The making of a super-producer: Jeremy Thomas interviewed in 2014

Jeremy Thomas: When does a person’s memory begin? It’s cloudy for me as to when my first really dated memory is, but the first really significant memories are going to lunch at the Pinewood restaurant. This was a huge restaurant in the middle [of the studios]. In a room off it would be Cecil Beaton, taking photographs of the biggest stars of the day. The restaurant was serviced by uniformed waiters with a full à la carte menu and everybody in their costumes – from Richard Burton and Liz Taylor to members of the Carry On team dressed as Indians – were having lunch with the directors, and Hitchcock would be sitting there. It was beyond belief for a child to be having plaice, chips and peas looking at this. The Pinewood restaurant is a metaphor for me for the film business. A certain standard was expected because there were so many well-known actors and directors. Today it’s an empty room that’s occasionally used for a party and which you walk through on your way to the bar – it’s got the panelling from the [1907-built ocean liner] Mauretania. 

Nick James: As a child, I suppose the thing that you’re reacting to at first is the costumes. 

There were people working on my father’s films and people working on my uncle’s films. My father was making a film called The Iron Petticoat [1956]. Katharine Hepburn used to come and stay at our house. We would go to pond on the common and she would flip stones in her twill trousers and her suede blouson. There were the Doctor films and the Carry On films. I remember particularly Carry On Sergeant, because I was allowed to play in the assault course with my sister Jill. I was given free rein to run around with a bicycle going to these incredible stages. I can remember all these people hanging off ropes on this model of the Titanic [from 1958’s A Night to Remember]. I remember Cleopatra [1963] too. 

Were there particular people of whom you were fondest? 

I was very fond of my father’s DP, Ernie Steward. He had Alfred Roome, the editor, and there was a designer [probably Carmen Dillon], a target group of people who used to come to the house because he was making three films a year. I grew up in a lavish house that was like a Beverly Hills house: swimming pool, tennis court et cetera. 

What was your earliest memory of watching a film? 

I remember watching films on 16mm at the house, and it was always very exciting and the thing would go wrong, it would spin out of control and there would be film all over the living room. Then I was given a camera and I was allowed to go and make films with my sister at Dirk Bogarde’s house, who lived just round the corner. He lived in a place called Drummers Yard, a large, beautiful house which had a cinema in it. Even today, if you look at it from the road, it’s like a castle. Dirk lived there with [actor] Tony Forwood and Tony’s son, Gareth. I was the guy with the Bell & Howell 16mm wind-up camera with a turret on it. I was very lucky to have such a thing and my dad would take the film to be processed at the studio. Dirk would help with the props. If we were doing a fishmonger scene, he’d go down the drive in his Rolls and bring back some mackerel.

There were film stars in our house. Brigitte Bardot was there. Our house had a large staircase and you could look down to the hall. My sister and I would be up there in our pyjamas looking to see who was coming in. You’d see James Robertson Justice coming out of his gull-wing Mercedes. I didn’t know what to look at, him or the Mercedes. The Carry On team were at my uncle’s house. I was very friendly with Sid James, Kenny Williams, Joan Sims and Hattie Jacques. I knew most of them from before I had memory.

In those days they couldn’t get enough movies made. Rank’s problem was, “How can we ramp up production more?” The studio was buzzing in work, with a camera department and a prop department and a budgeting department and a sound department and a directors’ department and editorial and a writers’ department and an executive producer Earl St. John over it all. They had trucks that went off to Europe, brute-like arc lights that we’d ship to India to shoot the Taj Mahal. You’d go into the camera department and there were 50 cameras. You’d go into the prop department and there was everything you could have imagined. 

Is there any one film from that time that somehow encapsulates your childhood for you? 

I suppose The Wild and the Willing [1962] because I was 13 years old and I could interact with John Hurt. He had been cast by my father from RADA and I was able to go to the set. I became friendly with John and I still am. He’s only eight or nine years older than me and that shared memory of this boy who was doing ten-pin bowling with him in Uxbridge has remained today. 

When did you first experience the London side of the industry? 

I had some friends in London because I went to boarding school from a young age, and at Millfeld we had a film society and I was active in the film group. I really didn’t like school. I was more interested in looking out the window. I got a few ‘O’ levels and left at 17. I wanted to get out and get into the world, so I went with a friend in a little car around Europe and Morocco and then I came back and wanted to go to work. So my dad got me a job in the Rank laboratories in Denham, which was very sought after. The film business in those days was a closed shop. You had to get a union card to get in. The only way you could get a union card was by being a trainee in the labs. 

What did that entail? 

Labelling cans and later working in numbering rooms, cutting rooms and sometimes the darkroom, which was more responsible. 

Did they tease you because of your connections? 

A little. I managed to get by. It was an awkward situation. I behaved intelligently modest and somehow got through. Then I got a job in the cutting room. Fred Chandler, who was a great lab man, gave me a gig in a post-production trailer facility and I did a little bit of work. Then I got my full union card. 

What were you cutting? 

Trailers for [TV series] The Saint, working on a pic sync and doing what I was told – “We want ten frames of that” – getting a rough idea of what it meant to put two shots together. Meanwhile I moved to London because I had a job on a film called The Ballad of Tam Lin [AKA The Devil’s Widow, 1970], directed by Roddy McDowall, starring Ava Gardner and produced by Alan Ladd Jr and Stanley Mann. I was a junior assistant, numbering rushes and wrapping up trims for John Victor-Smith, the editor of The Road to Hong Kong and Dick Lester’s films. Great editor, the editor I chose to edit my film when I directed a film although he was 70. He was the guy who gave me my break. I was allowed to hang on to the outside of the group, showing the rushes to Ava Gardner, hearing her talk about them – it was like an induction.

Then I went to work on The Harder They Come [1972]. I met Chris Blackwell, understood reggae, loved that music – and that film really broke that music in the world. It was all very friendly and Chris Blackwell became this influence in the way that he’d subconsciously managed to commercialise what he loved into some sort of business by doing music that he felt would be bridging originality and crossover.

Then I went to work with Roy Watts, who was Ken Loach’s editor, and I worked on The Rank and File [for the BBC’s Play for Today in 1971], which was a Jim Allen play, in cutting rooms in Wardour Street opposite Gerrard Street. 

Do you have particular stories from that time that stand out? 

One of my attributes as a producer is that I find it pleasant and easy to interact with people, and every older person likes to have younger people around who are able to assimilate with them. I had that skill, and so I was allowed in. Of course it may be that I was more advanced in cinema culture because I grew up in it, it may be because I was dressed in Carnaby Street clothes – already at school I was allowed up into Carnaby Street to buy button-down collars and flashy clothes. I suppose one of the reasons why it opened up is that I was the son of a film director who made so many movies and who brought so much different culture into the house. I had a childhood already full of films being made in front of me. 

One gets the impression that he was both loving and militaristic. 

A film director is a film director, used to meeting hundreds of people at their whim. “I’ll do it like that. Oh no, I’ve changed my mind, I think we’re going to do it like that,” and everybody obeyed. We were in a house with a patriarch, who was very quietly spoken and carried a lot of weight. He was a very approachable father, never got angry but everybody was doing what he wanted to happen. This is a house with staff, by the way – with meal times. If you didn’t eat at meal times, you didn’t eat. As Alexander Walker described it, it was “Hollywood England”. There was a lot of people living in that area around Pinewood, Denham and Shepperton – not only the British filmmakers but also the Americans because, after [the] McCarthy [hearings], a lot of filmmakers chose to live in the UK.

I worked on lots of films because you would work around the studios and get two days here, two days there. You’d finish your job at Pinewood, drive to Elstree, go to see the manager of the cutting-room block and get three or four days on a Sam Peckinpah film numbering the rushes, make your 20 quid, then that job would run out. Then you’d go out to Shepperton, go see the cutting-room manager. “Yeah, come in.” “I’ve got my union card.” “Yes, you can do this, that and the other.” And so it went for me.

Then I became an assistant editor, learning more about the film, working with Roy Watts for a year on Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad [1973]. I was allowed in with him doing the work – I made the plates for him. I was the link between him and the movie in the cutting rooms. That was a fantastic job that gave me a lot of technical knowledge in terms of the internals of making a film. The industry had an analogue complexity then, a need for a certain masterly approach, whereas today it’s a different skill medium, that of a super-geek on a computer to do the same thing as hundreds of people in the darkroom.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was shot in Goldhawk Studios in Goldhawk Road, in the basement. There I met this great American producer, Charles H. Schneer, who produced all those films for Harryhausen and he was influential on me. One day I was working in the cutting rooms and I got a call: “Mr Schneer wants to see you.” So I went up to Fitzhardinge House in Portman Square and waited outside his office. He had an American accent and he was dressed like an American producer – not chomping a cigar literally, but he would have been chomping a cigar if it wasn’t that he didn’t smoke. He said, “Jeremy, I’ve got something very serious to talk to you about.” I said, “What’s that, Charles?” I was terrified. He said, “I got your petty-cash vouchers and I’ve got to teach you a lesson. I never want to see you buying staples, rubber bands or pencils from WHSmith individually – I’ve got a deal with the company.” I said, “Charles, it was only about five pence.” “No, you’ve got to understand that every penny is a penny in a movie and I take care of every penny, including every petty-cash voucher.” 

Tell me about your time with Ken Loach. 

I was the boy who came from Beaconsfeld and Gerrards Cross and went to a very good school, who was suddenly thrown into Ken Loach land. Ken was a wonderful man and he didn’t spare me. I heard political points of view on life which were foreign to me. I was very affected by these views, so I became quietly politicised – not politicised like Ken and [his producer] Tony Garnett were, but it opened my eyes. And being affectionate towards radical politics made my journey through cinema so much easier. I got a bit of it first hand from Ken and then I went on to edit a film for him at the BBC, a one-hour Chekhov play, A Misfortune [1973], with Ben Kingsley.

Then I was asked to edit a film with Philippe Mora, a French-Australian artist living in London who’d made films at a very young age and who was also a well-known 60s pop art painter. He introduced me to Sandy Lieberson and David Puttnam. I was living in Bayswater but I was hanging in King’s Road. I had some friends there. Mike Molloy was the [camera] operator for A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Performance and Walkabout. He took me in to this group and I became very friendly with artists and a lot of Aussies: Richard Neville, Germaine Greer, Philippe, Martin Sharp. They were there living in The Pheasantry [an artists’ colony in King’s Road] and I got included in things that were going on in London in that period which were so vibrant. 

But given that, how did you get any work done?

Work was very pleasurable and very serious, but this was the ambience that was happening in London. I got introduced to Sandy [Lieberson] and David [Puttnam] to edit Brother Can You Spare a Dime, this wonderful compilation film about the [period from the] Great Crash to Pearl Harbor using films starring James Cagney, and Roosevelt’s speeches and political life, as a narrative for the history of that period. It involved going to America for a year with Sandy. He was an American, from Fairfax High, had been a well-known agent who moved to Rome to head the William Morris office, then moved to London and produced Performance. He was like-minded to me, though older. He was an incredible teacher. He took me into places you wouldn’t normally take an editor, to the homes of the Hollywood counter-culture elite. I’d been in Hollywood as a boy and so I was equipped to deal with it. I was in my early twenties and was given free rein in America, living in an apartment in New York paid for by the film company. Philippe and I looked through all the best archives in Washington D.C., upstate New York, middle America, Los Angeles and San Francisco and the American film business got into me. When the film was completed it was accepted by Cannes for Critics’ Week. So I went to Cannes for the first time as a professional – although I’d been there as an invited guest in Bernard Delfont’s house. 

What year was this? 

1975. I stayed in a back-street hotel, got the print down there. It was a very different event than from today. The film was shown at a cinema at the side of the Majestic – I don’t think it’s even there any more – and it went very, very well. I came back to London and Philippe said to me, “Why don’t we go to Australia?” He and I had written a couple of scripts. I was in my early twenties and I wanted to move on from being an editor. To go and make films in your early twenties was then impossible in the UK. You couldn’t even point to somebody who’d done it. So I went to Australia. I was broke. My father helped me out only a couple of times but what he did give me was a letter.

So I left to go and produce and edit a film based on a book by Margaret Carnegie called Morgan: the Bold Bushranger. Morgan was like Ned Kelly but before him. Philippe wrote a screenplay. Margaret was of a very noble family from Australia. There was interest around to put some money in. I arrived in Australia and I had this letter, so I sent it to Sir Norman Rich, who distributed all Rank movies in Australia, including all the films that my dad made – [and] the Carry On… movies partially because they were so successful in Australia. So I sent this hand-written letter to Sir Norman Rich and I got a message – I was in Melbourne – “Come and see Sir Norman at his club in Hyde Park, Sydney next week.” So I had to buy a suit. Went up to Sydney from Melbourne, where I was staying in this doss, and there in the club was this old guy. It went, lunch: “And what are you doing – Daniel Morgan, the Carnegie family, yes? And what do you want? Your father said I should meet you.” “I’m going to make this film.” He said, “I tell you what. Your father made an incredible amount of money for me and he’s never been to Australia, although he’s entertained me in London many times. Why don’t you go and see the person who runs my film division tomorrow?”

In the morning I called to see John Fraser of British Empire Films in the State cinema in Sydney, a monumental cinema that doesn’t exist anymore – like the Odeon Leicester Square but ten times more beautiful. He said, “The old man said I should give you half the budget and distribute the film.” Then we got Philippe’s family in, and the Australian Film Development Corporation gave us some money so we got the budget. Then we got Dennis Hopper. At first we wanted Stacy Keach. We went to LA to see this agent, Jack Gilardi, wanting to meet Stacy Keach. “Stacy’s very successful at the moment,” says Gilardi, “and I don’t think he’ll want to play this character.”

The second on the list was Dennis Hopper, a counter-culture hero after Easy Rider. Dennis was persona non grata by this time because he had become so wild. We went to see his agent, Robert Raison, who had a beautiful house and had been Cole Porter’s lover. Lovely guy. He said, “I love this script. Dennis gets buggered in this script [there was a male rape scene]. I want you to go and see him.”

So we rented a plane to go from Albuquerque to Taos, New Mexico – we had some pre-production money. As we landed, Dennis was riding along next to the plane firing a gun in the air with his cowboy hat on. “Hey man, welcome!” By that night, we were staying in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s house with loads of young people around us and everything that you could imagine would be in Dennis Hopper’s home at that time, including being able to see The Last Movie about ten times in a private screening room in a church, with everybody going “Ommm” when the good moments came.

Anyway, Dennis Hopper arrived in Australia and by nightfall he was in jail. He arrived with a Levi’s suit on, a cowboy shirt, a pair of boots and a passport, that was it. I can imagine Bob Raison just pushing him on to the plane, saying, “Just go to Australia for a bit.” It was a big thing this film – 102 speaking parts, bushrangers, carriages, guns – a baptism of fire. I’d never made a film before, knew nothing about it. The budget was done with a pencil on a piece of paper. Nobody knew anything. There were a few television cameras and a little bit of naive expertise. We did have the brilliant Mike Molloy as DP, Philippe, and the editor John Scott. It went over budget a little bit. We were unprofessional then and we went into things that you couldn’t go into. Now you can’t do that. I don’t think we even had a completion bond. It was very amateur. Anyway the film was finished, was accepted into a sidebar event in Cannes that doesn’t exist anymore – the International Festival of Westerns – and it won the John Ford trophy. And then I came back to London. 

Had things changed by then? 

When I started in the film business as a professional in the cutting rooms, I always thought that my father’s films and my uncle’s films were adored, because they were so popular and I would go to events and they were the top men. Then [along comes] New [American] Cinema, the cinema I like very much, a movement of film and filmmakers that had to bury the Rank era to progress. That’s what was going on and I realised that. Ralph’s films and Gerald’s films have been rehabilitated but there was a moment when they reached rock-bottom in terms of perception by the film industry. There were some very poor films, but they were the staple diet of the film business. That was what they were employed to do at a film factory – to make a lot of movies. By the time New Cinema came they weren’t being made under factory processes any more. They were indie movies made by independent production companies with a thought of individuals rather than of Lord Rank’s idea.

So how did things commence after Mad Dog Morgan? 

When I came back to London, I got hold of a script by Michael Austin called The Shout [1978], based on a Robert Graves short story about a man who could kill with a shout. I had recently seen Deep End, so I gave [its director Jerzy] Skolimowski the script. He was in a down period, having made a couple of turkeys. He said, “I want to shoot cricket, because it’s such a crazy game.” He had no idea what the rules were, he was interested in the bails and the stumps and the symbolism of the game. At the time he was a name to be reckoned with so I managed to get an incredible cast: Alan Bates, Susannah York, John Hurt, Robert Stephens, Tim Curry and Jim Broadbent. I wanted a line producer and met Joyce Herlihy. She had been an army captain in the signals corps with a machine gun at the fall of Singapore and a production secretary on big Hollywood movies in Africa and in Europe. On the set at Hartland Point in Devon, where the cricket match was shot, there were ten very primitive caravans. I asked Joyce about it and she said, “Don’t worry about the actors, they always moan in the mornings.” That was the sort of wisdom I got from her. The film won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes and got sold all over the world.

Before going to Skolimowski, I’d offered The Shout to Nicolas Roeg. I’d visited the set of Performance [1970] as a boy – the hippest place to go in Notting Hill. And then I saw the film. Wow. And Walkabout [1970] was beyond belief. Nic was preparing Flash Gordon at Pinewood [a project that passed to Mike Hodges]. I went in and told him, “I’ll do anything to make a film with you.” He said, “You see this script here? It’s owned by Carlo Ponti. If you can get the rights, I’ll do it.” It was called Illusions but it became Bad Timing [1980]. There was a screenplay by Yale Udoff which Nic liked very much. It sounds unbelievable that a young lad would get something from Carlo Ponti, but I got it. Then Anthony Williams, head of production at Rank, said, “We’ll put up 50 per cent if you find the other 50 per cent”. Sandy Lieberson had just been made president of worldwide production [at Twentieth Century-Fox]. He said, “OK, I’ll give you the other half.” So we made Bad Timing, a very sophisticated film, a baptism of fire in terms of the emotion Nic puts in. But the opening was like a wet fish. We were so moved by this wonderful work but when it opened it was excoriated. The [Rank] gong man was taken off. The board saw the film and said, “We can’t be involved with a film like that.” And it was met with the full dose of group feeding-frenzy hysteria from the press.

Did this baptism of fire make you feel more like a producer? 

I was beginning to understand. With Mad Dog I’d been fucked badly on the business. Then I got in to Cannes and having won the Grand Prix, having breathed that high-altitude air, I wanted it. I’ve been true to that ever since. Straight after Bad Timing we went into Eureka [1983], my first and only experience of a full Hollywood studio film. It was made under the David Begelman regime. I was a sort of neophyte dealing with a $30 million movie – a fortune then – with Gene Hackman, Rutger Hauer, Theresa Russell and Mickey Rourke. I was encouraging of a certain wild behaviour because I admired it. I admired Sam Peckinpah and that extremism that went in to films in those days. It doesn’t exist now. When I first started making films, if you didn’t supply a cold beer at wrap, people would be very, very grumpy and maybe resign. Today if you offer somebody a beer at wrap, you’re taken to jail or sued. You’re not allowed an alcoholic drink on the set, you’re not even allowed to smoke. If you’re drunk, you’re fired. It’s in your contract. You’re putting the film into disrepute.

In a way you’re saying the Hays Code belatedly won. 

Yes. I’m not condoning drunkenness, I’m just saying that that part of the creative process is no longer there. Film is a very unusual combination of things because it has an incredible financial commitment of spending, yet it has to be free and creative. To be any good, the cinema that I do has to be free and yet there are many constraints on it now and my best films were made in an era of wildness, not least financial wildness. If you look at my films from the 70s through to the 90s, they were just me: producer Jeremy Thomas. Now I’ve got 13 executive producers all with a voice. To make these films you have to bring together many, many sources of money, all of whom want a strong voice. I’ve had to mutate or die. 

So how did you come out of Eureka? 

I made a $300,000 Hollywood producer’s fee, a lot of money then, and I pumped it into my business. A film producer who has no money is an oxymoron because it’s very hard to be one unless you can flash the cash. You’ve got to buy the rights, take people out, schmooze, travel. If you have to go so cap in hand, you’re asking, “Can I breathe today or not?” And that is not creative.

I’d sat next to Oshima at the [Cannes] prizegiving for The Shout. Five years later he sent me a project, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence [1982]. I liked it very much. I had this partner, Terry Glinwood. I was introduced to him by [film financier] Sir John Terry. He wanted to work on Merry Christmas. I went round to his apartment and John called, and I said, “Where are we going to find some more money?” He said, “Let’s go through Yellow Pages.” So we got to ‘H’ and called up [merchant bank] Hill Samuel. John was put through to someone called Rodney Payne. We went to see Payne. He said, “We’re not interested in film finance, but I’m going to introduce you to somebody who’ll put up a lot of money,” which he did. Cut: The Last Emperor [1987]. Payne took us to the chairman of Hill Samuel, who said to me – his name was Brian Quick – “Do you want a quick answer?” I said, “Yes please, Brian.” He said, “If you can set me up a dinner with the head of the China International Trust and Investment Corporation I’ll get you the money to make your film.” Hill Samuel wanted to get into China. I’d already got some of the money because I had a distributor in France, a distributor in Italy and a distributor in Germany. I’d phone them up and say, I need 200,000 [pounds] development money from each of you guys towards The Last Emperor. Fine.

So, to flip back to Merry Christmas, we got Bowie and Kitano [Takeshi] and Ryuichi Sakamoto together with Tom Conti, Jack Thompson and the great designers and cameramen, and shot in Rarotonga [in Polynesia]. It came to Cannes and was a gigantic hit.

How did that change things for you? 

I had a golden period where I owned my movies and I could sell them for more than they cost. The directors and myself would share the film and they loved it. Suddenly I was mastering what was mastering me. I read a screenplay and I look at the things the filmmaker wants to do – take [the forthcoming] High Rise, for instance: I’m thinking about the three films Ben Wheatley’s made, Ben as a person, J.G. Ballard and High Rise. I’m using my mixology to say, “That’s going to work.” That’s what I was doing with the Jarmusch film [Only Lovers Left Alive, 2013]. When Jim talked about the film, I saw what it could be. The question is how I can challenge hugely commercial romcoms and special-effects films with a film that I’m gonna feel good about myself, that can be commercial, that can interest other distributors and the public, and can satisfy critics and writers about films. 

How did you get to mount The Last Emperor [1987]?

I got a call from Bertolucci. He said, “I saw Merry Christmas and I was impressed. Do you want to meet up?” I said, “Why don’t we meet at Lee Ho Fook?” Bernardo said, “It’s strange you should choose a Chinese restaurant because I wanted to talk to you about From Emperor to Citizen: The Autobiography of Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi.”

So Bertolucci is sitting in front of me but I wasn’t looking at the Bertolucci of, say, La Luna [1979]. I was thinking, this is the monument that made 1900 [1976], Last Tango in Paris [1972], The Conformist [1970] and Before the Revolution [1964]. That was [the beginning of] a three-and-a-half-year journey to the Oscars in 1988, with all the difficulties involved of shooting [one of] the first [Western] features in China and of shipping all those people and food and costumes, the co-productions with different countries and all the political difficulties. I’d be frightened to consider a film like that today. 

What about the smaller films of the early 1980s? 

Margaret Matheson at Central TV approached me and said, “Stephen Frears wants to make this subject written by Peter Prince [The Hit, 1984].” I also had Insignificance [1985], so we did a two-picture deal – there was a special tax regime for financing independent films and I managed to pull off two very good low-budget films, both of which went to Cannes.

By this time [Cannes Film Festival head] Gilles Jacob had become very important for me. Gilles took a liking to what I was trying to do and I got a lot of good breaks. I got many films into Cannes because I became a supplier, supplying the likes of Oshima.

In the past, films like Apocalypse Now [1979] or The Go-between [1971] or sex, lies and videotape [1989] could win the Palme d’Or. It’s changed. The juries have become more radical. That’s not very good for festivals because now, if you win the Palme d’Or, it doesn’t really mean as much. I enjoy having a good relationship with festival directors. Most people go to LA to see top executives. I don’t. I worked that out a long time ago. It’s a waste of time. 

So who do you see in Hollywood? 

Friends. Actors. Directors. People from the past. I don’t want to wait in somebody’s outer office for an hour to have a meaningless meeting. It’s demeaning. They’re not interested in you or your culture. My friends and close colleagues in England who are successful ridicule me. But I’m not thinking whether I get this into 5,000 screens. My solidity is based on a longevity because we’ve been here in this building of film people making films since the early 1970s.

The Last Emperor seems to have been such a game-changer for you.

Yes, but you forget the days of anguish and stomach-churning difficulties. It was semi-poorly received by Columbia Pictures, but nominated for nine Oscars. We did a clean sweep and I had numerous incredible offers from Hollywood but I just stuck my two fingers up in the air and went to stay in Jamaica for three months with Chris Blackwell. Then we made Arthur Miller’s Everybody Wins [1990, directed by Karel Reisz] in Dino de Laurentiis’s studios in Wilmington. I was sort of suckered into that project. It’s not a well-known film but it looks much better today than it did when it came out. Luckily I was still working with Bertolucci on The Sheltering Sky [1990], which somehow I managed to get involved with. 

It wasn’t your project to begin with then? 

No. I had met David Cronenberg in Toronto and we got on like a house on fire. We were in a bar having a Red Stripe, and I said, “Why don’t we do Naked Lunch?” I told him he was the only person in the world who could make it. So I went to Burroughs and got the rights for 1,500 bucks a year over five or six years. I went to Tangier with Burroughs and David for ten days and we visited Paul Bowles and saw all the places and got stuck there because of storms.

Burroughs hadn’t been back since he wrote Naked Lunch. Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky was a book Nic Roeg had wanted badly to make but I couldn’t get the rights. It was owned by Warner Bros with Robert and Bill Aldrich. Robert Aldrich died before he got to make the film. Bernardo’s agent, Jeff Berg, was approached by Warners and we got to do it. I got the world rights, they took the US. That was a much-anticipated film made in the same road where Bowles wrote it. We went through Morocco and Algeria, we crossed the Sahara and through Niger and made the film for real; built a fort in the sand dunes, spent $28 million. It was a moment of megalomania that turned in to a well-received film. I like it very much today but it didn’t have the magic of The Last Emperor.

Then I was in Cannes with Bernardo and he was wanting to make a film about Buddha. We got a call from [French businessman and producer] Francis Bouygues’s office. So Bernardo came and seduced Mr Bouygues, who was sitting in a room in the Cap d’Antibes with a large statue of Buddha. One of his right-hand men asked how much we needed. “$40 million.” “Mr Bouygues will give you $40 million”. The quote from Bouygues was, “I want a garden that is cinema and the first plant I want is a film by Bernardo Bertolucci.” That was Little Buddha [1993]. 

When making a film with Bernardo, the cultural experience is as important as the technique, because the technique is just there. The whole richness of a film is in the private pleasure, a hubbub of cultural mayhem going on for a short period that then explodes and you never see the people again. There were so many anecdotes from these films because of the size and the scale involved. Incredible, dangerous and life-threatening things. Health and safety didn’t exist. The way of making films was completely different. You don’t make films under canvas in danger, in floods and [with] plane drops anymore. 

Tell me about Naked Lunch [1991]? 

It took David [Cronenberg] five or six years to write the script. It was an extremely difficult film to finance. Then Saddam Hussein started the [first] Gulf War, which meant that we couldn’t shoot in Tangier. I rang David and said, “The film’s collapsed.” There was a bit of gnashing of teeth and weeping on the phone. Then he phoned me back in an hour and said, “I want to shoot it in Toronto and it’s going to be better and cheaper.” We saved $2 million on the cost and he did brilliant things like having a lot of people in a café on a corner in Toronto with two camels from the zoo going backwards and forwards. I still had my regular partners then who supported the film and a lot of Japanese support. It didn’t perform well at the box office, although it’s become some sort of classic.

Then there was the continuation of the relationship with Bernardo. Stealing Beauty [1995] had a screenplay by Susan Minot. We scored big time with the cast of Liv Tyler and Rachel Weisz. [Stealing Beauty] was financed by UGC and made in Tuscany on location. The film has an incredible patina. No matter who Bernardo is working with, the camera always becomes an amazing object which moves over everything in the scene in the right way. If you’ve seen another filmmaker try to make shots like that, you’ll know it’s a big deal. Bernardo’s crew could lay down tracks in seconds, yet there was a gaiety around his shoots. Lunch was a very important part of the filmmaking experience. It was a great lesson in how to handle talent. 

A Jeremy Thomas production should always be pleasurable. 

There’s no point otherwise. This is why I have trouble with minimalist cinema. For me a film should have aspirations to be grand. What’s going on is a privileged collaborative creative moment between a group of people. Travelling and arriving are very different. The travelling part is always magnificent in the memory, the arriving just OK. 

So when is the transitional moment? 

The delivery of the film. Every time you show your films to the public, there’s a reality that you have to deal with. Like with Bad Timing. That was a film by adults for adults and the heart of it rang true to human relationships. Only someone like Nic was prepared to do a film like that, to go to the edge of what you can do. 

Speaking of that, what do you think now about the reaction to Crash [1996]? 

When David said he wanted to make Crash, I knew it was going to be a rough ride culturally but I had no idea what was going to happen in the UK which was completely out of all proportion to what the film was – being banned in the West End and vilified by the press and my appearing as some sort of pervert to be promoting this film. We had a certificate. There was no problem with the BBFC. The film was made by adults for adults. It was suggestive and talked about forbidden sorts of acts. But it’s just a brilliant creation. I love making films with Cronenberg. Long may it continue. I did turn down Dead Ringers [1988], which shows how crazy I can be. 

What about the film you directed [in 1998]? 

I read All the Little Animals by Walker Hamilton when I was in my twenties. I first imagined Dirk Bogarde as Mr Summers, the part that John Hurt plays in the film, and the young John Hurt as Bobby, the part that Christian Bale eventually played. I went to [Granada Television founder] Lord Bernstein, who had a handle on the book but Don Siegel had a second handle. The rights were very complicated, so I gave up. Cut. Lord Bernstein died and I thought, I must direct this film. So I optioned the book, my wife Eski wrote the screenplay and I found the money. I was overconfident though. The first day of shooting, the DP says, “Where do you want the camera?” I thought I had thought about it but I hadn’t – I had to enact it. So with a wonderful continuity woman and a wonderful operator helping me, I got in the swing. After a few days it felt good, and the post-production was very enjoyable. When we finished I was bereft but I haven’t made another. 

Why not? Did it just not happen? 

I got a good two thumbs up in America, but it never made any money and I got very bruised by the personal nature of the reviews here. When I was in Cannes, where it played in Un Certain Regard, nobody showed me the London reviews. On the plane home I was sat next to this guy who looked very frightened. When we got to London, I asked somebody, “Who is that guy?” And they said, “He’s the critic for the Times.” The day before he’d written a review which said: “Better luck next time, if ever, Jeremy.” That remained with me. I would like to direct again. It’s probably a very indulgent thing for me to do and it also takes a lot of time. I’ve got a couple of other subjects I’m playing around with. But its not for me to minimise how difficult it would be for me to get another film made. 

Tell me about your more recent run of films? 

There are so many and I can’t include them all. I met Kitano several times and he said, “I want to make a film in English and I want to make it with you.” So we started Brother [2000] – Kitano in LA, high body count. It was a lot of fun hanging in downtown LA with these guys. The Japanese are very economical. Kitano even likes his mistakes. First set-up: LAX, taxi arrives with Kitano in LAX, he gets out of the car. It’s been blocked [had its camera position determined]. Taxi arrives, misses the block, it’s halfway out of frame, he gets out of the car on the edge of the frame. I asked Kitano about it. He said, “If it’s something I hadn’t thought about and I can accept it, I’ll go forward.” Oshima was the same. If he finished shooting a scene at 2.30pm, even with hundreds of people in the crowd, he would wrap. Other directors would shoot hands and feet and faces till the end of the day.

I was shown Jonathan Glazer’s video clips and commercials. By chance a screenplay, Sexy Beast [2000], part of a trilogy by David Scinto and Louis Mellis [along with Gangster No. 1 and 44 Inch Chest], came through the door and Jonathan was attached. So I bought the script, they did some tweaking and the casting ended up different to what you’d imagine. You’d think Ben Kingsley would play the part Ray Winstone played and vice versa, but it worked out incredibly well. To me The Long Good Friday [1979], Performance and Sexy Beast are all films about the crime underworld in England. They’re not ‘gangster films’. 

Young Adam [2002] was a different sort of film for you. 

But it wasn’t though, because it was based on an Alex Trocchi story, and he fitted in to my love of beat literature. The story is very raw and it appealed to me. I didn’t know Glasgow at all. I stayed in the hotel with the crew and the wonderful actors Tilda [Swinton] and Ewan [McGregor]. Peter Mullan was there, Dave Mackenzie and all the good crew. You get to know the place. You move in with your posse. That’s the best part of the film-making game.

Then we had The Dreamers [2003], a wonderful film, with Gilbert Adair drawing from his book The Holy Innocents. Bernardo loved it, but wanted some changes and Gilbert rewrote the script. It was a fantastic story about these three kids and so true to how life was then. It’s got such a profoundness because Bernardo and Gilbert quote on cinema and the 60s in an incredible way. The film is one of the best I’ve been involved with. 

But of course one gets older… 

Yes. As my career went forward I became less needy to possess the films. I became sated. I decided I had to relax as a businessman. When I tell this story, of my career, it all sounds so unreal. It’s hard to think that such a life exists. There’s an anecdote I like: a guy gets made head of production at a big studio and his best friend rings him up and says, “Can we have a meeting?” So the friend comes in for the meeting and says, “I’ve got this idea to make a film.” And the head of production says, “But don’t you understand, 75 per cent of films are complete failures?” And the friend says, “I just want to be part of that 75 per cent.”