The Golden Bowl (1904), a tale of two flawed marriages, was Henry James's last completed novel, and on the face of it, the book defies cinematic adaptation. Experimental in style and tone, it finds the novelist at his most oblique. James Ivory, however, has tackled Henry James before, both in The Europeans (1979) and The Bostonians (1984), and he acknowledges that James is fiendishly difficult to bring to life on the big screen: the subtle, probing prose, exploring the most minute aspect of every character's state of mind, can't easily be translated into images.

The storyline centres on the aristocratic but impoverished Italian, Prince Amerigo (Jeremy Northam), who marries Maggie (Kate Beckinsale), the daughter of millionaire American Adam Verver (Nick Nolte), who is living in Europe to further his art collection. Amerigo was once romantically involved with the beautiful ­ but far from rich ­ Charlotte Stant (Uma Thurman), and when Charlotte marries Verver, complications are inevitable.

Adaptations of Henry James' work constitute a mini-genre in themselves, and apart from the James adaptations that Ivory himself has done, the one he professes to admire most is Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), based on James' creepy story, "The Turn Of The Screw." "It's a long time since I saw it, but I remember it as having a wonderful atmosphere," says Ivory. "Photographically, it was eerie and interesting."

While not keen to criticise other film-makers, Ivory clearly has reservations about some of the Henry James movies of recent years. He is no admirer of either Jane Campion's Portrait Of A Lady (1996) or Iain Softley's The Wings Of The Dove (1997). He suggests that they were miscast and misinterpreted. "The directors haven't always done their homework," he says, "and sometimes they've had a tin ear. There is a tendency to rewrite James' dialogue. You have to trim it, yes, but you shouldn't rewrite it ­ especially not that badly."

Ivory admits that his criticisms are severe and perhaps unfair. "Obviously I've made films myself based on EM Forster novels and Henry James novels. Naturally, when I see other films made from those writers' work, I'm 10 times more critical than the ordinary cinemagoer would be ­ maybe harshly and unfairly so."

Homework is something that Ivory and his regular partners, producer Ismail Merchant and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala are famous for. Whether they're making period pieces (Jefferson In Paris), Tama Janowitz adaptations (Slaves Of New York) or even films like A Soldier's Daughter Never Dies (adapted from Kaylie Jones' autobiographical novel about growing up in Paris in the 1960s), the Merchant-Ivory team is extraordinarily punctilious. Ivory gets testy when accused of dwelling too closely on the details. "I'll be damned if I listen to people who criticise me for taking great pains to do things in the proper way," he fulminates. "That's what I call production value. It is not, absolutely not, some morbid preoccupation with detail for detail's sake."

Film-making, he says, is a labour-intensive craft. All films are "collections of details of every kind". The unseen detail, the exhaustive editing process for instance, is similar to "the bottom of an iceberg... people don't recognise it". And it's not his fault if some critics grumble about the handsome production design, the intricately detailed mise-en-scène and the general splendour that characterise Merchant-Ivory's more sumptuous efforts. "If their eyes are wandering all over the set and they're not listening ­ that's their problem."

When interviewed in Venice a couple of years ago, Ivory told an anecdote which summed up his approach to film-making. There is a moment in Remains Of The Day (1993), his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, in which we see an elderly butler (Peter Vaughan) serving guests at a dinner party. A little bubble of snot dribbles out of his nose and into the soup just as he is about to pour for his lordship. It took an eternity, Ivory revealed, to get that bubble just right. "I thought, 'How in the world are we going to show a runny nose so that you can really see it?' In order for the audience to be able to see it properly, you have to have the camera right up under the tip of the nose. We worked and worked and worked..." But perhaps disappointingly, the snot bubbles are not the actor's own. "It's like tears ­ they came out of a little tube," he explained.

There are unlikely to be many runny noses in The Golden Bowl, but rest assured ­ there won't be a single scene on which Ivory and his team have lavished less than their full attention.

Geoffrey Macnab