Page 14 - Fujifilm Exposure_4 Samantha Janus_ok

behind the camera
Calling All The Shots
Calling All The Shots
Oscar-winning
producer
Jeremy Thomas
now calls
His father Ralph was responsible for
- among many others - directing the Doctor series, while Uncle Gerald is surely best known for helm- ing thirty Car r y On comedies. But while they seemed to be generally confined to foreign fields that were forever the back lot at Pinewood, Thomas Jr’s reputation has been built on a series of international films set in ever more exotic loca- tions - from the Sahara to Bhutan, from the Australian Outback to Beijing’s Forbidden City.
Born quite literally over the shop, Jeremy Thomas happi- ly admits to charges of nepo- tism. However, since that effortless entree, the resem- blance between two quite remarkable generations of British film-maker swiftly and spectacular- ly diverges to opposite ends of the spectrum.
‘Action..!’
Jeremy Thomas has now personally produced some 20 feature films - with directors as varied as Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, Karel Reisz and Nicholas Roeg - since his debut in 1976. He’s won an Oscar (one of its nine) for The Last Emperor, he runs a thriving production outfit (Recorded Picture Company) and he recently became ex-chairman of the British Film Institute after five years at the helm. A busy man indeed.
Yet ask what has given him perhaps the most pleasure of his fascinating career to date and one suspects he might reply it was not, as you’d per- haps imagine, turning cameras in the Cook Islands or Niger but some damp and deeply unexotic weeks he spent during last year on the Isle Of Man and in the depths of Cornwall.
Never was there a better case of a fortysome- thing producer putting his mouth where the
Photo: Oscar night wave from the The Last Emperor producer, Jeremy Thomas.
EXPOSURE • 14 & 15