Historical Background:  China in the 1930s
The White Countess takes place in 1936 and '37, during the tense prelude to the Japanese invasion of eastern China and the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945. The film's climax, with Shanghai under attack, takes place on August 14, 1937, known as "Bloody Saturday." On Bloody Saturday, the Japanese launched bombing raids on Shanghai but were deterred by dense cloud cover. The Chinese responded by bombing Japanese ships in Shanghai's port, but the attempted retaliation went awry when Chinese bombs hit crowded areas of the city instead, including the International Settlement where the film's nightclub would have been situated. The bombs caught crowds of onlookers gazing up at the planes and the loss of life was appalling--thousands killed and injured. The incident sparked the beginning of full-scale Chinese resistance to Japanese aggression and the start of the Sino-Japanese War.
Leading up to this outbreak of war, politics and power in China were already complex and volatile. Most of China was nominally united as a republic led by Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang nationalists. The Communists led by Mao Tse-tung, however, challenged the nationalists in a series of regional civil wars.  Warlords held sway over other regions. Japan had occupied the rich northeastern province of Manchuria, renamed Manchukao, since 1932 (film buffs will remember this period depicted in Bertolucci's 1987 "The Last Emperor"). The Soviets played their own part, fighting Japan over Mongolia and manipulating the struggles between Chinese communists and nationalists.
Japan's brutal occupation of China continued through WWII and ended only with Japan's surrender to the Allies in 1945. The collapse of Japanese control plunged China into full-scale civil war, from which the Communists under Mao emerged triumphant in 1949. Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang forces retreated to Taiwan, a partition of China that is still a source of conflict today. The international business hub of Shanghai was absorbed into greater China and has only recently regained its place as one of the richest and most vibrant cities of the Far East.

About the Production: A Conversation with James Ivory
"You can't force a really topnotch novelist to do something--they will do what they feel they have to do or want to do," relates James Ivory about Merchant Ivory's collaboration with Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. "The White Countess" is testament to an adaptable working process that values inspiration over predictability.
"We had discussed with Ishiguro a number of different possible projects" says Ivory, "one or two of which he worked on, including an adaptation of a well known Japanese novel, but he just kind of tossed our ideas out the window and embarked upon writing his own story. He was still in his Shanghai phase; his previous novel, When We Were Orphans, is set in Shanghai in exactly the period of "The White Countess." Ishiguro's grandfather was a Japanese businessman in the International Settlement, and his father was there as a child. He'd heard lots of stories, and seen family photographs, and he just wanted to go on with that kind of material about Shanghai and the start of the Second World War. He presented us with a draft that came as a complete surprise--but we were very intrigued."
Kazuo Ishiguro, whose earlier novel The Remains of the Day had been adapted for Merchant Ivory's film version by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, conferred with Merchant Ivory to develop "The White Countess;" the romantic relationship between the Countess and Jackson emerged over the course of several drafts.
The result, with its sweeping backdrop of political strife and impending war, is something of a departure from the intimate dramas that Merchant Ivory so often excel at creating. We see the Japanese militarist Matsuda's "broad canvas" of global war and politics juxtaposed with the enclosed, idealized set-piece world of Jackson's nightclub. "The nightclub couldn't just be a hole in the wall; we had big themes, and for that we needed room." To find the right visual style for this balance between broad canvas and intimate drama, director Ivory once again gave a collaborator ample latitude:
"We wanted to have a lot of variety in the style of photography, and our choice of the cameraman, Christopher Doyle, would tend to lead to that." (Doyle is a veteran of both Chinese action cinema and Asian and Western 'art films.') "He loves to bring variation in both speed and compositional style--he's always looking for what he calls "the jazz" that's inherent in every piece he's working on. He doesn't want it to be too straightforward a thing, and I was glad that he didn't, because I felt that everything about "The White Countess" needed to be different from anything we'd ever done before."
A small but pleasing example of the unpredictable style that Ivory sought to give the film is the short animation section that little Katya "sees" in her imagination as she looks into a shadow box: "We found a Chinese artist in New York who created Katya's daydream of a happy river trip to Soochow within an appropriate Chinese painting style." 
Such creative cross-pollination has long been a hallmark of Merchant Ivory, who cultivate a network of professional and personal collaborators and inspirations. Even the casting of Katya fits the principle of finding talent and letting it shine; Madeleine Daly, who plays Katya, is the daughter of Madeleine Potter, who plays her aunt Greshenka. "I've known that little girl since she was born, and she's always been very special, a highly intelligent and unusual, imaginative child. I just happened to go to dinner at Madeleine's, and saw her daughter and watched her, and I thought maybe she would do as Katya and maybe she'd like to do it also. She wanted to do it, though she'd turned down other opportunities to act before. She'd known Ismail and me for a long long time, and felt comfortable. It worked out very well because she turned out to be a very good little actress."
James Ivory had a wealth of very good actresses, in addition to Madeleine Potter, to play the Belinskys: Natasha Richardson, her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and her aunt, Lynn Redgrave. "In one way, there's nothing particularly unusual about directing a room full of Redgraves," says Ivory. "They're all professionals, they're all playing their roles. But there is a magnetism among them, and a warmth between mother and daughter that comes through in the kindly relationship between Vanessa Redgrave's Aunt Sarah and Natasha Richardson's Sofia."
"The White Countess" was nearly completed when its producer, Ismail Merchant, died unexpectedly after a brief illness in May of this year. "In the last week of shooting in Shanghai, Ismail fell and broke his ankle, which didn't stop him from coming to the wrap party in a wheelchair. Throughout a hospital stay in Shanghai and physical therapy back in New York, he was very involved in the film's completion and was present throughout most of the editing. The broken ankle--which had nothing to do with the illness that caused his death--didn't get in his way. He was very proud of the film and very pleased with how it turned out, having screened the successive versions and provided me with the highly useful suggestions I've always relied on."

About Merchant Ivory Productions
"The White Countess" marks the finale to a collaboration that has spanned forty-four years and over thirty films. Ismail Merchant and James Ivory founded Merchant Ivory Productions in 1961, and their partnership flourished until Merchant's death on May 25^th, 2005.
"If anybody told me there was another company like them," remarked Vanessa Redgrave, "I'd be amazed to hear it; there isn't any equivalent to them and what they do. With Merchant Ivory, you have an opportunity to do a role that really interests you and that you care about deeply. You respect them for the spirit and the outlook that obviously guides their choice of films, and what they do, and who writes their films and plays in them. They've got a record that literally cannot be matched." (From The Films of Merchant Ivory by Robert Emmet Long, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.).
James Ivory and Ismail Merchant were both neophyte filmmakers when they met and discovered mutual interests in both cinema and Indian culture. Bombay-born Merchant, young, charming, brash, and energetic, had already parlayed an MBA degree from NYU and a determination to become a film producer into his first short film, "The Creation of Woman," a tale set to Indian dance and music. The film was shown in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and, passing through New York en route, Merchant was invited to a screening of "The Sword and the Flute," a documentary on Indian miniature painting narrated by Saeed Jaffrey (who also narrated Merchant's short) and directed by young American filmmaker James Ivory. As quoted in The Films of Merchant Ivory: "During our conversation that first evening," Merchant recalls of Ivory, "I realized that he knew about India not in a dry, academic way but with understanding--something I have never encountered in an American either before or since. What was absolutely extraordinary was his feeling for India."
The first Merchant Ivory Production brought a third collaborator into the nucleus of the team: writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Prawer Jhabvala had grown up in a German Jewish family that was displaced by Nazism. She had married an Indian architect and was raising a family and writing in New Delhi when Merchant and Ivory approached her about a film adaptation of her fourth novel, The Householder. The three formed an indissoluble creative and personal bond, and Prawer Jhabvala went on to write original screenplays and screenplay adaptations for twenty-three Merchant Ivory Productions.
Ismail Merchant was the indefatigable engine of the enterprise, whether raising funds, choreographing shoots, courting collaborators and supporters, or even, in the early, lean days, cooking lavish Friday night feasts to reward underpaid cast and crew; his self-taught, loaves-and-fishes cookery evolved into the sophisticated recipes of Ismail Merchant's Indian Cuisine, his 1986 cookbook ("My style is pragmatic and experimental," Merchant remarked, "and not so different from the way I go about finding finance for my films.").
Throughout this unique four-decade partnership, Merchant Ivory has nurtured a congenial extended family of talented friends and collaborators in India, New York, and London; at Ivory's upstate New York country house, where what must be the most inviting of editing studios was built; and around the world, wherever the latest project took them. Longtime collaborators like composer and music director Richard Robbins, and recurring onscreen faces like Vanessa Redgrave, Madhur Jaffrey, James Wilby, Greta Scacchi, and many others, contribute to a continuity of vision and quality that permeates the Merchant Ivory filmography.
Here is Ismail Merchant's account of receiving perhaps the greatest award in a long and much-lauded career:
"After receiving many honors and tributes internationally, only an honor from India was missing. Every year on Republic Day, January twenty-sixth, the president of India bestows honors on people of distinction in different fields…I was to receive Padma Bhusan, the equivalent of a British knighthood.
"The ceremony took place on March 27, 2002, at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the magnificent Presidential Palace. Dressed in a traditional flowing kurta and shawl, I felt I was in a scene from an Indian miniature painting…This was a ceremony rooted in history and, for me, it represented a reality absent from the glitz and glamour of show business awards whose artificial tone paled beside the dignity of this occasion…It was a thrilling moment for the boy from Bombay whose only dream had been to make movies."

About the Filmmakers
James Ivory (Director)
James Ivory was born in Berkeley, California. After attending the University of Oregon, where he majored in Architecture and Fine Arts, he received his Master's degree in Film from the University of Southern California. His first film, which he wrote, photographed, and produced, was Venice: Theme and Variations, a half-hour documentary made as his thesis for his Master's degree. The New York Times named Ivory's evocation of the city in 1957 as one of the ten best non-theatrical films of the year.
An easy rapport with India was evidenced in Ivory's second film "The Sword and the Flute," based entirely on Indian miniature paintings in American collections. Its success led to a grant by the Asia Society of New York to make "The Delhi Way," a film about the Indian city. In 1961, Ivory teamed up with Ismail Merchant to form Merchant Ivory Productions. Their first theatrical feature was "The Householder," based on an early novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who also wrote the screenplay. Since then, Ivory's feature and television filmmaking career has taken him to Great Britain, France, Italy, back to India several times and to the United States.
The many theatrical films that Ivory has made for Merchant Ivory Productions include the classic Shakespeare Wallah," three Henry James productions, The Europeans, The Bostonians, and The Golden Bowl; Heat and Dust from the prize winning novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; A Room With A View, Maurice, and Howards End, all from novels by E.M. Forster; Slaves of New York was based on the stories by Tama Janowitz; Mr. & Mrs. Bridge was adapted from the novels Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell, and adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; and The Remains of the Day was based on Kazuo Ishiguro's bestseller.
Ivory's most recent films were Jefferson in Paris, Surviving Picasso,  A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, The Golden Bowl (Ivory's longtime collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote the screenplay of The Golden Bowl.)
In 2001, James Ivory, Ismail Merchant, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala received the Fellowship of the British Academy of Film and Television, one of the highest awards in film.
In 2003 Merchant Ivory Productions made Le Divorce from the best-selling novel by Diane Johnson. The novel was adapted for the screen by James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Ismail Merchant (Producer; Founding Partner and Co-President of Merchant Ivory Productions)
Although Ismail Merchant was born in Bombay, he lived and worked for most of his life in the West. Merchant's first film was a theatrical short, The Creation of Woman, which was nominated in 1961 for an Academy Award, and was an official entry from the United States in the Cannes Film Festival that same year. While en route to the festival Merchant met James Ivory, who agreed to form a partnership, Merchant Ivory Productions, to make English-language theatrical films in India for the international market.
The Golden Bowl marked the fortieth anniversary of Merchant's career in film production, a career that has already earned the Merchant Ivory team a place in The Guinness Book of World Records for the longest partnership in independent cinema. In addition to the numerous accolades Merchant has won in the world of film, he is also an Honorary Doctor of Arts at Bard College, New York, has been honored by the Mayor of New York, and was made a Commandeur des arts et des letters by the French Government in 1996. He received India's Padma Bhushan in 2002, bestowed on artists and writers for their lifetime achievements.
The difficulties of producing "The White Countess" in China were similar to those Merchant often faced in India, where he and James Ivory first began working: a multiplicity of languages and entrenched customs, many-tiered bureaucracies, and vast distances between lab and the production company. His genius at balancing artistic and cinematic necessities with the realities of a volatile location were never more evident than in "The White Countess," his final film. Ismail Merchant died in London in May of 2005 after a short illness.

Kazuo Ishiguro (Original Screenplay)
"The White Countess" is the second collaboration between Merchant Ivory Productions and novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. In 1993, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapted Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day for Merchant Ivory. The film, starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins, garnered eight Academy Award nominations and was named "Film of the Year" by the British Film Critics Society.
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on 8 November 1954. He came to Britain in 1960 when his father began research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey. Afterwards he worked as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral before enrolling at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he read English and Philosophy. He was also employed as a community worker in Glasgow (1976), and after graduating worked as a residential social worker in London. He studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, a member of the postgraduate course run by Malcolm Bradbury, where he met Angela Carter, who became an early mentor. He has been writing full-time since 1982. In 1983, shortly after the publication of his first novel, Kazuo Ishiguro was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers'. He was also included in the same promotion when it was repeated in 1993.  In 1981 three of his short stories were published in Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), narrated by a Japanese widow living in England, draws on the destruction and rehabilitation of Nagasaki. It was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. It was followed by An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which explores Japanese national attitudes to the Second World War through the story of former artist Masuji Ono, haunted by his military past. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
Ishiguro's third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), is set in post-war England, and tells the story of an elderly English butler confronting disillusionment as he recalls a life spent in service, memories viewed against a backdrop of war and the rise of Fascism. It was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction. His next novel, The Unconsoled (1995), a formally inventive narrative in which a concert pianist struggles to fulfil a schedule of rehearsals and performances in an unnamed European city, was awarded the Cheltenham Prize in 1995.

Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, When We Were Orphans (2000), is set in Shanghai in the early part of the twentieth century, and is narrated by a private detective investigating his parents' disappearance in the city some 20 years earlier. It was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Booker Prize for Fiction. His latest novel is Never Let Me Go (2005).
As a screenwriter, Ishiguro's first full-length film was The Saddest Music in the World (2003), a melodrama set in the 1930s starring Isabella Rossellini.  He has also written two original screenplays for Channel 4 Television, A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (1984) and The Gourmet (1986).
He was awarded the Order British Empire in 1995 for services to literature and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1998. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.   Kazuo Ishiguro lives in London with his wife and daughter. 

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