(Paris) A youthful trip to a peaceful Afghanistan: at 95, cult director James Ivory returns in a documentary, An Afghan summeron the origins of his vocation and recounts its genesis in an interview with AFP.
Long before his 1990s successes with Anthony Hopkins (The remains of the day And Return to Howards End), and even before Room with a view in 1986 with Daniel Day-Lewis, James Ivory took his first steps as a student, making films on art, in Venice and in Asia.
In 1960, “I was shooting a film in India and it was getting hotter and hotter”, explains in an interview with AFP the director, who left his mark on cinema with his passion for India and his social satires, through his very literary and stylized adaptations of Anglo-Saxon novels.
“I couldn’t last another minute. I was advised to go to a cooler area, so I went to Afghanistan.” “I didn’t know anything about it, but I went there,” he adds.
Decades later, his images from Kabul are brought together in this documentary, in theaters Wednesday in France, which shows an Afghanistan at peace, before sinking in the times that followed into chaos and war.
The images “were immediately incredible, very poetic and mysterious,” says Giles Gardner, a longtime collaborator who helped put together the rushes for the film by delving into the filmmaker’s archives.
“With everything we know about Afghanistan, the violence we see in the news, the idea that it can be a place of beauty has been erased,” he adds.
A happy young man
An Afghan summer is like a return to the roots of the career of James Ivory, who met the producer of Indian origin Ismael Merchant just after his return from Afghanistan.
Partners in cinema and in life, until the latter’s death in 2005, they made more than 40 films together.
Their intimate relationship was never made public during the lifetime of Ismael Merchant, who came from a very conservative family. Ivory, for his part, did not experience these difficulties and he confides that there were no real problems growing up, as a homosexual, in an industrial town in Oregon.
“I don’t understand why people think I was trying to escape from something, I was a happy young man,” he emphasizes.
His meeting with Ismael Merchant was the “greatest luck” of his career, because it allowed him not to think about money matters.
“Having to constantly find funds discourages so many directors, it kills their spirit. Thanks to Ismael, that never happened to me,” he says. “If he wanted to do something, he achieved it. God only knows how. Probably thanks to iron determination and his mind.”
Still valiant at 95, James Ivory still travels in Europe and the United States to present his documentary.
Oldest artist to receive an Oscar, at 89 for the screenplay of Call me by your name (2018) with Timothée Chalamet, he says he has few regrets, except the sadness of having lost his loved ones, Ismael Merchant and their writing accomplice, the British novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
“Every day I wish they were here. I love them. I’m an old man now. I have close friends, but I miss them a lot.”