By Brandon Judell

Brandon Judell chats with The Golden Bowl director James Ivory about adapting Henry James, the state of today’s cinema and his groundbreaking film, Maurice, which gave Hugh Grant a big boost to eventually becoming a star.

The Golden Bowl is, of course, Henry James’s unreadable novel about an Italian prince committing adultery with his wife’s best friend – who also happens to be his mother-in-law. The main difference between this tale and an episode of "The Jerry Springer Show" is that two of those involved in the former are billionaires who can tell a Raphael from a Van Gogh.

Mr. Ivory, by the way, is an American who’s directed such pictures as A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, Surviving Picasso, Jefferson in Paris, A Room with a View, Shakespeare Wallah, The Europeans, The Bostonians, Howard’s End, and numerous other literary adaptations.

His producer is his soulmate, Ismail Merchant, while the woman who most often serves as his screenwriter is Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. All three reside at the same address in New York City and also share a country home.

The following conversation took place in Mr. Ivory’s Essex House hotel room in high back chairs that confronted each other.

Brandon Judell: According to a Gore Vidal essay on The Golden Bowl, Henry James was very happy when he wrote it because he was living with a "charming Anglo-Irish man-about-town" named Jocelyn Persse.

James Ivory: Some kind of wishful thinking there or something. That never happened to Henry James.

Judell: He never had gay desires?

Ivory: He had many, many …. He fell in love easily many, many times as an older man but he was never writing from any sort of sense of a happy love affair or a happy life or anything of that kind in which all those kinds of hopes are ever fulfilled. I mean, that didn’t happen for him.

Judell: Should we consider Henry James a gay writer? Or, if you would prefer, a writer who is gay?

Ivory: Well, we’ve read virtually every scrap of every letter he’s ever written, and we know his feelings. So I think you would have to say he was certainly gay – but not in any way as somebody who could ever realize those feelings. Here’s an interesting thing: I was going through a bunch of my stuff the other day, old newspaper clippings and so forth, and I found a very interesting article that had been written for The Advocate way back in either the late seventies or the early eighties. It was about Henry James’s feelings for his own brother, William, and how that relationship of Henry’s with William James was probably, of all the relationships in James’s life, the strongest and most compelling. No one was ever suggesting there was any sort of unsavory thing between them but just that the greatest relationship of his life was the relationship with his brother. I thought that was pretty interesting. I’ve never seen any report on it since.

Judell: Researching you, I came across a site on the Internet about gay people who served in the military. There, under the title, "17 Famous Bisexual or Gay Men who Served in the Army," are you and Gore Vidal.

Ivory: There must be so many other famous people who served.

Judell: Well, they only list 17, and you are there. Have you and Gore Vidal ever exchanged war stories?

Ivory: I’ve never met Gore Vidal. I've talked to him on the telephone once. We have mutual friends but that’s it!

Judell: Besides being an internationally acclaimed director, you’re also sort of an icon in the gay community. You’re openly gay, you have a long lasting creative relationship, and you made Maurice, which has helped so many people come out. The film has been such a comfort to hordes of gays. How does that make you feel?

Ivory: Well, Maurice really is a lovely film, I think. I saw it the other day again. I know it means a lot to so many, many people. That’s good. Yeah.

Judell: Wasn’t it a brave film to make at the time, as opposed to doing it now?

Ivory: When would it be braver to do? Braver to do then or now?

Judell: Then, I would think. Now there is a gay cinema. The success of your film and others like it freed up money to do more gay films. And Maurice also showed there was a marketplace for films with gay subject matter; it also showed that heterosexuals could embrace a topic like this. So it was much braver to make it then.

Ivory: We expected with that film that there would be a lot of criticism of it. We expected that it would be attacked. But we were wrong because, I think, it came at just the time when people dared not to attack … because it was a time in which so many people were dying from AIDS. AIDS was obviously this tremendous tragedy within the gay community, and I think the people who might have attacked the film did not attack it because of that.

Judell: What do you think of all the gay films coming out now? Films with gay subject matter where young men are allowed to kiss other young men?

Ivory: Well, you know, I've hardly seen any of those. The only out and out … that’s the not the word I want to … the only unabashedly gay film I’ve seen recently which I really thought was a good work of art and a good movie was [Wong Kar-wai’s] Happy Together. That’s the only one that I’ve seen which I thought was really worthwhile.

Judell: Some critics feel that if you look at repressed countries like Iran and China, that they’re producing some of the most interesting films now. Also some feel when the Hayes Code was in full force in Hollywood, directors were much more interesting in the subtle ways they got things out. Do you feel too much freedom could be bad for gay cinema?

Ivory: No. If anything I feel that …. Really, I can’t judge because I haven't seen enough of these films. But I feel if anything, it’s that they’ve not really been seriously made yet, these kind of films. It's not enough. It hasn’t gone far enough. I'm not sure if it’s possibly the audience rejection of it. That could happen, that audiences don’t want to see it. Or it’s not carried far enough. Or there’s too much toying around or something. I don’t know.

Judell: The French are making some rather good gay films like The Adventures of Felix.

Ivory: But I was talking more of these shores. There could be really very interesting films. If you think of Maurice as a kind of well-made, strong film, there can certainly be other films like that in English.

Judell: Did you ever read Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet?

Ivory: No.

Judell: It’s the history of how gays are treated in films [and was made into a feature documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman]. It lists all the suicides and murders and villains. Moving on, do you think films can influence behavior? Society at large?

Ivory: Yeah. All too badly, probably. Sure. It’s just possible that cinema might be a force for good but that might be very naive and romantic of me to think so.

Judell: David Putnam has said he finds today’s films horrendous in the sense that for today’s youths there are no heroes depicted – no good role models.

Ivory: Because there’s only one emotion. The only emotion in 75 percent of the films being made, the only emotion that people are aiming for, is fear. To make you frightened, that’s all. And that’s one of the lowest emotions.

Judell: Would you label yourself a romantic?

Ivory: Some kind of romantic.(Laughs.) I don’t know if I’m a classic example of one. But I think you have to be a sort of romantic to even take up movies at all. At least independent filmmaking. Let me put it this way: You have to have some sort of romantic sense of what you do, and about your chances of doing it. You can’t be completely hard-headed about it.

Judell: You've created so many truly romantic scenes, especially in A Room with a View. There’s the scene where Julian Sands first kisses the unprepared Helena Bonham-Carter. Then there’s the moment when the bitter spinster Maggie Smith plays lets a memory of an old love soften all her features. Very few directors have moments like that in their whole filmography.

Ivory: No? I hope so. I hope they would. I mean, I see all kinds of films that strike me as deeply romantic.

Judell: Yours are subtle yet direct, romance-wise. It seems today many filmmakers are afraid to showcase unrestrained love. Do you think I'm wrong?

Ivory: I don’t know. Do you think that’s true? If so, that’s terrible.

Judell: I was just rewatching A Room with a View this morning while eating a vegetable omelet, and I can’t remember seeing any other films recently that were so unabashedly romantic.

Ivory: That’s terrible.