Quotes from James Ivory

You know, if the filmmakers were satisfied with the film they just made, they could jump right in and make another one, instead of lingering on the last one.

I learned to paint in a historical method. First through watercolours and then through oil. Then, when I went to college and to the school of architecture, I took up modern painting.

The writer, Ruth Jhabvala, livedin India but was German. My partner Ismail Merchant was from Bombay but was educated in England and he had a different view on the world. Probably they had to contend with some sort of Oregonian-ness in me that they didn't understand and didn't know where it was coming from.

I found in making and directing films that the less you have voiceover, the better it is.

If I hear that a film of mine is going to be shown on a big screen somewhere and I haven't seen it in a while, I make a point to get to see it. I just want to see it up on the big screen.

A lot of directors don't bother to go back and look at their films, but I do.

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.

But our writer, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - it was very much in her mind. After we had done 'A Room With a View' and 'Maurice,' she urged us to think about 'Howards End' as another candidate for adaptation.

In October 1959, I could scarcely wait to get off the plane that had brought me to New Delhi so that I could go to the Indian Arts Palace in Connaught Place and begin buying miniature paintings.

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.

It's important to see the work of as many directors as possible but you must not become self-conscious. You have to accept that your first attempts are going to be quite rough compared to the finished works of great masters.

I love a well composed shot. It doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful, but it must be well composed.

The conscious decision, early on, was that I was going to live in New York. That was 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.

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.

This may sound corny, but I've always liked to make things that were beautiful.

I like a lot of good dialogue if it is well-acted.

In 'A Room With a View' there's a lovely scene with Julian Sands and Helena Bonham-Carter in a wheat field. It was simply the right time of day: late afternoon, that golden light, wheat and poppies... So romantic. But I had no idea it would turn out that well, since we so rarely shoot in a studio.

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.

I've seen it happen with other directors. Sometimes there's a period where, if they're lucky, they get the financing where they can make two films in a year.

Maybe there's something in the Oregon character that pushed me into the kind of life that I took up.

I went to Europe in '52 or '53, and when I came back, I stopped in New York. I remember looking out of a window on a glorious October morning and there was New York. And I thought, 'I'm coming here. This is for me.'

I was in New York one day, and this guy ran off a bus, grabbed me, and told me that 'Maurice' had changed his life. I've also had it many, many times in England.

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.