No Land's Man

by Aasif Mandvi

  In my excitement and because Ismail only seemed to talk to me once a year I had never mentioned this project to my manager, Mike. Mike didn’t have many clients. Actually, he had only one. He was the kind of manager who called me more than I called him. So when I told him that I had been offered the lead in a movie, Mike was thrilled. Ismail was not.

  “Ismail wants you to come to his office, right now,” said Mike when he called a few days later. I had never been to the Merchant/Ivory offices and felt a pang of excitement at the prospect, but I also knew this was the result of nearly fourteen phone calls that had been made in three days between him and Mike regarding my per diem. Ismail had called and wanted me to fly to London for the weekend to be fitted for costumes but for some reason was refusing to pay for any food or lodging.

  “What did you say to him?” I asked.

  “The same thing I have been saying all week.” said Mike, “If he wants you to go to London for a costume fitting, you need a place to stay and money for food. It’s a reasonable request. I don’t know why we are being met with such unimaginable resistance. You don’t even have a fucking contract. I can’t in good faith let you fly to London without food and lodging to be fitted for costumes for a movie that may not even happen.”

  My heart sank as I looked at the color-coordinated flowchart on my wall that tracked the emotional journey of my character in the course of the one-hundred-and-fifty-page script. The film spanned thirty years in the life of my character, Ganesh Ransumair. I had noted that there were nine major emotional turning points and seven extensive gaps in time, which I had filled in with my own imagination, and there were three scenes where I was really going to have to “bring it” and cry.

  “So why do I need to go to his office?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, just go see what he wants,” said Mike.

  “I hate the son of a bitch,” he added before he hung up.

  As I walked into Ismail’s office he gestured for me to sit in one of the two plush leather chairs on the other side of his giant desk. The desk overflowed with papers, fountain pens, exotic paperweights, and a stack of several copies of his most recent cookbook, hot off the presses, as if guests were obliged to buy one before leaving. He was on the phone arguing with James Ivory about the appropriateness of calling Harvey Weinstein an uncultured oaf.

  “You can’t say that to him, Ismail,” I could hear James saying on the speaker phone, with a quiet fatigue in his voice that seemed borne from years of conversations just like this.

  “I don’t bloody care!” Ismail screamed. “The man is a pig. He’s an uncouth animal. How dare he say that Merchant/Ivory only makes costume dramas. A Room with a View, Howards End, Remains of the Day, Heat and Dust, Mr and Mrs Bridge: They are films about character and story. If he is interested in costumes, he can jolly well go down to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at costumes all day long.”

  I glanced around as he spoke. The office was like a gallery of accolades with BAFTAs, Oscars, and Golden Globes placed conspicuously throughout the bookshelves behind me. The walls were decorated with pictures of himself and Jim in younger days with the likes of Madhur Jaffrey, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Christie, Shashi Kapoor, and Anthony Hopkins. I sat in silence for almost fifteen minutes while he screamed and gesticulated. Finally he hung up and, without missing a beat, looked at me with an expression of genuine affection and vulnerability.

  “This bloody manager you have is useless,” he said. “He keeps bothering me about providing you money in London so that you can eat food and stay in a hotel.” He spat out the words “eat food and stay in a hotel” as if they were synonymous with “buy drugs and visit brothels.”

  “I know,” I said, apologetically, “but if you are sending me to London for the weekend, I am going to need a place to stay.”

  He stood up and walked to the outer office and returned with a crisp white envelope and a blank sheet of paper. He sat down, took a fountain pen out of the inkwell next to him, and began to write.

  “Now, this is what I am proposing. You will stay in my flat while you are in London. I will already be there so I will greet you and I will cook you breakfast. You may tell your bloody manager that the great Ismail Merchant made you omelets every morning as if he was your own personal chef. Secondly, as far as the rest of your food goes, there is a wonderful Indian restaurant down the street from my flat whose owner is my dear friend Mr. Khan.”

  He read aloud as he wrote, “Dear Mr. Khan, please let my colleague Aasif Mandvi order anything off your menu, and feel free to put it on my tab. Yours sincerely, Ismail Merchant.”

  He then put the letter into the envelope, sealed it, and gave it to me.

  “Remember,” he said, “when Mr. Khan presents you with the bill, make sure he is giving me a fifty percent discount.”

  London was cold, damp, and gray, but Ismail’s flat was impeccably decorated with bright colors and fabrics from all over the world. Every piece of furniture seemed to have been brought over from the maharaja’s palace in Jaipur or Christie’s auction house. Ismail was already there when I arrived and gave me a brief tour of his home. He lingered over many artifacts and paintings, describing their origins in loving detail, but it was clear that his prized possession was the set of antique dining room chairs that he claimed were handmade in Rajasthan in the 1600s.

  After the tour, Ismail departed and for most of the two days I stayed in his flat, I hardly saw him. The dining chairs were incredibly uncomfortable but there was nowhere else to sit while eating my takeout from Mr. Khan’s. Also, the dining room was the only room with a television, under which was a collection of DVDs, mostly of his own films with a few by Fellini and Satyajit Ray thrown into the mix. While eating samosas, watching A Room with a View (which I realized I had never seen), and enjoying the meta experience of watching the Merchant/Ivory aesthetic onscreen while literally sitting in the midst of the Merchant/Ivory aesthetic, I leaned back and felt the seat of the chair come loose from the frame. I had broken his priceless chair.

  Shit! In a panic I found some Super Glue in a box in a cupboard down the hall, and attempted to glue it back together. With a few well-placed dollops the chair seemed to be back to its original form and I hoped no would be the wiser. Ismail was flying to Mumbai and I was flying back to New York the next day, so as long as he didn’t sit in it, the damaged chair would hopefully go unnoticed until I was long gone.

  That evening Ismail came home and announced he would be cooking and having a few guests over for dinner. I could join them if I liked.

  A handful of well-dressed people in suits and saris gathered in his dining room later that night and talked of film, food, politics . . . and, of course, Ismail. I walked in to the room inconspicuously, trying to stay out of sight. It didn’t work. Ismail caught my eye the moment I entered the room and in mid-conversation turned to his friends.

  “Let me introduce you to the next great star of the Merchant/Ivory family,” he said pointing to me. “This young man is the star of my new film The Mystic Masseur, also starring the great Om Puri, a wonderful actress named Ayesha Dharkar, and the incomparable James Fox.”

  The guests turned to me with huge smiles on their faces. Toasts and congratulations were tossed in our direction as Ismail came and stood with his arm on my shoulder. Just as I was reaching to shake the hand of the nearest guest, I saw one of the older ladies in the room sit down on the antique chair that I had glued together. With a shriek and a flying plate of chicken mango curry, basmati rice, and okra, she collapsed amid a pile of three-hundred-year-old handcrafted wood and plush purple satin.

  “He broke my bloody chair!” Ismail screamed, without missing a beat, as he helped the poor woman back to her feet. “He was having sex on my chair, and he broke it!”

  I did a double take, not sure if I heard him correctly. I began to deny the preposterous allegation but didn’t have a chance as he continued with even more flamboyance and showmanship.

  “Unbelievable,” h
e said now with a distinct smile as he helped wipe the yellow and red stain off the poor woman’s blouse with some seltzer and a napkin. “See what happens? You extend someone the courtesy of having them stay in your home, you offer to make someone a movie star for God’s sake, and this is how he repays you: by having sex on your antique chair and breaking it.”

  I could not believe what I was hearing. The great storyteller, who had become one of the most prolific and unlikely Hollywood success stories, was accusing me in front of a group of strangers of having sex on his priceless antique chair. I stood dumbfounded until I realized as everyone turned to me, faces horrified, that this was part of his theater. He was clearly delighting in the deliciousness of serving this lie to his audience as much as he might in serving them his delicious lemon daal. Fiction was better than truth in his world. I smiled. Instead of an embarrassing moment, it became a hilarious moment, even if it was at my expense.

  I turned to the guests and played along, taking the cue from my director to be.

  “I’m very embarrassed,” I apologized.

  Ismail looked at his guests and smiled.

  “What are you going to do?” he replied. “That’s what happens when you let an actor stay in your house. Hugh Grant was worse.”

  Everyone laughed.

  I arrived in Trinidad on December 31st of that same year to begin shooting The Mystic Masseur.

  Ismail housed me in a lovely home he had rented with a pool and a beautiful garden in Port of Spain, but I was not there to lie by the pool. I arrived armed with my wall charts, my accent tapes, and my books about Trinidad. I had a collection of photographs from the region in the 1950s that I pasted onto my bedroom wall for inspiration.

  It was New Year’s Eve when we arrived, and after a party that Ismail had thrown for the cast and crew, Om Puri suggested he and I and a local actor with a car go into Port of Spain and check out the bars. Initially I declined, saying I had to go home to study my script and be well-rested for the start of filming.

  “Boy,” said Om, leaning out of the passenger side window, “you will learn more about how to play this role by drinking with the locals than learning your lines. Trust me, I’ve made a hundred films.”

  “Is that true?” I asked, impressed.

  “Of course not,” said Om. “I’ve made a hundred and twenty-three. Now get in the car.”

  The first day of shooting was supposed to start at five A.M., but luckily I got more shut-eye than I expected since the ex-con they had hired to be my driver forgot to show up. A production assistant picked me up at seven, which pushed production to nine. When we arrived, Ismail was running around in the ninety-degree heat screaming at extras and crew like a blur wearing a caftan. Since I had never actually spoken to Ismail about the script or the scenes or anything, I imagined that first he would sit down with me and discuss some things. The first scene I was going to shoot was on a farm road with a wonderful eighty-nine-year-old actress named Zohra Seghal who was playing my grandmother. I assumed we would all have long conversations about our characters’ relationship and Ismail’s vision of the scene and how it fit into the larger story. As it turned out, I would have had a better chance of going over my scene with one of the local farmers.

  This was a passion project for the great producer and what would turn out to be the last of only four movies he would ever direct himself. I realized very quickly, and much to my dismay, that my expectations of starring in my first movie were very different than Ismail’s expectations of me starring in my first movie. The luxury of excavating a character or text analysis were left to the safety of Wynn Handman’s acting class—that was the process that one is allowed on stage or in grad school, with weeks of rehearsal. This was the world of independent filmmaking; this was the world where Ismail was creating something out of nothing.

  The first few days I followed Ismail around with questions that he never answered or he thought were pointless or he answered with a perfunctory, “Sure, fine, try it.” He didn’t have time to hold my hand, he didn’t have time to talk to me about character and the truth of a scene or the legitimacy of dialogue because, well . . . because I realized he didn’t know how to. He was in his own process. He was painting the story he wanted to paint, even if sometimes that story was pretending that he knew what he was doing. I started having sleepless nights as I became afraid that without any guidance, without a director who could talk to me, my performance in this film might be the beginning and the end of my career. I was infuriated and disappointed that he seemed to care more about getting an immoveable cow with a rider on it to gallop through the foreground of a scene than answering a single question about the relationship between my character and his grandmother, which happened to be the scene the cow was an extra in.

  His filmmaking maddened me. He spent forty-five minutes figuring out how to get the chickens on the roof of the house we were shooting in front of not to walk out of frame during the scene. He finally instructed the Indian boys on the crew to tie the feet of the chickens together and hold the other end of the string just off camera so they literally could not move. As a result the chickens were furious and clucked so loudly they almost drowned out the actors.

  Ismail treated the script like a suggestion and every day we would invariably end up shooting scenes that were never written. It confounded me to no end since I had not prepared for them. He would see a wonderful road or a view or a tree that he liked and we would stop and shoot a scene. Once, when told to ride my bicycle down a particular road, I told him that the scene was not in the screenplay.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I don’t care what’s in the screenplay. This is a beautiful road and I want to see you riding your bike down it.”

  “But where is my character even going?” I asked.

  “He’s going home!” Ismail replied, irritated and impatient to start filming.

  “Well, then tell me where I am coming from,” I pressed.

  “Umm . . .” he said, searching for an answer, “you are coming from Ram Logan’s shop.”

  I paused and then reminded Ismail that didn’t make any sense because it was well established in the film that Ram Logan’s shop was across the street from my house.

  “Maybe you are taking the scenic route!” he screamed. “Now please stop talking and get on the bike and ride.”

  At another point in filming I was honestly not sure if he was mad or a genius when I saw him instruct crew members to dress up in camouflage with giant leaves, hide in the marshland, and then scare a flock of geese that would fly over a vintage car carrying myself and actor Sanjeev Bhaskar as it drove down a country road. But he got the shot and I could not deny, it was beautiful.

  What I came to realize as production went on and I was working sometimes twelve to fourteen hours a day was that this adventure would never be what I wanted it to be. I complained to myself that Ismail was not interested in my creative input and the work I had done on my character. It seemed like I was just a tool to him, a prop, a color on his palette board, and I was not entirely wrong.

  One day when I was not called to the set and had planned to have a relaxing day off going over my upcoming scenes, an intern showed up at my front door saying Ismail wanted me on the set ready to shoot.

  “What scene?” I asked. “It’s my day off.”

  “I know,” he said, “it’s not in the script. It’s something he added to the schedule this morning.”

  I was furious as I was pulled from my day to go through hair and makeup and was planted back on set. I felt disrespected and used. I grumbled, complained, and hollered to anyone who would listen (except Ismail), asking how was I supposed to give a worthy performance under these conditions. Om Puri was growing frustrated with my grumbling and finally he lost his patience and said four words that boomed out of his pockmarked face, like it was a megaphone: “Boy, do your work.”

  This was exactly what I needed to hear, because he was absolutely right. That’s all I could do. In the midst of the i
nsanity or magic that was Ismail Merchant, all I could do was my work. Everything else was out of my control. It’s also exactly what I was not doing. The charts, the research, worrying about the accent—even though it was all important stuff, I had spent weeks hiding behind it, using it as a crutch, afraid that I was going to be bad, afraid that I was going to fail. I may not have agreed with the way Ismail did things, but what I had to admire was that he was an artist who was not handcuffed by the worry that what he was creating would be viewed as good or bad. He was just creating, often in the moment, without any reason or rationale. He had given me a huge opportunity to do the same and that’s what I was blowing. The rest of the shoot was just as frustrating, but slowly I let go of worrying about the work and I managed to just do the work.

  The Mystic Masseur premiered the following year in New York City. I was incredibly nervous to see it with an audience. I had heard through other actors and some of the other producers that unfortunately not one single A-list or even B-list celebrity was going to be able to attend the premiere. Woody Allen had a movie opening the same night and Paul Newman was having an event that everyone in New York seemed to be invited to. I was simultaneously disappointed and somewhat relieved.

  Ismail called me before the screening and said, “The film is a masterpiece.”

  I smiled because I knew he was lying.

  “There will be lots of press at the premiere, you should be very excited.”

  I smiled again, because I knew he was lying.

  “But no one famous is coming, right?” I asked, hoping that was indeed the case.