant and personally served it at one big table. “You don’t want to do someone in by not paying them properly,” he says, “but you can create a certain atmosphere to make them part of your life. Then they can work in a beautiful way.”

His silken cajoling of Jhabvala set a tone too. Merchant is known as a tough negotiator who can get his way with his honeyed tones. The gift seems inborn. “You have to be a super salesman,” he says, giggling. “I remember my college [dean] saying I could sell snowballs to Eskimos.”

Ivory says of Merchant and Jhabvala: “We wouldn’t have continued in this partnership if we weren’t all friends. We have the same ideas about the films we want to make. No one wants to go off in some wild direction. I won’t be making, say, science-fiction movies.”

Ivory grew up in Oregon, where his father owned a lumber mill. As a young man he visited India and Venice, Italy, falling in love with both places and making short films about them.

Merchant, the son of a textile dealer with a penchant for gambling, aimed to become a Hollywood producer, and took an MBA course at New York University. On reaching Hollywood, he found he preferred European films and decided that he wanted to produce films based in non-American cultures.

Jhabvala’s Jewish parents fled Germany in 1939, when she was 11, and settled in London. She studied at London University, and at 24 married Cyrus, moving with him to New Delhi.

After Merchant Ivory’s films gained momentum, the Jhabvalas moved to upstate New York in the late 1970s. “We’ve been an itinerant troupe,” Merchant noted, though they spend part of the year living close to one another, near the Jhabvalas.

They have also been a troupe that has known fluctuating financial fortunes. The year 2000 was a bad one for Merchant Ivory. The company felt obliged to buy back its film of Henry James’ novel “The Golden Bowl” from Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, who had demanded radical changes, and resell it to another U.S. distributor for far less money. Their decision landed them in a cash crisis.

“But we did it because we believed in the integrity of the film,” Merchant says. “Weinstein wanted the opening scene cut, and Uma Thurman’s character [Charlotte Stant] punished. He’s a good marketing man, but he doesn’t know how to behave towards artists.”

For his part, Weinstein calls Merchant Ivory “great filmmakers,” but recently told New York magazine, “They need another person--and it ain’t me, because they don’t trust me--that they listen to.”

Merchant Ivory had suffered money problems before. Two backers for “Heat and Dust” abruptly withdrew 20 years ago, potentially endangering the film. Ivory recalled that “in Italy, ‘A Room With A View’ almost foundered a few weeks before shooting. We were in Florence setting up, and our investors disappeared.”

Merchant Ivory always operates on the tightest margins possible. Their highest film budget was a mere $16.5 million for 1996’s “Surviving Picasso,” starring Anthony Hopkins.

Simply, they pay the people who work on their films as little as possible. When Helena Bonham Carter, who appeared in “A Room With a View” and “Howards End,” presented them with lifetime British Academy fellowships at the BAFTA awards earlier this year, she said of their films: “You won’t make much money, but you might win an Oscar.”

Hopkins, interviewed by The Times in 1996 after “Surviving Picasso,” was more brusque. He called Merchant Ivory cheapskates. “They have a very underhanded way of dealing with people,” he stormed, charging that they held back payments to gain interest.

How, then, do their films look so opulent? “All the money has to go up on the screen,” Merchant says. “People have to work hard on our films, harder than they would on others. We save wherever we can.”

I once saw this for myself. Arriving on the set of “The Remains of the Day,” I was shown around by Merchant--not usually a producer’s job. “Where’s the unit publicist today?” I asked. “I am the unit publicist,” he said grandly. Of course: He could play host, a role he enjoys, and save a salary.

When costume designer and frequent collaborator Jenny Beavan requested a budget for “Jefferson in Paris” that was deemed too high by Merchant, he made her fly to India and have the costumes made up of Indian fabrics at a fraction of the cost.

Although actors and crew may voice disaffection on the set, they return to work for Merchant Ivory. The reason is obvious: Within strict financial limitations, Ivory encourages them to do their best work. His direction has advanced the careers of Hugh Grant, James Wilby, Greta Scacchi, Rupert Graves, Simon Callow and others.

Despite their struggles in raising money, and their advancing years, the trio intends to carry on, now shooting “Le Divorce,” with Hudson, Watts, Matthew Modine and Sigourney Weaver.

“I’ll be doing this till I go to my grave,” Merchant says. “It regenerates your youth and energy.” Ivory has drawn up a short list of Shakespeare plays he wants to adapt for film and will not discuss retirement. “This is what I do,” he said, shrugging. “And I can still do it.”

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David Gritten is a frequent contributor to Calendar.