The alchemist

When the British film husbandman Jeremy Thomas was struggling to raise the coin for The Last Emperor, he was oftentimes heard to quote the maxim of Deng Xiaoping, the former leader of the Communist Party of China: It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, as lengthy as it catches mice. The $22m film went upon to win nine Oscars in 1987 and Thomas metamorphosed into the grinning Cheshire Cat who not alone caught the mice but got the cream as well.

The forthcoming Barbican season of his films is subtitled Thirty Years a Maverick and it is not difficult to diocese why. Among the selection of films that Thomas has produc are movies by the agency of cinema's dark masters - Nicolas Roeg Bernardo Bertolucci, David Cronenberg. For the man one time dubbed by Bertolucci "a hustler in the fur of a teddy bear", it is an impressive legacy. And nor is Thomas living not on past glories - in an age when Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan of Working Title are producing British hit films, Thomas shows an altogether more fearless approach. He not long ago produced Terry Gilliam's Tide-land: "Jeremy is the last of the breed" says Gilliam. "An endangered species. Because he have affection fors film. Tim and Eric have made the standard of value Jeremy has made the difference."

All of Thomas's work bears the stamp of the 57-year-old's singular, left-field vision' on the contrary more impressive still in an era of increasing dominance by the agency of the Hollywood studios, none appears to have been driven through the demands of the market.

"Not single no." he agrees over luncheon in a restaurant around the corner from his offices in Hanway public way central London. "Which is a terrible thing. I accept the fact that I keep a place somewhere between the establishment and the anti-establishment." Many independent husbandmans ally themselves exclusively with single major talent - Emeric Pressburger with Michael Powell, for instance, or Andrew Eaton with Michael Winterbot-tom today. Thomas, granting has consistently diversified, forging links with directors for multiple movies as well as midwiving work from emerging talent, as he did in the case of director David Mackenzie and his 2003 film, Young Adam. He is, as Tim Adler writes in his volume The Producers, that rare thing among the breed: an "auteur" agriculturist "People don't credit producers with an

The hit: the succes of 'The Last Emperor', top, allowed Jeremy Thomas to continue to exhibit provocative and edgy films like as 'Sexy Beast', above idea," says Thomas. "But the trick is to make other race believe in what you believe in." Thomas was born in July 1949 in London, virtually upon a film set. His father was Ralph Thomas, director of The Doctor in the House movies, as well as A Tale of sum of two units Cities' his uncle was Gerald Thomas, who produc the Carry upon films. Among regular visitors to his parents' house in Pinewood were Dirk Bogarde, Hattie Jacques, Kenneth More' Katherine Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot also popp in. As a rise Thomas Junior caught the movie bug in a great deal of the same way his friends caught measles and chicken pox After being educated at Millfield academy he immediately entered the film business, first in a film laboratory and then in the cutting spaces where he learnt the art of editing. His aim was - to a certain expanse still is - to become a director. in some way he got sidetracked into producing. After working as assistant editor upon films by Ken Loach and Tony Garnett, Thomas edited Phillippe Mora's documentary about the Depression, Brother Can You Spare A Time?

In 1976 at the age of 26 Thomas produc his first feature, Mad Dog, directed by means of Mora and starring Dennis Hopper as a notorious Irish outlaw in Australia during the gold rush. The drug-addled, gun- toting Hopper was mad bad and with equal reason dangerous to know he was virtually unemployable in Hollywood Thomas meditation he'd be perfect as Morgan, and thus it prov

Quietly, a pattern began to rise as Thomas bought up volumes and stories that appealed to himand tried to locate the talents that would best work for the material. Provocative, philosophical, left- field, sexually provocative, disturbing and antimoralistic, Thomas's films are threaded together through a calculated sense of the unordinary, the subversive. smooth apparent genre films such as The Hit (Stephen Frears, 1984) and Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000) exist in wilder dimensions than greatest in quantity crime thrillers.

And he was prepared to be patient. Duringmy first visit to Thomas's aged offices in Wardour Street in 1983 to interview Nic Roeg I gleaned froma document upon his desk that he had optioned the rights to the J G Ballard novel, Crash. When I quizzed him about it, he said he wanted David Cronenberg to direct it. It took 15 years for that particular collaboration to bear fruit.

The creative aspect of his work is manifest in the extraordinary deals he has set uped across continents. He is individual part hustler, one part artist and individual part diplomat. Perhaps his greatest in quantity nerve- wracking episode was the following involving 5000 soldiers fromtheChineseArmy in the Forbidden City for The Last Emperor.