James Ivory: ‘Having work to do is a great healer’

And given that Ivory was 89 when he won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for the film Call Me By Your Name – making him the oldest Oscar winner ever – he’s making quite the case for third-age creativity.

In short, there’s hope for the rest of us. “Oh, 60 is youth,” Ivory tells me from New York. “60 is the new 40. You have to think like that.”

For a time there in the 1980s and 1990s, Merchant Ivory, the production team made up of Ivory, writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and producer Ismail Merchant (Ivory’s partner in film and in life), was the premier purveyor of classy and classic period drama. Merchant Ivory was seen as a stamp of quality (though where some saw elegance, others saw prissiness).

A Cooler Climate predates and postdates that era. “You see me now, an old man in a bathrobe going along with a cane poking around in boxes and opening cans of film,” he points out. But we also see what he shot back in 1960. A Cooler Climate, co-written and co-directed with Giles Gardner, is in some ways a postscript to a remarkable career. A postscript based on a preface. In 1960 Ivory was very much at the beginning of his film career. He had been given money by the Asia Society of New York to make a film in India. While he was shooting it the society sent him a letter suggesting that maybe, given the generous budget they had supplied, he could actually make two movies. He decided to go to Afghanistan for the second.

“You know why I went?” he asks. “I was working on a documentary in Delhi and it was getting to March and April and it was getting very, very hot and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t stand it.’

“And all the neighbouring countries were equally hot or hotter. Pakistan was an impossible place to go and I had no real interest in going to Burma. And then I thought, ‘Maybe Afghanistan?’”

The resulting footage offers a glimpse of Kabul before the trauma of recent history. “There was no Mujahideen, there was no Taliban. It was a central Asian kingdom. It had a king. He never made an appearance, but there was a king.

“And it’s just as you see [in the film]. It was quite a primitive place. Basically a city of mud buildings.”

Ivory was 32 in 1960, a man at the start of his filmmaking career. He admits he didn’t know much about Afghanistan – the place or its people – before he went there. Was he something of a dilettante at the time?

“I was anything but a dilettante. I was a very serious young filmmaker. Today you can make a film on your telephone. Making films in those days was hard work .You had to carry the stuff around. Then in places like Afghanistan or India you had to find a way to get your film out of those countries and off to a lab in Los Angeles or New York to develop and print it. I shot thousands of feet of film but I never saw a bit of it until I finally came back to New York and I saw what I had.

“By that time I had met Ismail Merchant and he wanted to make feature films and he wanted to make The Householder, which was based on a novel by Ruth Jhabvala, her first novel. He more or less said, ‘You will be the director and I will be the producer and she will be the writer.’ And I said OK. And that’s what we did.” And the pattern for your life was set, James? “Yes it was, the three of us together. The future was Merchant Ivory.”

Merchant appears at the end of A Cooler Climate and in many ways the film – as well as being a form of time travel back to 1960s Kabul – becomes more and more a sly memoir of Ivory himself as it progresses; about the young man he was and the older man he would become.

Through the story of the Mughal emperor Babur, the film explores gay desire. Babur was also a fascination for the English novelist EM Forster who would soon come to play such a huge part in Ivory’s cinematic life.

Too big a part perhaps. Merchant Ivory had a long and storied history, but there’s been a tendency to reduce the team’s work to the three Forster adaptations (they also adapted Forster’s posthumously-published novel Maurice about the love between two men) and Remains of the Day.

But that overlooks the films Ivory, Merchant and Jhabvala made in India, America and France. “I made more films in France than I made in England,” Ivory points out. “Sometimes it irritates me. When they want to show our films they say, ‘We want to show Maurice – everybody loves Maurice – we want to show A Room with a View and Howards End.’

“But they don’t say they want to show one of our Indian films like Heat and Dust, which was also based on a very successful novel which won the Booker Prize. And they don’t want to show Shakespeare Wallah, which is the basis of everything. Shakespeare Wallah was the film that really got us going with the critics in France and the United States, but they don’t even know about it which is a great pity.”

Shakespeare Wallah came out in 1965 and was loosely based on a real-life travelling family theatre troupe of English actors in India led by Geoffrey Kendal, who appears in the film alongside Shashi Kapoor and his own teenage daughter Felicity Kendal. Kendal was one of the earliest beneficiaries of Ivory’s eye for bright new talent. Helena Bonham Carter (A Room with a View) and Samuel West (Howards End) can also thank Ivory for prominent early roles.

“Hugh Grant’s another one,” Ivory points out (Grant made an early appearance in Maurice). “Well, it seems to me it’s always been an obvious thing that if you have young parts in a story and they have to be 19, 20, 21, then you find actors of that age and you cast them. Chances are you’ll find out sooner or later whether they’re good or not.

“If the part calls for a girl of 19 I’m not going to cast an established actor of 30. And that’s why we started a lot of young people off in their careers.”

When we speak it is not long after the news that Julian Sands, one of the stars of A Room with a View, has gone missing while hiking in southern California. “Oh terrible, terrible, terrible,” Ivory laments when I bring it up. “And the awful thing is his ex-brother-in-law Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who wrote the script of Maurice with me, died three or four days ago.”

Age brings with it a growing catalogue of losses. Ivory’s life and work partner Ismail Merchant died during surgery in 2005. “I was helped in a way by the fact that we were in the middle of a film when he died,” Ivory suggests. “We were making The White Countess – that’s another one people don’t talk about which was made in China for heaven’s sake. Anyway, we were making The White Countess in China. I had to finish it. It was a studio film. It was being made by Sony and I had to finish it and somehow the work itself was a great help to me.

“And immediately after that I made another film in Argentina – The City of Your Final Destination. We were making that in 2006 and 2007, and that was the first time I felt happy again. Not happy as I had been happy before. But what I was doing made me happy. Having work to do is a great healer.”

Merchant and Ivory kept their relationship secret for years, perhaps unsurprisingly given that Merchant came from a conservative Indian Muslim family. But in recent years Ivory seems to have become more outspoken. A fallout with the Call Me By Your Name’s director Luca Guadagnino saw him removed from his role as co-director and Ivory even spoke out disapprovingly at the absence of full-frontal male nudity in Call Me By Your Name. His memoir Solid Ivory is sexually frank in a way that might surprise those who see his films as rather too buttoned up.

All of which prompts a final question. Has Ivory become more fearless as he has grown older? “I think you do. I mean what’s going to happen to you after all?”

A Cooler Climate receives its UK premiere at Glasgow Film Theatre on Friday at 6.45pm. It also screens next Saturday in the same venue at 1.50pm