Jeremy Thomas spent more than five decades getting difficult movies made. One of his latest will reach a festival audience without him there to see it.
The British producer, who won the Best Picture Oscar for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, died Sept. 11 at 77. Thomas “passed away peacefully” at his country home in Oxfordshire surrounded by family and loved ones, his publicist said in a statement reported by Deadline.
Thomas built a career around filmmakers whose work rarely fit neatly into one country, genre or studio system. His credits included Crash, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Sexy Beast, High-Rise and A Dangerous Method, alongside repeated collaborations with Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg, Nicolas Roeg, Nagisa Oshima and Takashi Miike.
Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, Thomas’ latest collaboration with Miike, is scheduled to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 14.
His Latest Film Will Premiere Three Days After His Death
Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo reunited Thomas with Miike for the fifth time. Sony Pictures identifies Thomas as one of the film’s producers alongside Sam Pressman, Naoaki Kitajima and Misako Saka, continuing a relationship with Miike that had already included films such as 13 Assassins and Blade of the Immortal.
Shun Oguri stars as a corrupt Tokyo police detective whose case collides with an investigation being pursued by an FBI agent played by Lily James. The ensemble also includes Shotaro Mamiya, Liv Morgan, Jun Kunimura and Hiroshi Tachi.
The film is scheduled for an 8:30 p.m. screening at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre on Sept. 14 as part of TIFF’s Special Presentations program. Current coverage of Thomas’ death describes it as his latest film and notes that the premiere will now take place posthumously.
The project fits the pattern Thomas followed throughout his career, building international productions around directors with highly individual styles. Even late in his career, he was still pairing British, American and Japanese production partners on a film shot in Tokyo and directed by one of Japan’s most prolific filmmakers.
‘The Last Emperor’ Won All Nine Oscars It Was Nominated For
The biggest awards night of Thomas’ career came at the 1988 Academy Awards. Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, the story of China’s final emperor, Puyi, entered the ceremony with nine nominations and won every category in which it competed.
That sweep included Best Picture, with the Academy listing Jeremy Thomas as the film’s producer. It also won for directing, adapted screenplay, cinematography, film editing, costume design, art direction, sound and original score.
The production itself had required something far messier than its perfect awards-night record. Thomas helped finance an ambitious international independent production that secured extraordinary access to Beijing’s Forbidden City. He later recalled being particularly nervous about whether the filmmakers would receive permission to shoot there because the location was essential to making the movie work.
He Built Careers Around Directors He Trusted
The Last Emperor was one chapter in a 17-year partnership with Bertolucci. Thomas also produced The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers, giving the pair five films together.
He applied the same long-term approach elsewhere. With David Cronenberg, Thomas’ credits included the controversial J.G. Ballard adaptation Crash and A Dangerous Method. Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence brought together David Bowie, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Takeshi Kitano, while Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast became the director’s first feature.
Thomas’ wider filmography stretched across more than 80 productions, according to current obituaries. He worked with filmmakers including Nicolas Roeg, Stephen Frears, Jim Jarmusch, Terry Gilliam, Wim Wenders, Jerzy Skolimowski, Ben Wheatley, David Mackenzie and Matteo Garrone.
That international outlook had been present from the beginning. Thomas grew up in a filmmaking family, started his career in cutting rooms and received his first feature producing credit on the 1976 Australian film Mad Dog Morgan. He later founded Recorded Picture Company, which became the vehicle for much of the filmmaker-driven work that defined his career.
A Documentary Put the Producer in Front of the Camera
Thomas usually occupied the side of filmmaking audiences rarely see, but director Mark Cousins turned the producer himself into the subject of the 2021 documentary The Storms of Jeremy Thomas.
The Cannes Classics film followed Thomas and Cousins on a roughly 1,000-kilometer road trip from London to Cannes, retracing a journey Thomas had made to the festival for decades. Their conversations became a moving history of his films, collaborators and attachment to independent cinema, with Tilda Swinton, Debra Winger and producer Rebecca O’Brien also appearing.
Thomas remained active almost until the end of his life. This month, he appeared onscreen in Luca Guadagnino’s sprawling 435-minute documentary Joie de vivre, a study of Bertolucci and 20th-century cinephilia that screened out of competition at the Venice Film Festival.
La Biennale lists Thomas among the documentary’s participants alongside Martin Scorsese, David Cronenberg, Alfonso Cuarón, James Gray, Catherine Breillat and Debra Winger.