Material outside the mainstream is what has always interested 'Fast Food Nation' producer Jeremy Thomas, he tells Michael Dwyer
Richard Linklater, the Texan director of Fast Food Nation, says that when a movie is credited as a Jeremy Thomas production, "you know it means this is probably going to be something different". Linklater's new movie is the 38th on which Thomas has been producer or executive producer in a career marked by independence and imagination. To describe his productions as "something different" is to understate their maverick nature.
It was one of his earliest collaborators, former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, who suggested to Thomas that there was a movie in Eric Schlosser's non-fiction bestseller, Fast Food Nation, a scathing exposé on the practices of the fast food industry. McLaren felt that the film version would be more effective as a narrative feature than a documentary.
"I hadn't thought about it in those terms," Thomas says, "but as I reflected on it, I felt that it could work if we found the right film-maker, and that was Rick Linklater. Eric and Rick agreed that the book would work better as a narrative. It all fitted together. Taking a book that is a well-known novel, such as The Sheltering Sky, is a challenge because it's a book beloved by people and they've formed their own ideas about it. Fast Food Nation is a book about facts and information, and how to make a dramatic film out of that was even more of a challenge."
Linklater has responded to that challenge with an energetic, darkly humorous movie marked by an evident sincerity and concern, pulling no punches in depicting the production of fast food as disgusting and dangerous. Formed as overlapping stories dealing with characters at different levels on the fast food chain, it attracted a strong ensemble cast of established actors (Bruce Willis, Ethan Hawke, Greg Kinnear) and rising talents (Catalina Sandino Moreno, Avril Lavigne, Paul Dano).
"In a way, it was the cast who put themselves together," says Thomas. "The book sold millions of copies and Hollywood is full of activists, especially among the younger actors, as well as people who want to be successful and make lots of money. All the cast worked for scale and lived in a motel while we were shooting."
Thomas grew up surrounded by actors and directors. His father, Ralph Thomas, directed more than 40 movies, including the Doctor romantic comedy series and the 1959 version of The 39 Steps. His uncle, Gerald Thomas, directed the immensely popular Carry On movies.
"Looking back on it, it was an extraordinary childhood," Thomas (Jeremy) says. "At the time it seemed normal to me because I didn't know anything else - to have Dirk Bogarde as a godfather, to have Katharine Hepburn flicking stones in the pond, or Brigitte Bardot in the swimming pool."
His parents wanted him to further his education, but Thomas chose to leave school at 17 and work in a film laboratory, where he rose from runner to film editor for Ken Loach.
"It was a good apprenticeship," he says, "although when I worked for Michael Winner on Lawman, he fired me by long distance from Mexico for getting the rushes out of synch twice. I tangled with the greats!"
His father and uncle specialised in highly commercial films, but Jeremy Thomas struck out in a different direction when he began to produce his own movies. In 1975 he edited Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?, Philippe Mora's documentary on the Depression era, and a year later he produced his first film, Mad Dog Morgan, which Mora directed. It starred Dennis Hopper as an Irish outlaw in mid-19th-century Australia.
"It was a very low-budget film," Thomas says, "even though we had 60 location changes and over 100 speaking parts - and Dennis, who agreed to do it for very little money. He arrived in Australia with no bags and only the clothes he was wearing. He was in jail within two days of arriving. It's still a legendary film in Australia that it ever got made at all."
THOMAS WAS THEN sent a script based on a Robert Graves short story and he flew to Warsaw and asked Polish film-maker Jerzy Skolimowski to direct The Shout. It won the runner-up award, Le Grand Prix du Jury, at Cannes in 1978. "We had some great actors - Alan Bates, Susannah York, John Hurt - working on this very traditional story that was being told in Skolimowski's surreal style. It generated this extraordinary film and it won the prize at Cannes, which gave me more credibility as I tried to make other films."
Characteristically, Thomas's third film as a producer was "something different" again, The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, an anarchic romp directed by Julien Temple and featuring the Sex Pistols with a cameo from train robber Ronnie Biggs. In one scene, Sid Vicious shoots the audience at the end of his frenetic rendition of the Sinatra classic, My Way.
"When one well-known British producer heard I was making that, he told me I would never get to work again," Thomas says, "but it's a magnificent document of that time."
He followed it with one of the great films of his career in the raw, emotional Bad Timing, starring Theresa Russell and Art Garfunkel, the first of three Thomas productions directed by Nicolas Roeg.
"It was a very dark film that went to extreme places of people's minds, and it was very difficult to get it made," Thomas says. "I persuaded the Rank Organisation to put up half the money, but they had their gong man taken off the front of the film when they saw it. They saw the film as an effrontery to morality."
Thomas is one of those rare producers whose work definitively befits the description of world cinema, and his next stop was Japan for Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Nagisa Oshima's film of a Laurens Van der Post novel set in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1942. The cast featured pop stars from different continents in Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also composed the memorable score, and David Bowie.
"That was by far my most successful film up to then," says Thomas, "and it's still a film that's seen a lot. Its themes are as relevant now as they were then. The bringing together of the different cultures really made that movie special, and it crossed the boundaries into popular culture in a very satisfying way."
The 1984 Thomas production, The Hit, brought Stephen Frears back into movies after 12 years directing TV drama.
"Gangster films are such a staple and I had never approached a genre film before then," Thomas says. "It had the classical themes of the genre. It was a road movie set across Spain. We had wonderful actors: Terence Stamp, John Hurt, Tim Roth in his first feature film, Marisa del Sol, and Fernando Rey, who only speaks in the last scene."
Thomas worked with Roeg again on the thrilling, vastly underrated Eureka, which starred Gene Hackman as a gold prospector who becomes the wealthiest man in the world, along with Theresa Russell, Rutger Hauer, Mickey Rourke and Joe Pesci.
"We had an incredible cast and it was by far the biggest production I had done at that stage," Thomas notes. "It was my only film that was 100 per cent financed by a Hollywood studio. It was for MGM, when the notorious David Begelman was in charge. He was a great studio mogul, but by the time we finished it, he was being indicted for embezzlement. That held up the release of the film, and again it was difficult for the studio because it was confrontational to the ideology of success."
Is it frustrating to produce a film of such quality when it doesn't find an audience or even get a chance to find one?
"Unfortunately, it happens a lot if you're working in subject material outside the mainstream, and that's the material that interests me," Thomas says." I would like my films to be very successful, but I am not trying to make X-Men. Some of my films have been very successful, but they are mainly for a specialised audience, and there is an audience out there for them. I try to make them with an economy that can support that."
HOWEVER, HIS 1987 production of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor was lavish and sumptuous. It collected nine Oscars, including best picture, for which Thomas, as producer, was the recipient.
"Making it was an extraordinary adventure that started with meeting Bertolucci in a Chinese restaurant in London," he says. "He pitched me this remarkable story about an emperor who was the ruler of a quarter of the world and then died as a gardener. We went to China. We were the first film to get permission to shoot in the Forbidden City. We had complete freedom." Not so in Hollywood. "Nobody believed that the film would be successful, and when it became a hit, it ended in fierce litigation with Columbia. We made the film without studio involvement. When it was finished, David Puttnam was in charge at Columbia and he bought the distribution rights, but before it went on release, he was gone and the studio was under new management. If a film like that won nine Oscars today, it would have been marketed in a very different way.
"I still enjoy dealing with Hollywood studios. I have to deal with them. There is often a clash of ideals. The studios are run for stockholders, for the ultimate profits, and that's just the way of the world. Now they all have their own divisions for specialised films because they need those films. If you look at the films nominated for Oscars this year, they all came from specialist divisions of the studios, except for The Departed."
Bertolucci went on to become Thomas's most regular collaborator. They worked together again on The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha, Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers, and they are preparing a new project in Naples.
"Bernardo's the best guy in the world to work with," Thomas says. "He's a master film-maker and a delightful person. He's very challenging, just as any very gifted person would be, but I love working with him."
THOMAS HAS WORKED twice with Canadian director David Cronenberg, on Naked Lunch and Crash, both based on novels widely regarded as unfilmable. "And I will work with him again," Thomas says. "He is the most accurate film-maker I know. He knows exactly what he's doing at all times. Everything is prepared. He works with the same collaborators all the time. He starts at nine in the morning, sleeps for an hour at lunchtime and finishes shooting at 5.30."
Thomas's notable recent productions include Brother (directed by Takeshi Kitano), Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer) and About Adam (David Mackenzie). And he followed his father and his uncle by turning director with the touching 1998 drama, All the Little Animals, beautifully acted by John Hurt and Christian Bale.
"I decided I had to direct before I was 50," says Thomas, who was 48 at the time. "My wife wrote the script, my colleagues at work helped me, and I finally made the film. I was directing it and I was also the producer. I was getting these calls every night asking where's the money for this or that, but it was a wonderful experience. I originally intended to be a director. I used to think that being a producer was a very vulgar profession, and that the producer is the hate figure."
Fast Food Nation is on release