Longtime film director James Ivory opens his latest movie, “The White Countess,” after an extensive career of lauded films. This time, though, everything will be different. James Ivory’s partner in filmmaking and life, Ismail Merchant, died last May. The pair met more than 40 years ago when Merchant was traveling from California to the Cannes Film Festival.
“I had made an Indian documentary, which [Merchant] saw and liked very much,” Ivory says. Merchant was proud of his Indian heritage and wanted to find a way to make English language films in India to be exported to the West.
Merchant remembers his first New York meeting with Ivory in Robert Emmet Long’s book “The Films of Merchant Ivory.”
“I realized he knew something about India not in a dry, academic way but with understanding,” Merchant said. “What was absolutely extraordinary was his feeling for India.”
This led the pair to enter into an artistic collaboration.
“He said, ‘Why don’t we make a film?’” Ivory told the Blade. “That’s how we started out, and he became the closest person in my life.”
Merchant was the producer of the films that came to fall under the Merchant Ivory label. “Howard’s End,” “A Room With a View,” and “Maurice,” all based on gay novelist E.M. Forster’s works, are perhaps the pair’s most famous films, along with Oscar-nominated “The Remains of the Day.”
“The White Countess,” starring Ralph Fiennes and Natasha Richardson, is set against the backdrop of Japan’s earliest invasions of China in 1936 and 1937. Fiennes plays Jackson, a retired and now-blind American diplomat who wants to build a fantastic and culturally significant nightclub in Shanghai. He meets Richardson’s Countess Sofia, a royal Russian widow in exile who has become a dance hall girl to support her family.
Jackson decides that Sofia is the hostess he needs to make the club succeed. Throughout this backdrop of impending social upheaval, the two forge a relationship of trust and eventual love.
Ivory had not yet worked with Fiennes, although they almost did for “Maurice.”
“We were planning to make ‘Maurice,’ and Julian Sands was going to play Maurice,” Ivory says of the gay main character of the novel and film. Sands chose not to do the film, and Merchant and Ivory scrambled to find a replacement. Fiennes was one of the candidates.
“I liked Ralph Fiennes very much, but he couldn’t do it because he had some sort of commitment with the National Theater,” Ivory says. The role eventually went to James Wilby.
Sumptuously told in strong visual metaphor and deeply moving scenes of intense intimacy, “The White Countess” opens in New York and L.A. on Dec. 21 and moves into wide release on Jan. 20.
The award-winning director will be going through the opening hoopla alone this time, though.
“What fun there is was mostly provided by him,” Ivory says of Merchant. “He’s not here. I’m always aware of it.”