There were people you expected to see in Cannes every year. The stars came and went, directors arrived surrounded by entourages, distributors appeared for three days and vanished again. But Jeremy Thomas seemed to belong to the place. Somewhere between the Palais, the Carlton and the Croisette, he was part of the permanent landscape of cinema.
Usually looking immaculate but never overdone, he had the air of someone who had seen practically everything the film business could throw at him and remained fascinated by movies anyway. He was not a producer who needed to announce himself. If you knew cinema, you knew who Jeremy Thomas was.
His death at 77 brings to an end one of the most remarkable producing careers in modern British cinema — and one of the last in which a producer could operate principally on instinct, taste and relationships.
Thomas was a gambler, although he would probably have resisted the description. A gambler takes a chance hoping to win. Thomas took chances because he was interested in what might happen. That distinction explains an extraordinary career.
He was born into the film industry — the son of director Ralph Thomas, whose Doctor series was a staple of British popular cinema, and nephew of Carry On director Gerald Thomas. But he did not follow the family towards dependable commercial filmmaking. Instead, he gravitated towards the outsiders, the obsessives and the directors whose ambitions made nervous financiers reach for their calculators. His company, the Recorded Picture Company, became a home for this kind of cinema.
The list of directors he backed is almost absurd in its breadth: Bernardo Bertolucci, Nicolas Roeg, Nagisa Oshima, David Cronenberg, Werner Herzog, Terry Gilliam, Wim Wenders, Stephen Frears, Jonathan Glazer, Takashi Miike and others. The films were equally eclectic. Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. The Last Emperor. The Sheltering Sky. Crash. Sexy Beast. High-Rise. Only Lovers Left Alive.
Eventually filmmaker Mark Cousins made a doc about this charismatic man behind the scenes: The Storms of Jeremy Thomas followed the yearly drive with the famous British producer from London to Cannes, on his way to the. Festival de Cannes. It centred on his life in the service of cinema, a journey towards the discovery of new films and talents.
There is no convenient Thomas genre. There is, however, a Thomas sensibility: curiosity without fear. His relationship with Bertolucci produced the most conspicuous triumph of his career. The Last Emperor was an extraordinary undertaking, a huge international production that eventually won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For most producers that might have been the summit from which the rest of the career descended. Thomas simply carried on. That is what makes his story so unusual. The Oscar did not domesticate him.
He continued backing films that could be difficult, controversial or commercially awkward. Cronenberg’s Crash was hardly an exercise in reassuring audiences. Neither was much of the work he championed. Thomas understood something that the modern industry has increasingly forgotten: controversy can be evidence of life.
Thomas also had an instinct for emerging talent. Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast was a particularly striking example. Thomas did not need a director to arrive with a proven international reputation before deciding that he was worth backing. He could recognise the possibility in a filmmaker.
That made him a genuine producer in the old sense of the word. He was not merely arranging money. He was creating an environment in which a director could make the film he wanted to make. And Cannes was where all these worlds collided.
Thomas understood the festival instinctively. He knew the excitement of arriving with a film nobody had quite seen before. He knew the strange mixture of commerce, gossip, egotism, friendship and genuine cinephilia that makes Cannes unlike any other film festival. He also knew everybody. Or at least it sometimes seemed that way.
A Thomas appearance on the Croisette could involve a director he had been working with for 30 years, a young filmmaker he had just discovered, an old friend encountered outside a screening and some new project being discussed over lunch that sounded completely impossible. The great thing was that he might actually make it.
Thomas had that increasingly rare quality in film culture: credibility. Not because everything he touched succeeded — no producer could possibly achieve that — but because you trusted the reason he had chosen to make it. He was interested in cinema before he was interested in the market. That sounds almost quaint now.
The contemporary film business is built around intellectual property, established brands, algorithms, demographic targeting and risk management. Thomas belonged to an earlier and more romantic system in which someone could fall in love with a filmmaker, spend years trying to get a project financed and eventually turn up in Cannes with the finished film. His films often felt like the product of that stubbornness.
And he remained stubbornly active. Even towards the end, there was no sense that Thomas had become merely a figure from cinema’s past. He was still producing, still working internationally, still following directors into unpredictable territory. His final work with Takashi Miike was heading to Toronto, while Werner Herzog’s Bucking Fastard had reached Venice. It seems entirely appropriate.
Thomas never really retired into his own legend. He kept making films. That is why his death feels significant beyond the impressive list of awards, credits and famous names.
Jeremy Thomas represented a particular kind of film culture: international, unruly, personal and slightly dangerous. A culture in which the producer could be a cinephile, a diplomat, a fixer, a gambler and occasionally a madman — sometimes all before lunch.
He was also a reminder that independence does not necessarily mean making small films. The Last Emperor demonstrated that an independent producer could think on an epic scale. His later work demonstrated that independence was ultimately a state of mind.
Perhaps the best measure of Thomas is not the films that made money or won prizes, but the films that would have been much harder to make without him. That is the producer’s invisible legacy. The audience sees the director. The actors receive the applause. The distributor sells the film. The producer is often somewhere behind the curtain, making phone calls, finding money, calming arguments and refusing to accept that the impossible is impossible.
Jeremy Thomas did that for some of the most distinctive filmmakers of his generation. And then, year after year, he came back to Cannes. Another film. Another director. Another improbable idea. Another gamble.
The Croisette will look the same without him. It won’t quite feel the same.
JEREMY THOMAS 1949-2026