Caliph of the hyperCool

With an ‘It’s a wrap’ of Ismail Merchant, an era has ended. An inspiration for filmmakers the world over, this man towered ov...

With an ‘It’s a wrap’ of Ismail Merchant, an era has ended. An inspiration for filmmakers the world over, this man towered over his contemporaries. In Hollywood, where production companies come and go — their stature dictated by hits and flops and a Friday-to-Friday existence — Merchant-Ivory thrived for four decades. Not in a pond swimming with pet fish but in Hollywood, an ocean full of sharks.

Regretfully, I never met the man. My only tenuous connection with Merchant-Ivory Productions was that I share an alma mater with James Ivory —the USC film school in Los Angeles. I don’t know if Ismail Merchant ever saw any of my films, but I saw a good many of his. What then can I add to the millions of words being written about the man? Just my very personal homage: words I wish I could have said to him.

Ismail Merchant was a beacon for a lost tribe of filmmakers like me who have been raised on Hindi films (with a smattering of Hollywood films thrown in) but are trained in the West. I am as much in awe of the Bollywood spectacle and scale as I’m smitten by the subdued storytelling of Hollywood. This mixture of sensibilities is potent — unfortunately it has few outlets. Where do I fit in? What kind of films do I make? And for whom? For answers I, as many other filmmakers of my ilk, looked to Ismail Merchant. We wanted to emulate the man.

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Merchant started making films in India for international audiences. By dint of effort and force of passion, Ismail Merchant made it in Hollywood. He made films that the world saw and applauded; his cinema resonated with audiences all over. He made the concept of multiculturalism cool practically before the word was even coined. Somewhere I read a description of Merchant as the ‘Caliph of Crossover’. Frankly, I don’t know what the word ‘crossover’ means. Yes, a film can sometimes cross over to an audience that the film wasn’t intended for but how do you make ‘crossover cinema’? Does that mean that you are making a film for one audience but you’d prefer that a different audience saw it? Isn’t that disingenuous? Disrespectful to your own audiences? I think that’s what I respected the most about the man — he made cinema that was at once local and global. Merchant was honest to his films, period.

More than 50 films in a career spanning four and a half decades is in itself a lifetime’s worth of work. And somewhere in the crazy life of a filmmaker, he found the time to cook. In my book, a man who likes to feed people can’t go wrong. Caliph of Crossover? I’d like to suggest ‘Caliph of hyperCool’. Mr Merchant, in the capricious world of filmmaking, you were a hit.

The writer is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles