Page 15 - Fujifilm Exposure_4 Samantha Janus_ok

Photos main: Jeremy Thomas in reflective mood; and inset from top: Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (BFI stills); Insignificance; directing on the set of All The Little Animals; The Shout.
money is than the sight of Thomas up to his ankles in unseasonal mud making his belated debut as a director on All The Little Animals, financed by J & M Entertainment, BSkyB, the BBC, British Screen and the Isle of Man Film Commission.
“I had secretly wanted to direct it ever since I first read the novel over 20 years ago,” he told me. “It’s a unique fusion of the traditional thriller and a classic morality tale and it also touches on issues which have become even more important and more topical today.” So thanks to a screenplay by Thomas’s wife, Eski, the sixties-set book has now become a contemporary thriller about betrayal, revenge and redemption co-starring Christian Bale, John Hurt and Daniel Benzali.
He’d sat on the rights for years resisting end- less approaches from other film-makers just wait- ing for the right moment to try his own hand. Until? “Well, I’d built a business up which was self-
sustaining and could be run by the people there now, so it’s not just a one-man band. That meant I could take a six-month period to do something like this. Then there was the fact that after working on the screenplay for two or three years, Eski had come up with a script that was very, very good.”
So, with trusted colleagues at his elbow - like cinematographer Mike Molloy and veteran editor John Victor Smith, for whom Thomas once worked as a trainee cutter - he leapt.
“Now, of course, I regret I didn’t do it a long time ago. But maybe it was for the best because when I went on the set that first day I really wasn’t nervous. I knew where to put the camera and I knew what I wanted to do. There are 80 people on the set, many with questions and ideas, and so you must be confident enough to be decisive.
“That’s why it’s crucial to be surrounded by people whose opinions you respect for it’s quite
hard sometimes to stand back and see the wood for the trees when you’re as close as I am to this. At £3.5m, it’s maybe a little larger than the usual first-time film but this kind of budget still means that there’s not a lot of baggage and the produc- tion side is very modestly priced. Will producing- only be a holiday after this? No. It is and remains a very difficult job.”
All The Little Animals will, Thomas is fully confident, receive some kind of official launching pad at this year’s Cannes. How fitting that would be for a man who has had such a long-time rela- tionship with the festival as, variously, a juror, pro- moter and participant. In fact it was his atten- dance at Cannes not to mention other regular venues on the festival circuit that first brought him to the attention of Bernardo Bertolucci, for whom he has produced, to date, four films trail- blazing with the Oscar laden wonder, The Last
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