COVER STORY: EMMA THOMAS
I HAVE TO IMAGINE THAT BEING IN THIS POSITION, AS A BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE PRODUCER, WAS NOT YOUR CAREER TARGET, GROWING UP.
also Jane Frazer, who was my immediate boss. I ended up working as an in-house physical production coordinator. In the meantime, on weekends, we were making our own films.
It never occurred to me that it was even a possibility.
SO, WHAT LEFT TURN BROUGHT YOU INTO PRODUCING? I completely fell into it. My dad was a diplomat, a civil servant. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. I assumed I was going to go into the Foreign Service like my dad. And my first day at university, I met a guy called Chris Nolan. He had always wanted to be a director. I was really fascinated by that, because I didn’t know anything about that world. It was right at the beginning of the school term time when everyone is joining lots of different clubs and societies. And he said, “I’m going to go make films in the Film Society.” I thought, “Well, that’s kind of interesting.” I mean, how do you even do that? I had no idea. So it really started as a social thing. That was just the group of friends that I connected with. I had no idea what a producer did, but I started helping Chris make his films, and that was kind of the beginning of it. So by the end of university, I decided I didn’t want to go into the foreign office. Chris had some ideas for films, and I figured I’d try and get a job in the film industry. But of course we were in England; there weren’t a huge number of film companies around. But there was one called Working Title. They ran an internship, where you could be a runner for two weeks for free. I did that, and afterwards got my first job with them as a receptionist. I remember my dad came down to meet me. He took me out to lunch and he had a pile of brochures from the civil service in England. I think he was pretty horrified that I had gone to university, the first one in my family to do so, and then I was taking a job as a receptionist. But that was the beginning of it. I learned an enormous amount from watching Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner but
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I THINK THAT OUR FILMS, WHATEVER THE SIZE, ALL FEEL VERY SIMILAR ON SET, AS STRIPPED BACK AS POSSIBLE AND REALLY FOCUSED ON THE WORK AT HAND.” SO TALKING ABOUT TIM AND ERIC AND JANE, WHAT SORT OF INFORMATION AND EXPERIENCE DID THEY IMPART TO YOU?
Tim and Eric, they were head and shoulders above everyone else in England at the time, making films in what I want to call an “American” way. They had very commercial sensibilities but at the same time really cared about script and the artistic integrity of their films. Jane taught me everything about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking and what it takes to make a film, from how a production report works to insurance and budgeting. What was most amazing about her was that she was incredibly generous with her time and her expertise and never made me feel like I didn’t have a right to ask questions. She was incredibly encouraging and I’m enormously grateful to the three of them. When the time came, Chris had finished making this film called Following, which we shot on weekends with no money whatsoever. We were looking at the way independent films were discovered in the U.S., and it seemed very much as though we needed to do the film festival thing. I was talking to Jane about what I wanted to do next and she said, “Well, you could go and work on one of our productions, if you want. Or maybe you could go and work in our LA office.” And of course I went straight for the LA office. That was where I needed to be if we were going to figure out how to put this film that we had made out there.
LANDING IN LA FOR THE FIRST TIME, WAS THERE A MAJOR CULTURE SHOCK? The system here is very different, with the agencies and the studios and so on. Just learning who everyone was and how it all worked was an incredible eye-opener for me. In the meantime, we were submitting Following to festivals. I look back now and I think, “Gosh, you were so naïve.” Because we really believed that if we just sent these tapes out cold, they would get discovered. We were incredibly lucky that anyone ever watched the film or managed to pick it up from the pile. We did manage to get Following into a couple festivals, including the San Francisco Film Festival. We had shot the film on 16mm but cut it on tape, and we had to have a print to