James Ivory Opens up About Why He & Ismail Merchant Hid Their Love

In a talk with The Guardian, the ‘Call Me By Your Name’ writer spoke about his relationship with Ismail Merchant.

In a no-holds-barred interview with The Guardian, the Oscar-winning screenwriter for Call Me By Your Name, James Ivory criticised the director Luca Guadagnino for the lack of full frontal nudity in the film. Still baffled by the film’s resounding success, he said that the coming-of-age film’s wide appeal is a mystery to him. At 89, he became the oldest Academy Award winner this year.

While reiterating his disappointment with Guadagnino, over not showing Elio and Oliver naked, despite the specifications in the screenplay, he said,

“When people are wandering around before or after making love, and they’re decorously covered with sheets, it’s always seemed phoney to me. I never liked doing that. And I don’t do it, as you know.”

But this was not the most outspoken part of the parley. He went on to talk tenderly yet unabashedly about his gay relationship with his producing partner Ismail Merchant, which withstood the test of time. He lifted the longterm veil of secrecy that shrouded their relationship.

The duo, that ran Merchant Ivory Productions, met in the 60s and were in a companionship for 44 years till the death of Merchant. When he was questioned about why they kept their relationship under wraps, he attributed it to the illiberal mindset of Merchant’s community.

“Well, you just wouldn’t, That is not something that an Indian Muslim would ever say publicly or in print. Ever! You have to remember that Ismail was an Indian citizen living in Bombay, with a deeply conservative Muslim family there. It’s not the sort of thing he was going to broadcast. Since we were so close and lived most of our lives together, I wasn’t about to undermine him.”

James Ivory

Few collaborations are as distinctive as that between the two. When Ivory, who had never directed a narrative feature, met Merchant, who had never produced one, they made the Shashi Kapoor starrer, The Householder.

Bagging 31 Academy Award nominations, the pair garnered tremendous critical success with movies like A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992), and The Remains of the Day (1993).

Merchant’s demise brought in its wake a slow decline of the Merchant-Ivory Productions which Ivory’s Oscar win in March seems to have corrected.

Ivory even dismissed Daniel Day-Lewis’ retirement announcement. We would like to keep our fingers crossed in favour of this prophecy!

“He retired once before to become a shoemaker in Italy and luckily he didn’t persist at that, so hopefully this is short-term, too.”

James Ivory

Finally, he spoke about the prestigious accolade that he recently pocketed.

“It’s sitting at a window where all kinds of people could see it if they bothered to look across. Do you know the funny thing about an Oscar? It’s exactly the right weight for a dumbbell. So if you had two of them, you could do a pretty good work-out.”

Source: The Guardian

(This article is from The Quint’s archives and is now being republished to mark Ismail Merchant’s birth anniversary.)