Quotes from James Ivory

I've never had to search for themes. My films just come naturally out of my interest.

You know, a lot of people give up their religion, but, oh, my goodness, they go through such agonies. I never did.

My father built me a theatre behind the house where I could put on plays. Dear me, I'm making it sound a bit grand, and it wasn't an amphitheatre or anything like that, just a little place with a roll-up curtain box and I'm sure the plays were childish lopsided things.

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 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.

You can just start shooting things and see how it goes. But time is still money, so you have to know when you are finished. It's not like painting a picture which you could go on refining for 20 years - with a film you have to stop at some point, and that is no bad thing.

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.

I think you can study too much. I've seen that happen. Young people get immersed in the work of other directors and end up imitating them rather than finding their own identity.

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.

Helena Bonham Carter was 19 when we made 'A Room with a View'. She came for the interview in these extraordinary boots and a black dress, and sat with her feet out in front of her.

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.

Did I develop any ruses of my own in order to buy what I wanted at a reasonable price? In time, of course, anyone who has ever done real business in an oriental bazaar will learn the tricks and feints of buying and bargaining there.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's a cabin in Oregon I go to, which belonged to my parents. It's never been winterized. It's not a place you want to be after the first of October or before the first of June. I go for about three weeks every summer.

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.

Love is the absolute basis of my career.

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.

Maurice' was a groundbreaking film. People didn't feel that then but looking back everyone says that.

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