James Ivory to pen family drama 'The Judge's Will'

Oscar-winning screenwriter James Ivory will adapt Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Delhi-set story "The Judge's Will" with Alexander Payne directing.

The film is based on a New Yorker article Jhabvala, a friend and collaborator of Ivory, wrote, reported Deadline.

Jhabvala shared a long association with Merchant Ivory Productions which yielded her two Academy Awards for her work on the films "A Room with a View" and "Howards End". She died at the 85 in 2013.

The article, which was the last from Jhabvala, detailed the final moments in the chess game relationship between an ailing Delhi judge and his Bombay wife. Each had separate lives even though they lived under the same roof and, as he nears death, the judge wants to be sure that his even younger, barely educated mistress is cared for and not cast out.

"It's a universal enough premise, the business of a wealthy man having a mistress and wanting to take care of her after he dies," Ivory said.

"You feel her influence, her way of thinking about people and relationships. There were people she wasn't fond of when she met them, and in time grew to like them very much and she didn't hold on to her dislikes. The family, needing to take care of the mistress, to worry about her, that seems a very Ruth way of looking at things," he added.

At the Academy Awards this year, where he won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Call Me by Your Name, the 89-year-old Ivory had thanked Jhabvala along with Ismail Merchant and author Andre Aciman.

The new project, which hails from Fox Searchlight, will be produced by Jeremy Steckler and Dawn Ostroff along with Jim Burke and Jim Taylor.