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Posted on Friday 26/04/2013 April, 2013 by Francesca Rudkin

Jeremy Thomas, one of the most successful independent producers of our time, produced A Dangerous Method, and it is one of the extraordinary number of critically acclaimed, individual and daring films with which he has been involved. He’s an Academy Award winner who has spent the last forty years working with auteurs such as Cronenberg, Nagisa Oshima, Bernardo Bertolucci, Wim Wenders and Nicolas Roeg, just to name a few.


David Cronenberg is the featured director in April’s Rialto Channel Directors' Showcase and this weekend his latest film, A Dangerous Method, screens on Saturday 27th at 8.30pm, as well as A History of Violence which wraps up the series on Sunday evening at 8.30pm.

Jeremy Thomas, one of the most successful independent producers of our time, produced A Dangerous Method, and it is one of the extraordinary number of critically-acclaimed, individual and daring films with which he has been involved. He’s an Academy Award winner who has spent the last forty years working with auteurs such as Cronenberg, Nagisa Oshima, Bernardo Bertolucci, Wim Wenders and Nicolas Roeg, just to name a few.

Jeremy kindly took some time out of his busy schedule (his new production Kon-Tiki is currently being released around the world), to talk to us about his special relationship with Cronenberg, and life as a producer.

A Dangerous Method is the third film you’ve shot with David Cronenberg, you’ve worked with him since 1991’s Naked Lunch. How does your working relationship work? Does David come to you with a project and say lets do this together or are you constantly talking about ideas?

JT: Well, we’re friends, I met him in 1980 in Toronto when I had a film called Bad Timing there, which was an award winner and I sat next to him at a bar and started talking to him. We were much younger of course, it was a long time ago, and I said is there anything you want to do, and he said yeah, I want to do Naked Lunch and a flash of lightening hit me and I thought, well, you’re the only person who can do it. And I went to meet William Burroughs in Kansas and got the option on the book Naked Lunch, and then years later we made the film. I kept optioning the book for very little money, and he wrote a script and we made that and then at the end of that he said, I’d like to make Crash by J.G Ballard, another book that I loved, so we’ve got similar tastes and that helps a lot, so then Crash happened, and then years later, I want to make this film about Freud and Jung based on a play by Christopher Hampton, and so we developed that into a screenplay…

The rights were quite complicated [for A Dangerous Method] because it was a play based on a screenplay and then in the end Christopher Hampton re-wrote it for David, and that was the third collaboration and I’m going to make another film with him, it’s a long-term relationship - not every film - but he’s a close friend of mine. We talk a lot about other things in life apart from movies when I see him a couple of times a year, I always see him at the Toronto Film Festival and I hope it will go on a long time, the filmmaking. We’re of course getting a lot older, but there’s a few films left.

What’s Cronenberg like to work with?

JT: He’s a very experienced filmmaker with a very singular sort of idea and filmmaking style. I think he’s one of the very few directors who has got a signature style that you can virtually recognize after a few shots. And there are very few directors who are, you know, when you say it’s a Cronenbergian film, people know exactly what you’re talking about. There are few directors who have that; Hitchcockian, Cronenbergian etc. He’s got his own way of shooting.

He collaborates with the same collaborators on a regular basis, cameraman Peter Suschitzky and Carol Spier his production designer, his editor Ronald Sanders and his composer Howard Shore, so that he’s worked out a way of making his films feel and look a little bit different, whether the film is the sort of, not horror type, but his earlier films that were very specific, or his later films such as History of Violence, Eastern Promises, or Dangerous Method, they have a certain feeling to them and they are shot in a special way with choices of lenses and camera angles, and the musical choices and the editing choices make a special flavour…

He’s a very light person, he’s very humorous, a very easygoing person, and he’s the opposite of what you’d think he is from seeing his films. He’s a gentle man, a gentle person, thoughtful and sort of quiet, stay at home kind of person, except when he’s making his films which he likes to make in a very orderly fashion.

He likes to make the film in a very controlled and orderly way. He likes doing very set hours and unlike some film directors who want to work in a mixed screen way, and others want to work in a very orderly and controlled way and he’s one of those producers who wants to work in an orderly and controlled way, very prepared and thought out.

I read somewhere he’s a director who works on schedule and on time and on budget – that must be heaven for a producer?

JT: He likes to be accurate; he’s somebody who doesn’t want to waste time or energy and effort shooting things that he’s not going to use. He’s thought the film out, it always comes from experience and knowledge.

So, what was it that appealed to you about A Dangerous Method? What attracts you to a project in general?

JT: Well, It’s all done on personal taste, starting with the filmmaker and director, even with a first time filmmaker like say Jonathon Glazer who I worked with on Sexy Beast, or David Mackenzie I liked what they’d done and I like their whatever their previous work had been, even if it’s not a feature, so the filmmaker needs to be someone I’m attracted to, one. Two, I need to have some sort of empathy for the material and who wouldn’t be attracted a film about Jung and Freud, and Sabina Spielrein with David and a Christopher Hampton script.

You’d have to be a producer like me with what I’m looking for, that’s [A Dangerous Method] pretty much in the bull’s eye, the centre of culture… For me it was a journey of discovery as well, because I didn’t know everything I should know about Jung and Freud and Sabina so during the making of this film I learned a lot about it, and that’s a great thing for a producer to do. Working on a film like that, or some of the other films that I’ve made, you get a postgraduate course in various subjects while making the movie.

Does the ability to fund or sell a film come into your decision making process when choosing projects?  

JT: Yeah I’m sure it does, because I’ve got a human hard drive developed in my head, I’ve been making films for nearly forty years and I’ve made a huge amount of films, and so when I look at reading material I’m sure I’m subconsciously thinking how can I film this, how can I do it, will enough people want it. Audiences I hope, but primarily I’m thinking, initially how am I going to find the resources to make the film and where can I make it.

So when taking Dangerous Method as a case, I could see that David and his crew are Canadian and then a lot of the film would be shot in Europe, and we chose Southern Germany where there’s a very lucrative financing system for financing films like in Australia. If you get it right, get your components right you can get a lot out of the state and the tax deals because they want to stimulate filmmaking. So it fitted into that. We shot a lot of interiors in Germany, and the lake Zurich on a lake in Southern Germany, and in a studio in Cologne, so that was from the Germany side. And then the editing and the music and post production and the other various technicians were Canadian so we managed to make a Canadian /German co-production. I knew that going in, because of the knowledge of how the world works in cinema, that could work like that.

And you do that many times. I’ve been making films in Japan with Takashi Miike (13 Assassins), I know that I’m going to get a lot of resources in Japan for a samurai film by him and there’s various fans around the world for his films too, so you use that knowledge in a subconscious way initially, and then in a conscious way when you start getting serious about it.

What’s your role as Producer – is it in a case like this to raise the money, shoot the film and distribute it?

JT: No film is made without a producer and today it’s very difficult for people to understand because sometimes you’ve got about 20 producers names on a film and that can be someone that as the producer of the film and the promoter, I’ve never even met them! It might be someone who handed the script to someone else to get you an actor or something stupid like that. Not quite that stupid as that, and yet they will be very remote and credits have become very debased.

But a producer like me, I option or get hold of the material, then I work on the screenplay with whoever is writing it, which could be with a director as well,  then I choose a director to work with and we go and look together for locations, actors or technicians to work on the film and parallel I’m raising money with a group of people that I have working with me, and then we plan the film and then the film is shot, and I stay on the set everyday to try and make it feel good, like a good set, a nice place to work, and then you work on the editing and the promotion of the film and the opening of the film. You’re supervising every area of the film. You’re not standing on the set as the creator, but you’re there as an enabler, an entrepreneur for the whole mission

How much creative input do you have in films you produce?

JT: Its hard for me to say, because its for the director to say, but I’m involved in every stage, the sounding board, or the arbiter for many things, so I feel like a creator myself, but the director creates it for me, after I’ve created it for him. So it’s something that I feel deeply involved with and why I claim “Jeremy Thomas Presents” on the front of a film, on a film like a Cronenberg film, I feel its my film as well, and he would, he would also know it’s my film too. We do different roles, and he couldn’t do his role without me, and I couldn’t do it without him. It’s hard to delineate really, but the director is the key role of the creativity of a film that’s for sure, but he can’t do it without a producer producing for him, which is not only the cash.  

When you start working on a film, you obviously think you’re making a great movie, but when do you know you’re making a great movie?

JT: You think you’re making a great movie really until you’ve completed the film and people tell you, and so you have to wait, and even then some films that I’ve done which I knew were great, were excoriated on opening and later become classics. And you see that in other works such as Citizen Kane which was excoriated, and Peeping Tom which was excoriated, many films get very badly received when they’re opened and then sort of come into people’s imaginations and become the classics of all time, so its difficult to really always tell. You always love the films you make, you know I’m coming up to 65 movies and I always think they’re great, until at a certain point you realize they didn’t hit the spot. But in my case, I’m pretty happy with the films I’ve done.

 

Make sure you catch A Dangerous Method on Saturday evening, 8.30pm on Rialto Channel. 


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