The BFI is delighted
to announce that Jeremy Thomas, one of the industry’s most revered
independent producers and founder of Recorded
Picture Company, has made a significant donation from his working archive
to the BFI National Archive. The archive spans Jeremy Thomas’s remarkable
career both as a producer and executive producer from his first film, Mad Dog Morgan (1976) by Philippe Mora, through
to Ben Wheatley’s High Rise (2015).
Consisting of both
moving image and paper-based material this donation includes rare 35mm prints,
scripts, production material and international posters from some of his most
important and distinctive films such as Nicolas Roeg’s Bad
Timing (1978), Nagisa Ôshima’s Merry
Christmas Mr Lawrence (1983), Bernardo Bertolucci’s 9-time Oscar®-winning The Last Emperor (1987), David Cronenberg’s
controversial adaptation of JG Ballard’s Crash (1996) as well as
Jonathan
Glazer’s landmark cult classic Sexy
Beast
(2000) and David Mackenzie’s Young Adam (2003).
The Archive will
continue to receive donations from Jeremy Thomas ongoing, and once fully
catalogued the paper-based material will be collectively known as The Jeremy
Thomas Collection. The
donation also includes rare moving image material such as the original sound
tapes by David Byrne and Ryuichi Sakamoto for their Oscar®-winning soundtrack
for The Last Emperor as well
as Thomas’s 35mm print of the film, plus 35mm prints of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence,
Karel Reisz’s
final film, Everybody Wins (1990),
adapted from Arthur Miller’s
script, Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of The Sheltering Sky (1990)
and Jeremy Thomas’s
own film as director, All The Little Animals (1998),
starring John Hurt and a young Christian Bale.
The donation gives us a fascinating
insight into the pivotal role of a producer in shaping a filmmaker’s vision and in particular highlights
Jeremy Thomas’s success in international co-production, charting the
development and production history across a number of high profile films
including those made with his close friend and long-time creative collaborator
Bernardo Bertolucci. There are creative
materials across Jeremy Thomas’s renowned epics with Bernardo Bertolucci
including The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky, Little
Buddha (1993), Stealing Beauty (1996) and The
Dreamers (2003).
With a filmography that
reads like a who’s
who of independent and world cinema, the donation features archive material
from an extraordinary catalogue of films made by prominent directors including Stephen
Frears, Terry Gilliam, David Mackenzie, Jonathan Glazer, Takeshi Kitano, Bob
Rafaelson, Jerzy Skolomowski, Takashi Miike and Richard Linklater.
In many cases this unique archive documents the
history of a production from initial story and script drafts through to art
department drawings, location work and production stills as well as marketing
and press campaign materials. This previously unseen paper documentation helps to
illustrate the producer’s involvement in each stage of a film, from its
original inception and development through to production and final release, foregrounding
the care and level of detail given to nurturing new and emerging British
talent.
Jeremy Thomas said, “The
BFI has been important to me since I was young, and a lot of my film education
has been through preservation of things past which I enjoyed at the National
Film Theatre. My affectionate involvement with the BFI culminated with my work
as Chairman. I’ve decided to entrust my archives starting at the beginning of
my career through to my recent work, and I intend for all my extensive material
to eventually be together in the BFI National Archive. In the words of Cocteau:
“There's no such thing as love; only proof of love.”
Heather Stewart, BFI Creative
Director said, “I couldn’t be more thrilled that Jeremy is donating
his personal collection, a history and expression of everything he has stood
for as one of Britain’s greatest producers, to the BFI. Jeremy has fought for
film culture all of his working life, and as ex-Chair of the BFI he understands
perfectly the critical role that the BFI’s film, television and moving image
archive plays in making sure that these key documents and many rare films are
preserved for future generations to enjoy. It is a big step for him to take to
let go of so many personal prints. I can’t thank him enough for his generous
spirit. The collection offers an amazing opportunity for students and
researchers to understand more about how films are made, and is a real treasure
trove for the BFI to use to illuminate and contextualize our public programme.”
Chair of the BFI for
five years from 1993-1997, Jeremy Thomas was honoured with a BFI fellowship in
1998, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to film culture, and was
the subject of a BFI Southbank retrospective in April 2014, ‘Made in Britain’,
celebrating 40 years as a producer.
Jeremy Thomas’s donation follows the recent move of Recorded
Picture Company and HanWay Films offices from Soho to Notting Hill. His
archive will join other significant personal collections held and preserved at
the BFI National Archive John Paul Getty Jnr Conservation Centre in
Berkhamsted. Once the donation process is complete and cataloguing is underway,
it will be accessible to view by appointment through BFI Special Collections at
the BFI Reuben Library.
