I've known him about 3 years, since he asked me to write the screenplay for the Goddess. I met him at a party. I was struck by his willingness to take me on though I've only written co-written one screenplay. He had this uncanny ability to sniff out talent. He didn't have to go through all the bureaucratic ranks of agents and so forth. He just met them and gave them work. That's also because of the way he came up in the industry.
At the end of the day he would cook for you. I remember a party with Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson, they were all talking about how they worked for a pittance, in a Merchant Ivory film.
Hugh Grant said, 'We all know why we work for Ismail. We do it for the curry.' He believed in filmmaking as a family endeavor.
I always thought he was the classic Bombay boy. When you're born in Bombay you're born with your feet running. And he had that Bombay spirit of enterprise.
He came to New York in the 1960s with nothing to his name. And he speedily made a reputation as the best producer of art films ever. He married that Bombay spirit of enterprise with a very keen aesthetic sensibility.
Ismail was certainly passionate bout his work. I've known him to pick up a chair and threaten to hurl it at people he didn't see eye to eye with. Everyone's got Ismail stories.
It was part of the joy of working with him. You never knew what to expect but you were confident it was going to an adventure.
He hated the studio system, what Hollywood began to stand for. So he decided to make movies his own damn way. He persuaded Glenn Close to act in a movie called Heights. Glenn Close told him that the budget for flowers in her last Hollywood production exceeded the total budget for the film that Ismail was producing.
You might feel hard done by Ismail on one project, but then he'd come back to you again and again. He'd make lifetime friends. It was the classic example of a repertory company.
We were outside of Tina Turner's house last year, in Zurich. And we were walking around the lake. And here's this incredibly exciting project with this legend of music, and he just stops and it was morningtime, and he looks at the sky, and he bent down to smell a flower, and his whole being was filled with pure joy at the beauty of it, and I realized how important beauty was to him.
And he found that beauty everywhere - in film, in people, in landscapes - and he took time to smell the flowers.
(Suketu Mehta wrote the screenplay for Goddess. He also co-wrote the script for Mission Kashmir, and is the author of Maximum City. He spoke to Arun Venugopal)
