JEREMY THOMAS INTERVIEW

Born with a self-described ‘silver reel’ in his mouth, Jeremy Thomas started his career as a cutting room assistant on films such as The Harder They Come and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. His father Ralph Thomas directed more than forty films in the UK and his Uncle, Gerald Thomas, directed all the Carry On films. Eventually becoming an Editor for Ken Loach, Thomas produced his first film shortly afterwards: Philippe Mora’s Mad Dog Morgan, which was shot in Australia and was fraught with production issues thanks to its star Dennis Hopper and his predilection for heroic doses of drugs and alcohol. Thomas went on to produce some of the most lauded and iconic independent films of the past thirty years (Naked Lunch, Crash, Stealing Beauty, The Dreamers, The Great Rock’N’Roll Swindle, Sexy Beast) and he solidified his stature in the independent film world when he won the Best Picture Oscar in 1988 for producing Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. In person, Jeremy Thomas cuts a decidedly relaxed air, clearly at ease with his filmic legacy. He prefaces some statements with off-hand comments like: “I’ve made a lot of great films…” and one’s first reaction might be to baulk, however with Thomas there’s no argument when presented with the evidence of his amazing back catalogue. He’s in Australia for the impending release of Kon Tiki, his film about Norwegian Anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl’s traversing of the Pacific Ocean in a raft in 1947 by drifting from Peru to Tahiti in order to prove that ancient peoples could – and did – use oceans like roads to reach far-flung destinations. It’s smashed box office records in its home country of Norway and it’s nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar at this years Academy Awards. It’s a story Thomas has tried getting on screen for more than 20 years: “ I had read the book when I was much younger, it’s such a magnificent boys own adventure, this raft and the men with their beards, it very much stayed with me. Funnily enough, it was Michael Douglas who clued me in to the fact that the publisher of Kon Tiki wanted to sell the film rights but he didn’t own them, so the publisher took me to the Canary Islands to meet Heyerdahl in person and to get his consent. I got to know him, gave him some of my films to watch and went back several times over the next few years… eventually he decided to give me the rights”. The efforts in securing those rights were just one fiery hoop to jump through however more hurdles soon presented themselves: “I couldn’t find the way to do it back then, the ocean, the creatures, the sea life, I couldn’t find a way to do it in a pre-digital world”. Several years would pass before Thomas recruited directors Joachim Rønning, and Espen Sandberg, whose commercial backgrounds benefitted the entrepreneurial Thomas’s desire to fashion an epic for a mere 15 million euros: “we found a way to do the CG effects and the digital work very cheaply in Norway and making it a Norwegian film helped with the funding”. Thomas is justifiably pleased with the end result, as a culmination of many years hard graft, it’s a gratifying outcome: “lately in my career I’ve been executive producing films I enjoy, much like with Takashi Miike (13 Assassins, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai)…but earlier in my career, such as with Nic Roeg and Bernardo (Bertolucci), I would follow those projects for their entire life, from inception…. Producing is a funny cliché really; it’s the ‘vulgarian’ you know? A Hollywood cliché that in reality is very different. It’s a special sort of job and I’m really very lucky to go to all these amazing places with so many interesting and fascinating people…. it’s the stuff that dreams are made of really. So when a project like Kon Tiki is successfully brought to the screen, grows legs and goes on to have a life of its own - its really very satisfying.” JARROD WALKER