All eyes will be on the British Film Festival’s opener, Steve McQueen’s Blitz, as well as its dramas, thrillers, comedy, retrospectives and a sidebar, Brit Rock to Brit Pop, but there’s more to this festival than meets the eye, as a newly released documentary looks at the art of film itself.

American director Stephen Soucy’s 110-minute doco, Merchant Ivory, shown here in its Australian premiere, features a star-studded line-up of interviewees, not least Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Anthony Hopkins and Vanessa Redgrave.

It’s about the Merchant Ivory Film Company, a byword in the ’80s and ’90s for arthouse cinema featuring lavish cinematography, lush settings, elegant costumes, enchanting music by composer Richard Robbins, complex characters and literary adaptations by the Booker prize-winner, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Among the screenings illustrating this will be James Ivory’s epic melodrama Heat and Dust, based on the novel by Prawer Jhabvala, set in in ’20s India, and in tribute to the late Dame Maggie Smith, his classic melodrama based on EM Forster’s A Room With A View.

Led by American director James Ivory and producer, the late Ismail Merchant, who first met at the Indian Consulate in New York, the company was in fact a perfectly-balanced powerhouse team of four, operating on such tight budgets that one of their favoured actors, Hopkins, once sued them for non-payment.

In the film, Soucy looks at the struggles behind Merchant Ivory’s façade and at the professional and personal bond, “understood, but never talked about,” that produced 44 films over four decades.

When I catch by WhatsApp to LA with director Soucy, he tells me the film was a passion project for him, which took three years and a lot of hard work in raising money.

“I had to be Ismail,” he says, in reference to the legendary fundraising skills of the charming Merchant, who sourced money while Ivory was behind the camera, “so the movies were Jim’s eye.”

“Jim is still going at 96,” he says, “ last night we did a session at the University of Southern California and there he is on Zoom talking to us on Zoom at 11.30 at night.”

“It was quite a team, the four of them… of course, the leaders were Jim and Ismail, but the films would not even have been made if not for Ruth, she was the one who brought the Henry James and EM Forster stories to them.”

Interestingly enough, he tells me, Prawer Jhabvala always felt that the screenplays were side work for her and that her real life was as a writer of fiction, she won two Oscars but she never went to a ceremony.

Soucy says he also took the time to focus on the music of Robbins in one section, especially through the film The Remains of the Day.

But as the name Merchant Ivory Film Company would suggest, central to its success was the relationship between Ivory and Merchant.

“In the last interview in the film, Jim goes on record about his personal relationship with Ismail and the triangle [with Robbins] but when we did this, his memoir had come out nine months before so he was prepared to talk. He was 93 years old at the time and he was comfortable talking about it.”

“ I made the choice not to stress the legal action Anthony took against the company,” he says, but it occurs to him that when they were filming in Argentina Hopkins demanded a private jet, so there are two sides of the story.

Regarding his famous interviewees, Soucy says, “Vanessa Redgrave and Hugh Grant were tough to get, but we got there. At first Vanessa said no but then Jim got involved and he put pressure on her.”

“Everybody else was very easy. Everybody appreciated the opportunity, but I did spend a lot of time working on my questions. In the case of Emma Thomson, I had to refresh her memory about Howard’s End, it was so long ago.”

Very late in life, long after Merchant died in 2005, Ivory got his first Oscar for his part in the screenplay for Luca Guadagnino’s film, Call Me By Your Name.

“I don’t think it’s fair… It’s a bit like Al Pacino getting an Oscar for Scent of a Woman,” Soucy says, “I have urged the Academy to give him a lifetime award for directing.”

British Film Festival, Palace Electric Cinemas, until December 8; Merchant Ivory will screen on November 8 and 10.