The Hindu : International : Will Merchant-Ivory team continue?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 27, 2005

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International

Will Merchant-Ivory team continue?

Hasan Suroor

LONDON: As tributes to Ismail Merchant, who died here on Wednesday, poured in, the big question being asked in film circles was whether the Merchant-Ivory team which he founded, with director James Ivory and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, would continue now that the man who had been its guiding spirit for 44 years was no more.

Ismail Merchant's friends and film commentators said that his sudden death was a huge blow from which Merchant-Ivory Productions may not find it easy to recover.

"I don't know if they will continue because I'm not sure James [Ivory] will have the stomach to carry on," said David Puttnam, one of Britain's most prominent producers.

Lord Puttnam, who knew Ismail Merchant personally, described him as an "extraordinary man" and a truly "independent film producer in Britain."

"Ismail was unique — he absolutely carved his own niche," he said.

Actor Anthony Hopkins, who worked in James-Ivory films, Howard's End and The Remains of the Day, called Ismail Merchant a "true pioneer", a "great maverick producer, a law to himself."

"He could charm the birds out of the trees... and sometimes he could get you to work for nothing," he recalled.

Another leading British actor Ralph Fiennes, who just finished shooting in Shanghai for Merchant-Ivory's The White Countess, said: "I was full of admiration for their passion and commitment to the film we were making." Britain's film establishment remembered Ismail Merchant as much for the quality of his cinema as for his personal charm, persistence and optimism. The Times hailed him as a "giant" of British cinema, and Sir Sydney Samuelson, the first British Film Commissioner, who was involved with Ismail Merchant's Shakespearewallah, recalled that when he first met Ismail Merchant "he had never got any money" to pay for things he wanted for his films.

"But such was his personality and integrity, I found that as a supplier you couldn't say no to him... from such humble beginnings, he rose to make some of the definitive pictures of the time," Sir Sydney told a newspaper.

The Merchant-Ivory team was formed on nothing more solid than a wing and a prayer by a young Ismail Merchant after he ran into James Ivory while on his way to the Cannes festival in 1961.

In an interview, he famously recalled: "When we first began, Ruth told us she had never written a screenplay. That was not a problem. Since I had never produced a feature film and Jim had never directed one." But that was then, and the rest is history.

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