Merchant Ivory retrospective series at Chiswick Cinema – Maurice (1987)

‘Here is where the sky is blue’

I had the great honour of interviewing film director James Ivory at the Chiswick In Film Festival last year. A genuine honour because his company Merchant Ivory has given such great pleasure to many millions over the decades they were producing more than 40 films, including classics such as A Room with a View, Howard’s End and The Remains of the Day.

He was coming to London to promote the new documentary Merchant Ivory and came a couple of days early specially for us. We were able to introduce Howard’s End at the festival with a live interview but also seized the opportunity to pre-record a series of interviews about ten of his films which Chiswick Cinema is now showing as a retrospective season under the title ‘Here is where the sky is blue’.

They are showing Maurice on Thursday 16 January at 8.15pm, with our interview by way of introduction.

Image: James Wilby and Hugh Grant in Maurice (1987); Photograph Merchant Ivory, IMDb

Maurice (1987)

Maurice was Hugh Grant’s breakthrough film. In the documentary he explains he had almost given up on becoming a serious actor, as he was getting more involved in writing and performing comedy sketches when James Ivory plucked him out of obscurity to play Clive Durham, who has a love affair with fellow student Maurice Hall at university.

Bearing in mind this was 1912, their love was not only frowned on but also illegal. In the late 1890s Oscar Wilde had been imprisoned and sentenced to hard labour for ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, as he described it.

This was an important film for James Ivory and his partner Ismail Merchant, who died in 2005. A Room with a View had just been a huge worldwide success for them, both commercially and critically, and it gave them the opportunity to make a film they really wanted to make, but might otherwise not have had the opportunity to make.

“It is the same story as A Room with a View”, James told me. Both stories are about young people who decide to follow their heart but who almost make the mistake of not doing so because of the weight of social opprobrium. “It’s the other side of the coin.”

In Lucy Honeychurch’s case, she almost goes off on a tour of Italy with two old ladies instead of acknowledging she is in love with a young man her aunt deems unsuitable. In Maurice’s case the stakes are much higher.

Image: James Ivory and Ismail Merchant; Photograph Merchant Ivory

I asked James about the personal relevance of E M Forster’s story for him and Ismail, who were both business partners and life partners. While Ismail was alive, they were quite quiet about being gay, so as not to offend Ismail’s conservative Muslim family. They didn’t go on marches and wave banners, but I put it to him that this was their way of making their own statement on the importance of the freedom to love.

He downplayed the idea that they might have had to be careful themselves working in Britain, even though he was in his forties by the time the law was changed to make homosexuality legal, but, he said, he was never “flamboyant”.

He did tell me about the impact of the film on many in the gay community, recalling one man who got off a bus and ran after him to thank him for making it, telling him it had changed his life.

Image: Bridget Osborne talking to James Ivory

A friend of mine also got in touch this week to say what a tremendous impact the film had on him too as a teenager.

Maurice will be shown at 8.15 on Thursday 16 January at Chiswick Cinema. The interview was produced by Chris Parker and edited by Andrea Carnevali.

Book tickets: Maurice

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