PARIS: The oldest person ever to win an Oscar, renowned director James Ivory is still making films at 95, with a documentary about his formative trip to Afghanistan in 1960.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.
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