British film producer Jeremy Thomas took to the Edinburgh International Film Festival stage Friday night to reflect on his legendary, decades-spanning career.
Thomas and Irish director Mark Cousins pondered over the state of the film industry during a 90-minute conversation, which also covered Harvey Weinstein, Harry Cohn and Thomas’ time spent with some of the biggest filmmakers in history.
Thomas, also the former chair of the British Film Institute, is a frequent collaborator of David Cronenberg‘s, having worked on Crash (1996) and Naked Lunch (1991). He is best known for producing Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), which won a whopping nine Oscars the following year, including best picture.
“I’m having difficulties finding work that satisfies me, principally,” Thomas admitted to Cousins. “I’m still making films, and I will continue making films, but the scale that I make films at — the size and the lack of responsibility, which was encouraged by those around who gave me money… I couldn’t make Naked Lunch today.”
What was clear was Thomas’ yearning for a time when producers were given total control over their films, an undertaking that he described nowadays as a far bigger, and more complex, group effort. “I was trusted for 30 years… by a group of people who wanted to make money out of me,” he said. “So I got freedom. [They thought], ‘Jeremy knows something we don’t know. We’ll give him 30 million bucks.’”
“I was at the tail end of the golden age of cinema, when films made money in the cinema before VHS was even thought about. That’s where I come from,” he continued. “And to continue working, to continue being relevant, I have to mutate. And that’s a fact, and I accept it.”
He added: “I’m satisfied when I get one over on everybody, when I make a film and I did it, I got it, I own it. It’s mine. I’m in charge of it. Nobody can tell me [they] didn’t like that… I’m in charge of it all, and I can’t do it as I want to anymore, because I’m an old man. I can’t go and find somebody to give me 40 million bucks anymore. I’ve got to find a way to collaborate with many, and subjugate my craziness into normalcy.”
In between discussions about working with the late Gene Hackman and Nicolas Roeg on 1983’s Eureka, and Thomas’ childhood spent on huge Hollywood sets at Britain’s Pinewood Studios, the pair also talked about Weinstein — and why Thomas hated him.
“I have a terrible enmity with Harvey,” he told Cousins. “I would turn my back on him in public and [say], ‘Don’t talk to me.’ I took [it to] a shocking level of rudeness. I couldn’t stand him, but I didn’t know why. But now we know why I didn’t like him,” Thomas said, referencing Weinstein’s sexual abuse charges.
Thomas revealed that in the wake of the controversial film Crash, following James Spader and a group of people who find themselves aroused by car crashes, he had people calling for him to be hanged and press gathered around his house. “I was heavily attacked,” he said about Cronenberg’s widely-banned film. “It didn’t offend me in my morality… If I can get away with it, I want to expose people to [boundary-pushing content]. Everybody’s protected in cotton wool, even then. They’re offendable, continuously offendable.”
Thomas added towards the end of the session: “I don’t like cultural domination of things. I like a big mixture, somehow being on the outside, and the counter culture’s on the outside… I’m continuing making films, economically for myself, but I still believe in the importance of this craft and art, because everybody in this room got their knowledge pretty much through the cinema. About the world, love and emotions and parents and sisters and brothers and hardships and poverty and everything, you didn’t get it through personal experience. You didn’t get it through the papers… You got it through movies.”
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2025 runs Aug. 14-20.