David P Kelly (pic: Caitlin Kelly)
Veteran London-based producer David P Kelly has credits ranging from Aki Kaurismäki’s I Hired A Contract Killer to Vera Glagoleva’s Two Women, which starred Ralph Fiennes. Now, he has returned to documentary with his new feature doc, The Storms Of Jeremy Thomas, sold by Visit Films and which world-premieres in Cannes Classics this weekend.
Kelly’s career began in the doc world in the mid-1980s. One of his very first ventures was Ten Years In An Opened Neck Shirt, featuring John Cooper Clarke, Linton Kwesi Johnson and a skinhead poet called Mark Miwurdz. This was commissioned by Michael Kustow, the first commissioning editor for arts on the UK’s Channel 4. At the time, Kelly had a company called First City. Documentary were “the baby slopes” and he has generally been focused on dramatic features since.
But in the spring of 2018, Kelly approached Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning British producer of The Last Emperor, Shout, Crash, Eureka and Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, to see if he might agree to participate in a film.
“I said to him that over my career, I had always taken an inspiration from what he was doing. He was a kind of talisman and inspiration for independent producers at the time,” says Kelly.
In particular, the producer admired the way Thomas financed The Last Emperor, a movie on a huge scale, using distribution minimum guarantees.
“I wanted to do something that I really know about and feel was worth saying,” Kelly reflects on why he was drawn to Thomas as a protagonist for a documentary.
He had seen several of Mark Cousins’ documentaries including The Story Of Film series and The Eyes Of Orson Welles and decided Cousins might be the perfect director for the project.
“I love his personal approach and the way he curates images,” Kelly says of the ebullient and prolific Edinburgh-based director. He contacted Cousins. They agreed to work together and soon secured development funding from Northern Ireland Screen. Kelly also put up some of his own funds together with his business partner. Jeremy Thomas’ sales company HanWay had been working on The Story Of Film – so Thomas already had a connection with Cousins.
“We decided to shoot a short pilot and keep building on that.”
This led to Kelly accompanying Cousins and Thomas on an epic journey across France to the 2019 Cannes Festival. Thomas was behind the wheel of his Alfa Romeo SUV, in fast and furious boy racer mode, while Kelly was following behind by train.
“They stopped off at various sites and locations that tied into Thomas’s world,” Kelly remembers.
They visited the locations in Paris where Thomas had produced Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, in Lyons and at the Drancy Internment Camp. While Thomas and Cousins were in the car, he continued to follow behind by train, making sure that Cousins always had somewhere to download his rushes and recharge his camera batteries.
The six-day road trip forms the backbone of the new movie.
Thomas has been visiting Cannes for nigh on 50 years, first attending in the early 1970s. This was his natural habitat, and therefore the best place in which to shoot him.
Creative Scotland also came on board. “It is a big shame they’re not here (in Cannes). They were real stalwarts of the project,” Kelly says of execs like John Thomas and Isabel Davis.
The Storms Of Jeremy Thomas could probably have been completed in time for Cannes 2020 but that festival didn’t happen. Now, it is finally ready to be unveiled, a year later than originally planned.
US outfit Visit Films took on sales duties just before the festival. Distributors are swarming around the film with several UK companies keen to acquire it. When it is given a British release, there is likely to be an accompanying season of films produced by Thomas. Unlike almost all of his contemporaries, he has managed to hold onto the rights to many of the features he has made.
“I’ve been looking at that for over a year,” Kelly says of the titles available for a retrospective. “There are some wonderful films. The Shout, The Hit, Sexy Beat, Dom Hemingway…there are over 60 to choose from!”
