What He Really Wanted to Do Was Direct--and Now He Has

There is an old joke in Hollywood. The subjects have been myriad--Mother Teresa, the president, even the pope--but the punch line is always the same: “ . . . but what I really want to do is direct.”

But for Jeremy Thomas, the London-based producer of such epics as “The Last Emperor” and “The Sheltering Sky,” and smaller films like “Naked Lunch” and “Insignificance,” the adage was no joke.

“I intended to be a director, but I started making movies as a producer, and then I got sort of big success when I was in my mid-20s. And then suddenly one day I said, ‘You know, I’m a middle-aged man and I never did it.’ ”

So he took a year off from his “day job” as one of Britain’s most established and prolific producers to direct “All the Little Animals,” a fable-like tale of an innocent man-child who flees his cruel stepfather for a bucolic life in the country, where he becomes the protege of an animal-loving misanthrope. The film opens today in Los Angeles, New York and 10 other U.S. cities.

“I read the book ‘All the Little Animals’ when I was about 20 years old and I loved the book--adored it--and I thought, ‘I want to direct this myself.’ Of course I sort of put it on hold and got on with my producing, and when the rights became available in the mid-’80s I bought them.”

It’s an example of the paradoxical nature of Thomas, now 50, that at the same time he was negotiating with the Chinese government for permission to film Bernardo Bertolucci’s lavish production “The Last Emperor” in the Forbidden City, and jetting around the world wooing international financiers, his greatest personal satisfaction was acquiring the rights to Walker Hamilton’s small, cult novel, with the long-harbored dream of directing it himself.

“The themes in the book--animal rights, the place of animals in the planet, the way we are with nature and the environment--seem to be stronger today than they were in ‘68, which is quite depressing. We have BSE [bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or ‘mad cow’ disease] in England. We damaged our food chain and we have all suffered. We are changing what is there, so radically, and destroying all things around us.”

The film however is not explicitly about animal rights and environmentalism; it’s a metaphor about a world wildly out of balance with the natural order.

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The main character, Bobby, an emotionally damaged young man played by Christian Bale, suffers at the hands of his stepfather, De Winter (played by American actor Daniel Benzali), a man so hateful he kills his stepson’s small pets. When Bobby runs away from home, he is taken in by a hermit, Mr. Summers (John Hurt), whose “calling” is to travel country roads and bury animals that have been killed by automobiles.

But this tale has anything but a simple, happily-ever-after ending. “There’s a twisted morality in the film. All of the characters are killers, even Bobby. And there’s a whole thriller element in it.”

While De Winter is clearly the story’s villain, Mr. Summers is not without his dark side, which was fascinating to Thomas.

“Whilst the script was being written, there was a lot of Unabomber stuff in the news, and I read the Unabomber manifesto on the Web. I thought, this guy is not unlike Mr. Summers--they both withdrew from society because of misdeeds by society and lived off the land in the woods and sort of disappeared. A lot of what Mr. Summers believes, his ethics, are in the manifesto.

“I made the film as an adult fairy story which could be shown to children as well. Ideally, I would love a family to go out and see the film and then go out for coffee or a sundae and have the children talk about what they thought the film was about.”

Apparently someone forgot to inform the director about the film’s R rating because, when it’s mentioned, Thomas is caught off guard--way off guard.

“What! No, surely not. How could it be an R? It’s a children’s film. Well, that’s sad because that will stop families from taking their 12- or 13-year-olds to see the film and they see much more violent things every night on television. I’m shocked, I’m shocked,” he says, before adding philosophically, “That’s my bad break.”

(Lions Gate Films, which is distributing “All the Little Animals” in the U.S., did not respond to inquiries about why Thomas was not informed of the Motion Picture Assn. of America’s rating.)

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But regardless of the rating, Thomas is restrained about his expectations for the film. “I’m shocked at the price it costs to market films in America. It’s incredibly expensive compared to other countries. It’s impossible to go and spend $25 million marketing my little film, or even $5 million or even $1 million.”

Meanwhile, Thomas has returned to producing with his usual vigor. “I just finished shooting a film, as a producer, called ‘Sexy Beast,’ with Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone, and I’m about to commence a film with Takeshi Kitano, the Japanese star and director, in English, called ‘Brother.’ And I also recently completed ‘The Cup,’ which debuted at Cannes and will be released by Fine Line in January. It was directed by a Tibetan lama [Khyentse Norbu]; the first film directed by a Tibetan lama. It’s a very unusual film.”

As for directing?

“Oh, I’ll direct again as soon as I can, maybe in a few years time. I have a few ideas I’m dickering around with and we’ll see what happens.”