"Tread softly and carry a big stick" interview with Jeremy Thomas (1949-2026) from 2008

The sad death of Jeremy Thomas last week leave a big gap in the UK film industry. He not only produced the first western feature to be shot in China, and the first film to be shot in Bhutan - but worked with a whos-who of indie filmmakers bginging out some of their best work. I was fortunate enough to meet him for an interview in 2008 - for the final edition of the Film Finance Handbook - and realised last week I'd never published it online before.

Jeremy Thomas is one of the UK's most seasoned producers, who has embraced international productions with the fearlessness of an explorer. 1988's The Last Emperor, which won Thomas an Oscar, was the first film from the west to be shot in China, and Bertolucci's film crew were the first ever to get access to The Forbidden City. In another collaboration with Bertolucci, The Little Buddha, Thomas' team became the first crew to shoot in Bhutan, filming Buddhist monasteries and practices which had never before been recorded. A genuine director's producer, Thomas has released a number of films with leading names including Takeshi Kitano (Brother), Terry GIlliam (Tideland), Richard Linklater (Fast Food Nation), David Cronenberg (Naked Lunch, Crash), Nic Roeg (Insignificance), Julian Temple (Glastonbury) and Jonathan Glazier (Sexy Beast). He also runs of the UK's biggest sales agents - Hanway. During the interview, as the Blackadder themetune surreally wafted through the Hotel Malmaison sound system, I couldn't help but sense I was in the presence of an independent producing legend at the very top of the game.

What qualities would you say are most useful for a producer?
Well I suppose to be personable, or a combination of false form and being personable, with your own raft of ideas and dreams. You have to have some ideas and dreams to be a producer and you've got be able to get them over many hurdles to get your film made. So the desires and dreams follow the idea and the stronger the idea is, the easier it is to make, whether it be a little three minute film or a big epic.

You went straight into epics early on - what was the genesis of The Last Emperor?
Well I had been working for years and years. I entered the film business in the late 60s, in 1967 in fact. And I had been working since 17 in the movie business as an employee at the laboratory of Denham, processing film. Then I moved forward as a runner, then an assistant editor and then finally graduated to become editor, then I went on to produce my first film when I was 23-24, which was very young to produce a first film, but I had already been going a long time. And The Last Emperor was halfway through my journey, it was something that happened through chance meetings with people, and (Bernardo) Bertolucci giving me the autobiography of Puyi, and then the long journey to make that film. But that was something that had happened after making films for a long time and I had already learned a lot about making films.

Did you find having a practical grounding gave you an advantage later on?
People come to producing films from many ways. As with directing, those sort of positions, you can do it through learning the job, on the job, but there are a lot of courses and a lot of theory about making movies, so people can make a film from a number of places. But it comes back to having the idea. And then you can get people to join you. It's not a solo activity producing films, so people who have a knowledge you don't have, an expertise. You find people in the legal, financial, numbers areas, who will help you as a producer with their knowledge. And when it comes to making the film you will be using people who have years of experience, who know more than you. It's great finding people who know things you don't know and you use that, and that's one of the skills of producing, finding a group of people who know what you don't.

And in terms of pulling together the team for The Last Emperor, how did you go about that?
Well I was a big fan of Bertolucci, so when he proposed the film to me it was an easy decision, I want to make it. Especially a film about 60 years of Chinese history, the last Emperor, son of heaven, lord of 10,0000 years, absolute ruler of a quarter of the world who died as a gardener, it was an extraordinary story. It has an extraordinary history running behind it.

But the size of the film was so gigantic, it was a day at a time. And the people who came to work on the film were all wonderful in the various capacities from Vittorio Storaro who is a great cameraman to fantastic designers, costume designers and production people who had worked in China before, and then of course the Chinese themselves who were very very involved in the mounting of the film and delivering that incredible thing you saw on the film. Including the Forbidden City, as a location, which was open to us, we were one of the first people to take a camera into this place. I'm a great believer in shooting films for real if you can and will always go and make a film in the real place rather than build it if I can.

How hard was it to get access?
It was very difficult and took a long time. But they wanted the film. Initially we had to get permission to proceed with it and they wanted this film. And there was this idea that it would be great to have Bertolucci to be making a film in China but particularly in China a film about a man who was born as an Emperor who could die happily as a gardener. This was a story they were very happy that we wanted to come and tell, and spend tens of millions of dollars making a film which endorses an ideology in certain respects.

Did you feel you had to present their version of the story?
We had to have the screenplay read for accuracy, but the changes they asked for were minor and factual, not political at all. We shot the film, the film was sent back every night to Italy from Peking or wherever we were, back to Rome, to Technicolor, and then the film was edited and then they saw the movie. There was maybe one person on the set listening to what was being shot. But there was no surveillance and we were pretty free once we got these permissions.

The main difficulty was communication, and making arrangements: we're gonna be here on this date to shoot and we need that, and you'd arrive and they'd got the wrong day, or didn't know the time, didn't understand that making a movie with hundreds of people, there's a time factor. When you have 100s of people, trucks and lights and cameras, and actors you need the place to be open so you can get through the front door. Those kinds of little annoyances.

I imagine the infrastructure wasn't there?
Well it's very different now. I haven't been there in the last few years, but the change between today and the mid 80s, 86-87 is gigantic. There were very few hotels, I mean Western-style hotels, apart from the political hotels. They've all sprung up, Shanghai has changed beyond recognition. In the last 20 years in China there has been an incredible acceleration of building, and changing of the landscape. Luckily when we were there filming we still had places to shoot which we didn't have to change. Digital didn't exist. In fact in one shot in The Last Emperor which is the last shot of the kowtowing millions in this square in the forbidden city, if you look very carefully you can see a skyscraper in the background. You wouldn't know if you didn't know what it was. Of course today you'd digitally excise that, but in those days you didn't have those possibilities.

It must have been a learning experience for both you and the indigenous film industry?
Well there's an incredible film history in China, They're very sophisticated in all areas, just a bit different. Such an incredible film culture and incredible Chinese filmmakers and incredible films have been made and of course there were some political constraints in China, but there was such a large collaboration of skills.

They have a different way of making sets. We used to give the set designs to the Chinese studio, and instead of making them fake they built them real. So the streets and buildings, the bricks were real. And by the time we left the studio people lived in them.

They weren't built out of cardboard, they were built properly with proper facilities, and then as the streets were built the families would move in after we moved out, and when people wanted to film there the families would move out. So the people who worked as editors, cameramen, designers, they were living on the back-lot. It was quite extraordinary.

Taking on a project of that scale, how did you psyche yourself up for it, was it daunting?
It was a day at a time. I suppose, coming back to what it takes to be a producer, there was a dream, and I shared that dream with Bertolucci, and we made it happen. With a lot of other people of course, but there was a push, some kind of energy and effort in terms of pushing that thing into reality from being an idea on the page, it was a mass of work, and cost a mass of money.

Later you made The Little Buddha in Bhutan, was that the first film shot there?
First cameras in there, yeah. That was an exciting thing to do, and you hope that you can deliver to the cinemagoer something amazing by going to such a place with a camera and filming drama in it. You couldn't have built these things, it's unbuildable, the Forbidden City is unbuildable. We'd seen it in things like 55 Days of Peking, but the sets are just a little bit of wall. It's not the Forbidden City as we knew it. And the same with Bhutan, we wanted to find the most impressive monasteries in the Himalayas, and they exist in Bhutan, so we had to go there to get that. And all those ceremonies, and Buddhist events that we filmed they were real, with our actors in them. So you had this reality going on and it would have been very difficult to get extras to do that. Plus of course equipment now is getting smaller and smaller and you can go to more and more extraordinary places to shoot your movie, if you can persuade your actors to come with you.

Are there skills a producer needs in a situation like that?
Well they're personal skills, it's like being a diplomat, they are skills of intelligence, and again finding the right help. So I found the right help to get into Bhutan, to help with the various problems that we encountered. We were in Katmandu and there was a lot of unrest when we were filming there. We were there for months between Katmandu and Bhutan. It sounds very exotic but the story took us there. It's not a case of gratuitously going to these places, you needed to go to these places to make the movie.

And in The Sheltering Sky in the desert, going right through the desert with a camera crew. You can feel it in the film, in the middle of no-where, you can feel that you are with them in 360 degrees of desert all around. It takes a lot to take crew and actors out there to a place where you can die in a second, you have to look after the crew, you have to plan it like a military campaign. You have to think about everything.

These were high budget films for an independent.
These were the three high budget films I've made. I'm not a specialist, I mean, I live in London and make my films out of the UK, I'm not in a Hollywood system of studio movies that make that size of films, it's a very difficult mountain to climb, and I've done it three times. I'm not sure if I'll ever do a film like that again, maybe I won't.

How did you go about raising the finance?
In the same old way, the begging bowl, you know, please (cups hands). And you do it with some idea of what the film is and where you're going to find the money. That film, of course, it was difficult promoting the first western film to be shot in China. Can you do it, will you be able to do it, can we believe we can do it? But in fact the Chinese authority's open door policy to us enabled me to bring lots of banks into the film because they all wanted to come into China and I managed to persuade them that coming in was an artistic endevor, approved by the Chinese authorities and good for the bank. And I arranged meetings with the head bankers, and I had some knowledge of who ran the main institutions in China, who had interactions with western companies, and the banks came along and put a lot more money than banks normally put into movies. It was the first and only time that I got banks involved in a movie but there was another reason why they wanted to be involved. And when I came back to the next movie having made them an incredible film, a lot of money and all the Oscars and all that stuff that went with the movie, they said, well, not this time - there was no appetite in the City, but they wanted to be there in that film, China was there as a welcoming commercial arm.

Was it 100% financed by the banks?
We got money from elsewhere but a good chunk of money from the banks, enough to get it made.

Was it after that you got money from the Japanese?
The French were the first to come in, they came in with some development money, then the Japanese came in with some development money, Because it was a very expensive film to develop. Normally if there's a film set today with no set building and people wear regular clothes you need only a few weeks for preparing it. But if every costume and set has to be designed or made you have a mighty pre-production period to get the film ready for production. So to fund the film and get money for the development, I had to spend $2m of investors money on a film where the financing hadn't yet been completed.

Is most of your day to day funding from producers fees?
That's the basic idea, but it's not like that now because of the years of work. But initially I did that. It was hand to mouth at the beginning of course, sleeping on floors as anyone does, but after years of making films after so many years and so many movies it all comes together as one lump, and a lot of my older films are paying for my current life, ie development money is coming from the past. I don't see the film industry today in the way I did at the beginning because then I was producing for fees to make my work pay for my life and development.

Today I don't focus on the fees as much I focus as the movie, and how its structured and set up and what I can generate out of that film once it's shot and made, so I'm trying to make the film as cheaply as possible. So I'm not trying to suck the film, I'm trying to make the film economically and then put it out, so it's more of a longer game plan. It's a company with 30 people covering sales, marketing, development, delivery, it's a constant going round.

When did Hanway set up?
1997. I had many involvements with different sales companies over the years.

What an indie producer needs in his arsenal of filmmaking tools is a good relationship with a sales company or a sales company of his own.

I imagine it must make a big difference for collecting receipts?
Well it's not so much that because the money's been prearranged with the people who put the money up, you get your little piece for getting the film out and most of the money would go back to investors initially. You'd normally make a film in a trustee company set up, you don't handle the money, the money is handled by an unimpeachable source with a prearranged waterfall of money, first this, then that. But having a number of things going on rather than one thing at any time, it helps with the cash-flow as our business doesn't have any outside investors in it. It would be difficult making some of these films that we make with investors on our back saying why didn't you make a romantic comedy, why don't you do this, why don't you make a film that's traditionally popular.

Do you only sell your own?
We also sell other people's, mainly other people's, the sales and international distribution division does 90% other people's movies.

How are your current projects being financed?
Every film is different. It always turns into something else, unless you've got financing from a parent, it's like being a kid, unless you can get it all paid for by a parent, by someone else you've got to get it financed. If you work for a major studio, they pay for 100% of the film and they own 100% of the film and give you some piece of the profits and you're doing a job for them and  they pay for that and you don't have to worry about where the profits are coming from.

And that is the traditional way of making film, the large industrial companies, the industrialisation of film, the large major companies who control production, that is the normal financing route.

The independent financing route is what's left of the scraps at the end of the table because the majority of the decent stuff is taken up by the big companies who can push their films into the market no matter what the merit of the movie.

We're very dependent on reviews, word of mouth and PR in the independent world because you're making an economical film and you can't afford to spend one or two times the cost of a film to market the film, whether it's any good or not, whereas the large international conglomerate make a movie, and the release date for that film and the worldwide plan for that has already been thought out when it goes into production.

If it's $100m film, maybe they'll spend $100m marketing it, it will go out on X-thousand cinemas around the world, it is pre-planned and a very different t kind of operation and the money spent on the marketing is so enormous. And whatever the merit of the film, the entertainment value of the film, there'll full page ads and a complete blanketing of the world of media, cable TV and every way you can. They've got the machinery: private jets, junkets, and so forth to ensure that that investment is covered, and it's only in exceptionally bad luck that they can not get a film out there and get over the hurdle of recoupment.

When do you start marketing a film?
I'm involved with the marketing in my mind when I begin, but I don't always have the resources to do that so I work on the marketing throughout the film, get together pieces of journalism by people to go with, but you can't pay for everyone to come in like a large film, you've got to invite them in and find a clever way to do that, and then you use festivals and other ways of getting your film out. You're thinking about marketing all the time. At the beginning you're thinking about the movie, and then as you develop your skills, that marketing becomes something you do as a producer without thinking about it.

Just looking at the directors you've worked with, you're not afraid to work with auteurs
That's personal taste, plus they're filmmakers that I admire and filmmakers I can promote. Many things go for it. You're more likely to get a good movie. First-time moviemakers I've been working with, you can see where they are and I've had some good work out of that. But by and large I want to work with someone whose work I've seen and I know what they're going to do with something. So I can read a book or think about material with a director whose films I know, and then I can be a producer and I can say, well he's going to do that. It's not a shotgun blast for me, it's more a rifle shot, of what the thing's gonna be.

I use this analogy all the time, but it's like knowing painters. we all know what a Hockney looks like, or a Picasso, a Dali, roughly, you look and go ooh that's a Dali, that's a Picasso. It's like you say to these painters, you ask them to paint this table, or this bunch of flowers, one will be abstract, one realistic. It's the same with filmmakers, you have a piece of material and you think oh this is definitely one for Ken Loach. Or a first time director and you love the commercials he makes and you know that's going to be good. I want to know the level you're working at, you want to know what the director's doing culturally as a creator and what you want as a producer for your film. And either that happens at the beginning of your career, or you develop that if you're going to have any longevity.

Are there challenges associated with working with someone with a big reputation or way of working - do you have to work around them?
Yeah if someone has developed their own style of work - everyone works in a different own way. Some like to do one or two takes, some like to do 30 takes. Some directors like to to do lots of coverage, some like to do cut to cut, some like no rehearsals with actors, some want to be instant on the set, some like to do to rehearsals till its word perfect and some people say dead in the ground and they all want to do it a different way and you just want to come to terms with that and as long as its bearing fruit you let it happen because you've chosen to work with that film artist for what they do and they get to that place by doing it that way.

Have you got any any advice for making relationships work in a working sense?
It's very difficult, how do you make a marriage work? Give and take. Credibility. Tread softly and carry a big stick I suppose. Have the ability to be in charge of your film  but know you're in a  creative process which is very technical and exacting, but its still a creative process where you need to deal with creative people in a different way.