Excerpt from Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, PART 2

On his first visit to the US, Ray met a number of American directors and writers. In New York he had long chats with Elia Kazan, Paddy Chayevsky and Sidney Lumet, and in Hollywood talked to Stanley Kubrick, George Stevens and Billy Wilder who was then shooting Some Like It Hot. “You won a prize at Cannes?” were his first words to Ray. “Well, I guess you’re an artist. But I’m not. I’m just a commercial man, and I like it that way.” Ray visited all the major studios, becoming “absolutely terrified by the plethora of equipment and personnel,” despite the forewarning impression he had received from Renoir in 1949. Two aspects of his trip particularly lodged in his mind: there were no “poets” among those he met, and virtually no one had more than “the vaguest notions about India.” An MGM executive he lunched with in the studio’s basement cafeteria had proudly confided to him his casting for a film about the Buddha – Robert Taylor! As Ray remarked in a letter to the Sri Lankan director Lester James Peries in December 1958, after he got back home to Calcutta: “One realizes what the Indian film-maker is up against – a colossal ignorance and only a moderate inquisitiveness. It is a miracle that Pather Panchali is doing so well at the Box Office. The notions about Japan are equally nebulous, and this airing of ideas about Kabuki etc. is just sheer pretence. The East is still as far away from the West as it has ever been…”
--From Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by Andrew Robinson