View From Prospero's Island

By Gerald Clarke

"Shoot, Jim! Shoot!" For 25 years that insistent cry--half command, half appeal--has been heard around the world, or wherever cameras have been set up for a Merchant-Ivory production. From India (Heat and Dust) to Boston (The Bostonians) to Florence (A Room with a View), Ismail Merchant, the producer part of the team, has been pleading with James Ivory, his directing partner, please, please to hurry up: time is short and money is shorter. So constant was the refrain on the English sets of their newest picture, Maurice, that when filming ended last month the cast set it to music and sang it at the wrap party, Shoot, Jim! Shoot!

The huge and unexpected triumph of A Room with a View has brought in lavish Hollywood offers but has failed to alter Merchant's pinchpenny philosophy. Made for a mere $3 million -- one-fourth the cost of the average Hollywood movie -- it is expected to gross $50 million and is a strong contender for Oscar nominations. Maurice, which is also an adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel, will cost even less, $2.5 million, and feature two relatively unknown actors, James Wilby as Maurice and Hugh Grant as Clive, his first romance. "Ismail has tremendous charm and substitutes it for the lack of money," explains Helena Bonham Carter, 20, one of the stars of A Room with a View. "You might not get paid very much, but you tend to believe in what you're making. And he feeds you very well."

Those uncomplicated ingredients have at last brought them commercial success, and neither Merchant nor Ivory seems eager to tamper with the recipe. Merchant, 50, is a hustler who grew up in Bombay, India's film capital. Coming to the U.S. in 1958, he studied business at New York University and made a short, which won an Academy Award nomination. Ivory, 58, is a shy Oregonian who attended film school at the University of Southern California and made a short about Indian miniature paintings. Merchant liked it; they talked, became partners and headed for India.

Their diverse backgrounds led them to their natural subject, the often amusing conflict of cultures. Their limited budgets forced them to work on canvases that were, by Hollywood standards, miniature. A Room with a View, their best picture so far, is an exquisite, almost delicious comedy of manners about Edwardian conventions being routed by the warming sun of Italy.

Arriving in 1961 in India, they persuaded Novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to write their scripts, and Jhabvala, 59, an English-educated German married to an Indian, has worked on almost all their pictures, Maurice being a rare exception. The team's reputation was established with their second film, Shakespeare Wallah. The story of a troupe of English actors traveling across India, the film was made on a budget of $80,000, small even by Indian standards. The modest renown established by that film was nearly lost by a subsequent series of almost perversely maladroit efforts, including The Guru, Bombay Talkie and Savages.

Fortune began to smile in the late '70s, when Merchant-Ivory started picking literary subjects: Henry James' The Europeans and The Bostonians, Jean Rhys' Quartet and two Forster novels. Critics occasionally complained that their adaptations were too literal -- "reverential" was the word casually tossed their way -- but with A Room with a View they seem to have satisfied nearly everybody. "It is successful in every country in the world!" exults Merchant.

Through good times and bad, the team has remained together, forming a cinematic family that now includes many of their performers and craftsmen. On the set of A Room with a View, recalls Actor Denholm Elliott, both cast and crew ate together. Every Sunday Merchant, an accomplished chef and cookbook writer, would cook such delicacies as dahi-walla jhingha (yogurt shrimp), tez tamatar shorba (hot tomato soup) and qeema aloo tikki (spicy beef potato cakes). "Indian food is not one of my favorites," Elliott admits, "but Ismail does it well."

Merchant and Ivory share a London flat and a Manhattan apartment one floor below Jhabvala's. On weekends the extended family moves to Ivory's 40-acre country place in the Hudson River Valley, where the male partners are restoring a large 1805 Greek Revival house. "It's like Prospero's island, like Tara," marvels Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who collaborated with Ivory on the Maurice script. "It casts a complete magic over you. You work like blazes and then at night you go down, bathe in the lake and come up anointed. It is an intensely familial situation, and you get adopted."

When she discovered there was no part for her in Maurice, a tale of a homosexual awakening in pre-World War I England, Bonham Carter felt the family had abandoned her and said so. Determined to be involved, she ended up working on the set as a hairdresser. Laughs Hesketh-Harvey: "You could see the stars of Maurice thinking that if you do one Merchant-Ivory film, you end up doing the hair on the next!"

Merchant raises money and opens doors. "I never take no for an answer," he declares. "It simply doesn't exist as an option." Ivory does the rest. "Relaxation is the answer to everything," says Elliott. "There's a gentle attitude on the set, none of that frenetic carrying on that you sometimes get with lesser people. Ismail occasionally comes by, yelling for James to shoot, but he doesn't interfere, because he knows that James is capable of being quite strong and firm."

Where will the trio turn next in their stately march through the Penguin classics? Jhabvala would like to do James' Portrait of a Lady or perhaps Howard's End, another Forster novel. Merchant wants to do George Eliot's Middlemarch. One thing is certain. They will not take the offer of a Hollywood studio and make A Room with a View, Part II. "We'll only do it," Merchant replied, "if you can resurrect Forster to write the book."

With reporting by Liz Nickson/London