The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a documentary for people who enjoy the sort of films that Jeremy Thomas gets involved with. The likes of The Sheltering Sky, Sexy Beast, Crash, High-Rise, 13 Assassins or The Dreamers. Smart, good-looking, slightly offbeat stuff, not arthouse exactly – his films are too starry for that. But not your Pixars, or Disneys, or Marvels or Foxes. Thomas is the producer or executive producer behind all of those movies, plus a long run of critical and box office successes going back to the 1970s. A “searingly bright” man of “great taste”, “totally playful” who can be “very serious”, says Debra Winger. “The dream producer… the enabler… so rock’n’roll,” says Tilda Swinton.
Mark Cousins is the man behind this documentary, a like-minded film enthusiast and another of the good guys of the movie biz, a critic, educator and maker of highly personal films who illuminates neglected corners, as he did in his magisterial series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, or his recent documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, which goes into the “how” rather than the “who” of the man.
Structurally, this documentary is a journey from the UK by car, Cousins in the passenger seat, as petrolhead Thomas drives them both to Cannes to attend the festival, where Thomas is promoting Takashi Miike’s First Love, though he makes clear he’s also in town to sniff about, meet people, collect ideas.
Cousins describes Thomas as a “movie prince” and it is true. He was born into a British moviemaking dynasty. He’s the son of Ralph Thomas, director of the vastly successful Doctor movies (from 1954’s Doctor in the House to 1970’s Doctor in Trouble), nephew of Gerald Thomas, director of the even more successful Carry On series. Much more biographical detail than that we don’t learn. Three kids, yes. Wife? Wives? If it’s mentioned I must have missed it.
It’s not that sort of documentary. Cousins isn’t the man to ask a prying personal question and Thomas, for all his rock’n’roll side, isn’t the sort of man who’d answer one, and so we get neither “The Real Jeremy Thomas”, nor an insider’s view of a complex business. Instead it’s a life as refracted through the movies Thomas has been involved with.
Most notably these include Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, which won nine Oscars, unheard of for an independent production, the movie that flung all the doors open for Thomas, for a while at least.
We’re here to admire and celebrate rather than to learn. Cousin knows that the read-across from a film to its producer isn’t as direct as it is to its director (and even that is moot) but he keeps worrying away at that knot, trying to tease from Thomas correlations between movies he’s been involved with and the man himself.
Thomas doesn’t really buy into this idea. Or if he does he’s too guarded to play along. But he deflects charmingly and is happy to talk at length about the things that do interest him, which Cousins breaks down into sub-sections – like Politics, Sex and Death – along the way name-checking actors like David Bowie (a star, Thomas admits, though he won’t be pushed on Bowie’s acting ability), Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando and Debra Winger, and directors like Nicolas Roeg, David Cronenberg, Takashi Miike and Bernardo Bertolucci.
The visuals are sumptuous. Between shots of the two men in Thomas’s car, or at Cannes, or at stops en route, there are acres of clips from Thomas’s films, and here you can detect a throughline, since so many of them are breathtaking.
Thomas isn’t all about surface charm but the films he produces certainly acknowledge it. Visuals matter. So do stars. In one of the film’s more thoughtful moments Thomas engages with Truffaut’s comment on stardom “deforming” the screen. Stardom, starriness, the star persona, Thomas counters, is part of what we pay to see. Tilda Swinton puts the same idea a slightly different way – deformity is, in a sense, what audiences want.
As I write, Thomas has three 2023 movies on the screens – Wim Wenders’s Anselm, a documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer; Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, another documentary, about the musician who recently died (and who memorably scored Thomas’s Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence); and The Dead Don’t Hurt, a Canadian western directed by and starring Viggo Mortensen (who starred in the Thomas-produced David Cronenberg movie A Dangerous Method) and Vicky Krieps.
All sound, at the very least, fascinating. Long may this movie prince continue.
The Storms of Jeremy Thomas – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
