| James Ivory - The Golden Bowl My New York critic friends are appalled that I much prefer the Ivory-Merchant The Golden Bowl to Terence Davies' The House of Mirth, but there you are. And there I was, encountering no difficulty at last year's Cannes Film Festival grabbing a press conference seat for The Golden Bowl. There were oodles of empty ones, despite the star presences of Nick Nolte and Uma Thurman. Most journalists, the Americans especially, were so unmoved by this adaptation of the Henry James novel that they went to lunch rather than stick about to hear how it got made. Also among the missing at the conference: anyone cheerleading from Miramax, the then distributor. Post-Cannes, Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein demanded that the film be recut, and the producer, Ishmael Merchant, and director, James Ivory, indignantly refused. Whereby the film went over to Lions Gate Films, a more risk-taking distributor. "It's a very tricky thing to do," Ivory conceded of trying to adapt what is probably James's densest novel. "Much of the story isn't revealed in the book itself. We had to construct scenes. We cut them up, put them here and there. A problem was there's not that much incident but a great deal of thought. We had to invent these scenes, and hope they revealed something of the interior life." Ivory's screenplay, as usual, was composed by Indian novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who penned the great script for Ivory's masterpiece, Howard's End. She succeeded once before adapting Henry James (The Europeans) and flopped once (The Bostonians). 'We've worked together now for forty years," Ivory said. "The same producer, the same music, and the same writer. Ruth Jhabvala is the only writer who can adapt Forster and James, so let's clap!" | |
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