IMAGINING THE GOLDEN BOWL

Uma Thurman as Charlotte Stant

As he puts final touches on his eagerly anticipated film THE GOLDEN BOWL, merchantivory.com speaks with director JAMES IVORY about re-creating Henry James's world in the grandest of his English period films.

MI.com: How does the environment of The Golden Bowl differ from that of Merchant Ivory's other Edwardian films (A Room with a View, Maurice, Howards End)?

J.I.: The scale and opulence are different. Except for the episodes in the life of the poor clerk Leonard Bast, Howards End takes place in what is basically a prosperous middle-class environment. The same is true of A Room with a View and Maurice. Yet this is a world of extremely cosmopolitan Americans living as millionaires in the most princely houses. The story revolves around a very rich - or nouveau riche - American family inhabiting an upper class English and Italian world.

Unlike Howards End and A Room with a View, there are not a lot of exteriors in this film; the action is pretty much set in the art-filled, rented houses of the American millionaire collector Adam Verver. The film reflects the days when the centers of social and artistic life were in the residences of the great European capitals - almost exclusively London and Paris. Even New York in those days would have been considered a backwoods place, where idealistic Americans like the Ververs, seeking personal or artistic fulfillment, would not want to be - like Henry James himself, and many of his heroes and heroines.

Kate Beckinsale with James Ivory

MI.com: What were some of the visual influences on the film?

J.I.: As long as I've been thinking of adapting The Golden Bowl - even before that, when I was considering adapting The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove - I've been influenced by the work of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). For many years, I had enjoyed his pictures, but I didn't really see his usefulness until we thought of adapting some of the later Henry James books. I then spent some time at two recent Sargent exhibitions, including the major exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington D.C., which had transferred from the Tate Museum in London, and a smaller but valuable Sargent show at the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Kate Beckinsale as Maggie Verver	John Singer Sargent: Nonchaloir (Repose), 1911

MI.com: What are the affinities you see between James and Sargent?

J.I.: Sargent gave visual expression to James's world of monied Americans living amongst titled, sophisticated people. His portraits often depict exactly the same cast of characters James was writing about. James and Sargent were born before the American Civil War, and both James and Sargent had a very cosmopolitan childhood and adolescence abroad. They were educated in and traveled to many of the same places in Italy, France, and England. Their visual references were similar, so their worlds overlapped, and in fact the two expatriate Americans became good friends in England after both, for professional reasons, had established residences there.

But Sargent wasn't the only painter who influenced the look of the film: the production designer, Andrew Sanders, used as a model the work of Whistler, Bonnard, and James Tissot, a Belgian painter working in England and France in the final decades of the nineteenth century, who specialized in beautiful women. We also collected masses of old photographs of the interiors of very rich Edwardian houses, which were used as a source to guide us in obtaining props and decorating the film's sets.

Jeremy Northam as Prince Amerigo	John Singer Sargent: Dr. Samuel Jean Pozzi at Home

MI.com: One of the main characters in the novel The Golden Bowl is Adam Verver, who is a legendary art collector, and so you had to create his extraordinary collection for the film. What will we see of it?

J.I.: We made up the Verver collection out of the real art in the houses where we were shooting, and in some cases we added to that. Belvoir Castle in Rutland (one of the primary shooting locations) has a terrific picture gallery - Poussinês "Sacraments," Holbein's "Henry VIII," a "Last Supper" by the Flemish painter Pieter Coecke van Aelst - also works by Gainsborough and Teniers. These were all appropriated for the collection, as well as several pieces in another major location, BurghleyHouse, where we found very good Roman portrait busts and sculpture by Nollekens, as well as works by the painters Reynolds and Romney - all the kinds of things an American art collector of catholic but somewhat conventional taste would buy.

In addition, we created a series of copies of Raphael drawings - it was still possible in James's day to buy important Renaissance drawngs. We wanted Verver's collection to be personal and intimate, and assembling Old Master prints and drawings was an easier way to suggest that: great paintings are hard to copy and impossible to borrow for filming. The collections of American connoisseurs such as J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and Isabella Stewart Gardner were models.

Nick Nolte as Adam Verver and a model of the museum he is building in American City.

MI.com: The film is shot entirely on location in several English country houses and London mansions.

J.I.: Yes. In addition to Belvoir Castle and Burghley House, we shot in Syon House, in Middlesex, Mansion House in London, and Lancaster House in London, where we filmed a costume ball. Syon House has a beautiful drawing room designed by Robert Adam, but it is Edwardian in its furnishings and decoration, and was lit in such a way by cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts that it provides a background to several scenes that seem strikingly close to Sargent paintings. The film was shot with anamorphic lenses, which often caused the backgrounds to go somewhat out of focus, suggesting a rich period décor without allowing too much distraction. It is that, as well as the frequent combination of certain colors - with strong yellows and ochres, set off by black, white, and pink - that strongly suggests Sargent.

The film also has sequences which take place in Italy, and for those we shot in the Palazzo Borghese, in Artena, and the Castello Massimo, in Arsoli. Some of the Italian scenes are flashbacks that take us back to the Renaissance, and the Palazzo Borghese features a simpler -- and certainly grimmer -- 16th century d¼cor, which was needed.

M.I.com: Tell us a bit about the costume ball you've mentioned.

J.I.: The costume ball in the film was based on the Devonshire House Ball on Park Lane, a grand ball given by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire in the 1890s -- the most famous of all the costume balls which were the rage at that time. They were attended by the British aristocracy and by very rich Americans -- many of whom had married into the aristocracy.

Lancaster House, where the ball was shot, is one of the few surviving private London townhouses: most were destroyed during the Second World War, or had been torn down. I found it in a book called London Palaces and we went to see it. It had been restored a few years ago by the British government as a place to entertain, and we found it totally sumptuous. No one had ever filmed there before. We used more than 150 extras for the scene, who were costumed in fancy dress by our costume designer John Bright.

Chalice, ca. 1230-1250 The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum, New York collection

MI.com: The title of the film refers to an object - an antique bowl -- that is bought by one of the characters and becomes a crucial object in the story. How did you go about designing the actual golden bowl?

J.I.: As described by Henry James, the golden bowl is crystal, but he also writes that it has a lot of gold over its surface. This is of course all supposition, but I thought that if the carved crystal were gilded, you could use gold leaf to make the figures on it stand out. I imagined something Byzantine or Romanesque - I'd seen a recent show of medieval treasures at the Metropolitan Museum that included several gold and silver chalices. I made some drawings of those and also brought the exhibition catalogue to Andrew Sanders, and these became our models.

MI.com: The Golden Bowl will be the third of your Henry James adaptations: do you have designs on any of his other novels?

The Prince and the Princess (Jeremy Northam and Kate Beckinsale)

J.I.: No. I think, with The Golden Bowl, that I've gone as far as I can go in showing James's world. I don't think I can usefully add to that any more. In a way I feel a bit like Sargent, who decided after a while that he didn't want to do any more portrait assignments. They had made his reputation, but he felt he'd done enough of them. What he wanted to do was something light and carefree, so he took up watercolors - and what watercolors they were! I think I could happily turn my hand to the cinematic equivalent.

THE GOLDEN BOWL arrives in theaters in November.