The China Mail - How it all began in Afghanistan for film legend Ivory

Though American, Ivory is best-known for a string of sumptuous costume dramas about the repressed emotions of Brits, including "Remains of the Day" and "Howard's End", both starring Anthony Hopkins, and "Room with a View" with Daniel Day-Lewis.

In 2017, he reached a new generation with his screenplay for "Call Me By Your Name" starring Timothee Chalamet as a teenager discovering his sexuality, which won Ivory an Oscar at the age of 89.

But his career began as a student making films about art in Venice and South Asia.

"I was making a film in India and it was getting hotter and hotter," he told AFP.

"I couldn't take it another minute. The backers told me to go to a cooler climate, so I went to Afghanistan. I knew nothing about it, but I went."

Decades later, his footage from Kabul has been worked into a documentary that shows a peaceful Afghanistan, before the wars and extremism that would drag it into decades of violence.

"(The footage) was amazing from the first reel, very poetic and mysterious," said Giles Gardner, a long-time collaborator who helped pull the film together after digging the footage out of Ivory's archives.

"With all we know about Afghanistan, the violence we see on the news, this idea of it as a place of beauty has been erased."

The resulting film, "A Cooler Climate", serves as a sort of origin story for Ivory's career, since it was immediately after returning from Afghanistan that he met producer Ismael Merchant. They became personally and professionally involved, and went on to make more than 40 films together until Merchant's death in 2005.

By then their names -- Merchant Ivory -- had become a byword for high-quality period dramas.

- 'Happy young man' -

Their romantic relationship was never revealed during Merchant's lifetime as he came from a conservative Indian family.

But Ivory said his own life was largely a breeze. Growing up gay in an industrial Oregon town was fine, even idyllic, he insisted.

"I don't know why people think I had to escape anything, I was a happy young man," he said.

If his films dwell on emotional and sexual anxiety, it's more because of the books he adapted.

"If you have E.M. Forster (author of 'Howard's End' and 'Room with a View') to work from, you are going to be in the area of repressed emotions," he said with a chuckle.

The films actually closest to his heart are two that made less of a splash but reflect his American upbringing: "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" (1990) and "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" (1998).

He said "the greatest piece of luck" in his career was teaming up with Merchant, who took all the money issues off his hands while being a creative force in his own right.

"Having to raise the money all the time discourages so many filmmakers, it kills their spirit. Because of Ismael that never happened to me," said Ivory.

"If he set out to make something, it was made. God knows how. Tremendous determination and spirit, I suppose."

Still in incredible shape for 95, travelling between Europe and the US for screenings of the documentary, he comes across as a man of few regrets -- apart from the sadness at losing friends, particularly Merchant and their writing partner, novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

"I wish they were here every day," he said. "I love them. I'm a very old man now and have close friends, but I miss them very much."

T.Wu--ThChM