No biters here: Britain’s only producer at Cannes couldn’t get UK backing for vampire film

 
P9 Vampire film
14 May 2013
The Weekender

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The only British producer with a film in the official competition at Cannes said he wanted to shoot it in the UK but could not secure the financial backing here.

Only Lovers Left Alive, starring Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as a vampire couple, was made in America, Morocco and Germany, with funding from elsewhere in Europe.

Jeremy Thomas, who produced The Last Emperor, Sexy Beast and Crash, said he still considered the movie to be “flying the flag for Britain”.

The production was developed in London by Thomas’s Recorded Picture Company, and the strong British cast includes John Hurt. The director is American Jim Jarmusch.

“It’s a very British idiom. Vampires are a British invention,” Thomas said. “Jim is a great anglophile and very knowledgeable about British culture. It’s a British film in my mind. Because I couldn’t get the resources in the UK I shot it in Cologne, not Pinewood. But you’ve only got three places in the UK you can get support [the BBC, Film4 and the British Film Institute] and if I don’t get support from one of those I go elsewhere.”

He said Swinton and Hiddleston play “very stylish and sophisticated” vampire lovers whose “debauched idyll” has endured several centuries, until the intervention of Swinton’s uncontrollable younger sister, played by Mia Wasikowska. The producer, 63, suggested there is a particular problem getting funding for American directors in the UK, because of a sentiment that the US industry is already well-supported. However, BBC Films is backing another of his current projects, Dom Hemingway, with Jude Law and Richard E Grant.

Thomas first won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes for The Shout in 1978 — only his second bid at producing.

While no British films are competing for the Palme d’Or this year, the homegrown industry is present at the festival, which opens on Wednesday. A documentary made with Thomas’s company, A Story of Children and Film, by Mark Cousins, will premiere in the Cannes Classics section.

Last Days On Mars, directed by Irishman Ruairi Robinson and written by Clive Dawson, will be screened in the Director’s Fortnight section, along with Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant. Paul Wright’s debut, For Those In Peril, is in the Critics’ Week strand.

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