Interview (Written): James Ivory

Conversation with the screenwriter of the movie “Call Me By Your Name”.

From Film School Rejects, an interview with James Ivory whose directing credits in his luminous career include A Room With a View, Howard’s End, The Remains of the Day, Jefferson in Paris, and Surviving Picasso. His latest movie is, however, a screenwriting credit: Call Me By Your Name, adapted from a novel by André Aciman. The movie stars Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, and Michael Stuhlbarg. Here is the trailer:

An excerpt from the interview:

How does it feel being the screenwriter and not directing?

“It was a new experience for me. Any screenplay I’d written, I’d filmed. And that was the intention here. I wrote it thinking I was going to direct it, so I wrote what I wanted and invented scenes I wanted to add and so on. 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. They raised the money on my screenplay but once they’d done that, then they were off and making the film and what I said no longer carried as much weight. Which is alright. I would never have dreamed of not having Ruth involved, especially in the editing.”

The ’us’ in that last sentence refers to Merchant Ivory, the independent production company Ivory formed with his longtime business and romantic partner Ismail Merchant. Novelist and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala made up the third part of a triumvirate which dominated and indeed defined period drama and literary adaptations for decades, winning six Academy Awards and numerous plaudits in the process.

Guadagnino’s new film falls squarely into Ivory’s wheelhouse. A period piece — set in 1983 and in the exotic location of northern Italy — the film is an adaptation of Andre Aciman’s 2007 novel.

How did you get involved with the project?

“I have a house in upstate New York in Columbia County. And one of my neighbors there was an agent in Hollywood called Brian Swardstrom and his partner Peter Spears. They had bought the movie rights for the book. But someone I know very well was restoring their house and so they came to me and asked if I would be interested in exec-producing it. And then Luca Guadagnino got involved and they came back to me and said would I be interested in co-directing with Luca because that seemed to be something he wanted to do and that seemed a good idea to me because there are a lot of scenes in Italian. I said, sure but I don’t want to do that unless I can write my own screenplay.”

“So, I wrote my own screenplay and it took about nine months and I was mostly in New York doing it and then they couldn’t raise any money and then they were able to, but the French company didn’t want to have dual directors, they thought that would not be a good way to work and in a sense, they were probably right. They were convinced that shooting would slow down with two directors because you would want to discuss everything. So, I said okay. It was alright with me. And I wasn’t even sure I could do it because of the Director’s Guild, to which I belong, have an absolute ironclad rule about co-directing so I wasn’t even sure they could do it. Though I could say I was in my 80s for heaven’s sake, there was no guarantee they would accept that. It was decided Luca would direct alone but it would be from my screenplay. They always had a star, the young man Tim Chalamet, who’s half-French, half-American and he’s a rising young actor in America and he was to play the young man Elio who falls in love with the older Oliver [Armie Hammer]; and so, he was there, and they were eventually able to put it together. They had a lot of trouble putting the money together, but they made it. And it’s going to festivals and people are going crazy about it and writing some really nice things.”

For the rest of the interview, go here.