From the NC-17 ménage à trois of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” to James Spader having intercourse with Rosanna Arquette’s leg wound in David Cronenberg’s “Crash,” producer Jeremy Thomas loves a controversy onscreen.
Cinema raconteur Mark Cousins (the ASMR-inducing voice and mind behind collage documentaries “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock,” “The Story of Film,” “The Eyes of Orson Welles,” and more) pays homage to the Oscar-winning producer in his 2021 Cannes Classics selection, “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas.” The film follows Cousins on Thomas’ annual pilgrimage to the Cannes Film Festival — literally, the producer drove for decades from England to the fest — and a five-day road movie through France. Together, they remember Thomas’ most acclaimed and provocative films as a producer, from his Oscar-winning “The Last Emperor” to “Crash” and its scandalous opening at the festival in 1996, Nicolas Roeg’s “Bad Timing,” Jerzy Skolimowski’s “EO,” plus Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch,” Jonathan Glazer’s “Sexy Beast,” and Terry Gilliam’s reviled child abuse fairy tale, “Tideland.”
The film includes Thomas’ stories of movie stars like Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, and David Bowie, and features new insights from actors, colleagues, and admirers including Tilda Swinton and Debra Winger (she starred in Bertolucci’s “The Sheltering Sky,” which Thomas produced).
“It’s just two people in the car, slightly obsessed about film,” Cousins told IndieWire of “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas” during an interview with Anne Thompson. The road-trip documentary also features conversations about “great radical English people like Powell and Pressberger, Derek Jarman, Vivian Westwood, and Francis Bacon,” as Cousins said.
“For decades I have been a passionate internationalist. Cinema is the art of elsewhere. When I go to the pictures I don’t want to see myself, particularly; I want to see another paradigm, another existing way of living my life.” He seems to have found that in his travel buddy Thomas.
Cohen Media Group releases “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas” at the Quad Cinema in New York City on September 22. Watch the trailer, an IndieWire exclusive, below.
The Quad will also present a 10-day retrospective of Thomas’ work, “Jeremy Thomas Selects.” The program will run September 18-28, curated by Jeremy Thomas himself. Series highlights include 35mm prints and the U.S. premieres of new 4K restorations of “Crash,” “Naked Lunch,” “The Dreamers,” and “The Last Emperor.” Special guests will include Howard Shore, Julian Schnabel, and a pre-recorded intro from Jerzy Skolimowski.
Thomas most recently produced Skolimowski’s 2022 Best International Feature nominee “EO.”
