The next movie I made with Merchant Ivory was Autobiography of a Princess, which was a semi-documentary, because Ismail Merchant had found... he was a good friend of the Maharaja of Jodhpur, and he'd found, in the archives, a lot of footage. The Maharaja of Jodhpur, the father of the present Maharaja, had a German cameraman who was part of the palace staff, and he shot a lot of footage of Durbars and pig-sticking and elephant hunts, and God knows what. And all this stuff was lying in the cellar in the palace in Jodhpur.

Ismail came across it and had a look at it and he decided that this could form the basis of another movie. He wrote... Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote... their regular scriptwriter, wrote a framing story in which this daughter of this Maharaja is living in London in a little flat in Notting Hill Gate, which was very conveniently across the road from where I was living. And she invites to an annual... there's an annual event where she invites her father's old tutor to have tea or lunch... no, tea, to invite them to tea. This is a sort of annual ritual that happens. And they set up a projector, in readiness for his visit, and they run this material, and he remembers how it all was, because this material was filmed when he was the tutor for the maharaja, for her father. And he was played by James Mason. So this was a little vignette. All the shooting that we actually did was done in a week, or maybe it was 10 days, in this little flat in Notting Hill Gate, and Madhur Jaffrey who played the princess, with whom I worked three or four times, had this magnificent jewellery on her, which was completely real. There were two security guards on the set all the time, because she was wearing something like a million pounds worth of real jewellery. Which, of course, in a film, paste would be just as good. But Ismail does things like that. Then he can write an article through the local newspaper and say, you know, she's wearing real jewellery, which he managed to borrow. It was amazing the things Ismail managed to do. And we had a very pleasant week's filming with James Mason. That all went extremely well and he played that beautifully. A really beautifully judged performance.