James Ivory

“It came right on the heels of A Room With A View. And that was such an enormous success, so I think people were hoping that Maurice would also have that kind of success.”

“My 22-minute film, which I called 'The Sword and the Flute', turned out to be a romantic film about India made by someone who had never been to India, but who already had very romantic feelings about everything Indian.”

“A director must be patient and unflappable. I think I was always pretty relaxed. I don't find shooting as traumatic as some directors do. Some hate it. But you also have to be strong-willed and persistent enough to get what you want.”

“I wanted to make a movie once at Lake of the Woods, where my parents had a cabin, which I now have. We actually planned, we wrote a whole screenplay about a kind of Indian spiritual group that was at Lake of the Woods. We weren't calling it that but it was Lake of the Woods. We wrote a whole screenplay about it but we couldn't get funding for it.”

“In 'A Room With a View,' you have three young Englishmen running around naked and laughing and whooping and jumping in the water. It's something the English don't apparently find troublesome.”

“In India, I tried never to show enthusiasm for the things I wanted most, but instead to focus it falsely on something showy, ask the price of that and then make a disappointed face when told.”

“When I went to Europe for the first time, I went to Paris and then to Venice. So after Paris, Venice was my first great European city, and it just blew me away.”

“It was okay but then I found myself in that position of being merely a screenwriter. And you are merely the screenwriter, and there's no way around it. You don't have the same clout as the director.”

“When I grew up there weren't any sort of terrible things that happened. I had very understanding friends and my parents didn't live that long. I had a blessedly lucky youth and growing up.”

“I was constantly going to the movies. My parents let me see whatever I wanted to and they only pulled me out of one movie in my life. That was 'Gunga Din' and they thought it was too violent.”

“I think the Merchant Ivory brand really means literate dialogue. I think it starts with that. When people say something, you know it has some sort of ripples to it.”

“Political consequences have never really come into my thinking. I didn't think about it when we made 'Maurice' or when I said first I would co-direct and then write the screenplay of 'Call Me'. I was just making something I thought I would enjoy creating.”

“When you tell a film financier that you want to do a Shakespeare film, their face drops. Shakespeare films don't have a very wonderful history at the box office.”

“I never work on a computer. I can't write on a computer. It's just not possible for me to do that.”

“Mind you, as a little boy, I always had other interests from most kids. I was not a boy who rubbed around baseball bats. I always had the storytelling instinct, even as a child. I was a very imaginative little boy.”

“I'm a great looker at pictures and paintings, and so forth. That's what I look for - a kind of formal beauty. I want that in my photography. It isn't always what we conventionally think of as beauty.”

“You can't go back and change everything because it is incredibly expensive to do. You just have to learn to live with your mistakes. If there aren't too many of them and they aren't too big, people generally don't seem to notice them.”

“It's always a matter of convincing the insurance people. They seem to think that after a certain age, you're just going to fall over or something.”

“You can't make up Timothee Chalamet to look, say, 40. That would be terrible!”

“I can tell you that when Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, our writer, when she would work on some of these grander novels like, say, a book like 'The Golden Bowl', that would take her months and I wouldn't know what she was doing, really.”