Photo © Cohen Media Group
The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
Jeremy Thomas in 'The Storms of Jeremy Thomas'
The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
(Cohen Media DVD)
Jeremy Thomas grew up in a British cinema family, scion of the men behind that nation’s quirky postwar comedies, Ralph and Gerald Thomas. Their movies were formative, but Jeremy sought to express himself in new cinematic languages. As producer and director, Jeremy Thomas has 68 films to his credit including work with directors as diverse as Stanley Donan, Nicolas Roeg, Richard Linklater and Stephen Frears. He earned an Oscar for producing Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987).
Filmmaker Mark Cousins accompanied Thomas on a five-day road trip from the producer’s English home to Cannes. The journey is the through-line of his documentary, The Storms of Jeremy Thomas. Along the way, the two men stop to admire the place where one of Thomas’ inspirational films was made (Carl Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc), the factory where the Lumiere brothers shot some of the earliest movies (1890s) and the site of a wartime deportation camp for Jews. The journey to cuts to clips from some of his films and interviews with his stars. Debra Winger calls him “searingly bright,” “playful and serious.” For Tilda Swinton, he is “the dream producer," a conductor who harmonizes the orchestra of filmmaking and knows how to raise money.
Thomas is very English, reserved but with a sly sense of humor and a careful agenda for running against the wind blowing from Hollywood. He admires Walt Disney but not today’s Disney empire and struggles against the global monoculture by finding artists with smarter stories and different ways to tell them. Swinton continues by describing Thomas’ “fellowship with William Blake” and “the width of his view.” The Storms of Jeremy Thomas provides an inspiring look at a man who juggles art and commerce in pursuit of meaningful cinema. (David Luhrssen)
