James Ivory Has Been Making Films for 70 Years. His Latest Might Be His Most Personal

Taking pride of place on the bookshelf, though, foregrounding titles like Benjamin Rowland’s The Art and Architecture of India and Charles Allen’s Plain Tales from the Raj is a framed black-and-white photo of a youthful Ismail Merchant—Ivory’s partner in life, and, along with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala at their production company Merchant Ivory, in film. Merchant passed away in 2005, but walking through the New York apartment they shared together, it’s hard not to encounter his presence everywhere, not least in a beautiful pencil portrait of Merchant in the main room. “We were married,” Ivory told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018. “We didn’t have to get married.” Their relationship happened to change the course of film history: In the Guinness Book of World Records, Ivory and Merchant are celebrated as the longest partnership in independent cinema.

In an email, the director Wes Anderson writes: “Jim, with [Merchant] and [Prawer Jhabvala], may be among the most independent of independent film-makers ever—and their longevity is possibly unrivalled? They initiated their own projects and worked with their team of regular collaborators for something like 50 years. And of course Jim is still at it… What don’t we learn from him/them? Howard’s End and A Room with a View were so popular (and good!): maybe we overlook how wide-ranging and adventurous this body of work really is.”

Ivory’s output slowed considerably after Merchant’s passing, and even more after Jhabvala’s: he has not directed a feature-length since she passed. But the last five years have seen Ivory rally, introducing another triumphant chapter of his public life. There was the Oscar win in 2018, and then last year the release of his book Solid Ivory: Memoirs, a lush, insightful and sometimes bawdy remembrance of his youth and globetrotting artistic, professional and sexual adventures.

And, a few hours after we meet, he’ll head to the 60th New York Film Festival in Lincoln Center for the world premiere of A Cooler Climate, a documentary, co-directed with Giles Gardner, on the life-changing 1960 trip he took to Afghanistan. It is, counting shorts and TV movies, Ivory’s 35th film as a director. He directed his first film, the short Four in the Morning, in 1953.

“It’s a great pleasure to be here after all these years,” he’ll tell the crowd. “I was here on the third year of the festival.” Plenty, of course, has changed. “I lived my life and did what I wanted to do,” he says during the open forum. “I’m one of those lucky people that didn’t have to struggle with [being who I am]. I never felt a moment of guilt—that’s because that little boy standing there was thinking that there was something special [in him].”