Jeremy Thomas, director of All the Little Animals (Un Certain Regard) talks about his pet project 
In the old days, Jeremy Thomas used to keep his motorcycle in his office. Not at his office: in it – off the street, under cover, near him. This factlet comes to mind as I watch All the Little Animals, Thomas' debut as a director after two decades of producing films by many of the world's best directors, 
including Bernardo Bertolucci, Stephen Frears, Nagisa Oshima, David Cronenberg, Bob Rafelson, Nicolas Roeg... 
 

Based on the novel by Walker Hamilton, All the Little Animals is a project that has been with Thomas for a quarter of a century: a strange, magical book about being at one with nature, focusing on Bobby, a mentally-damaged youth (played in the film by Christian Bale), who runs away from home and ends up living in a shack in Cornwall with the reclusive Mr Summers (John Hurt). The latter sees his role in life as being to return to the soil all the little animals killed on the roads by passing cars. Mr Summers doesn't like motor vehicles. The film doesn't like motor vehicles. Thomas, I had always assumed, does.

"I'd have to say there is an element of self-criticism," he admits, "because I do like Formula One motor-racing and I'm a terrible petrol-head. But, in recent years, I've been cooling it a bit and feeling more critical about myself than I have done in the past." In fact, these days, Jeremy Thomas is a Renault Clio man, in contrast to his Notting Hill neighbours, the bull-bars of whose 4-wheel-drives seem actively to invite little animals to tangle with them, which means it can't be much fun being small and furry in trendy W11.

"Everybody is surprised that I've made a film that is so gentle," chuckles Thomas, who grew up in the film industry (he is son to director Ralph, who made such movies as The Wind Cannot Read and the Doctor comedies, and nephew of Gerald, supremo of the Carry On films). "I've even been accused of being a bit of a tree-hugger. But it's a film that's been with me since I read the book in 1970. The rights were owned by Granada, and Don Siegel was going to direct it at one stage. Then, when Lord Bernstein died, I managed to buy the rights, and I've held them close to me ever since. 

Finally, about three or four years ago, I said to my wife, 'I want to do the film now and I want you to write the script'. I felt a closeness to the book and that was something that hadn't happened to me with any other book.

"The technical side of the film I knew I already had, because I'd spent years watching my pop and my uncle direct films every holidays, before starting in the cutting rooms and then, as a producer, working with lots of directors. So I didn't have that to learn.

"What I did have to learn was my relationship with the actors and the camera and how that all worked. I mean, when you get on the set and they say, 'Where do you want it, guv'nor?' I can't pretend I wasn't nervous the first morning. And then, as the day went on, I suddenly realised I was enjoying it much more. The actors gave me a lot. I went in beforehand and did little ideas of how I was going to do it; then, when I went into the room with the actors and walked through the scenes, I had to change my mind completely."

The cast was pretty much an ideal one for Thomas: Bale, Hurt and Daniel Benzali, who plays the hated De Winter, whom Bobby calls 'The Fat', and who becomes his guardian when his mother dies at the start of the film. Hurt, in particular, the director had known since he was a boy.

"He was put into his first part by my father in The Wild and the Willing in the early sixties, with Samantha Eggar and Ian McShane," recalls Thomas. "It was a fantastic part: John was a student who climbed the church steeple and fell down. I've still got a photograph of myself and John in a bowling alley: me, 13, and John as an adult.

"Then the second film I produced was The Shout. John played a part in that and he was great. I remained friendly with him and we did The Hit together, in which he was also great. He was absolutely my first choice. I wanted him because I knew that he could be like an animal, and that he could blend into the countryside as well. He's very, very believable."

Hurt also bears the brunt of the film's shift into a darker tone, when Bobby and Mr Summers' rural idyll is destroyed by the re-eruption of The Fat onto the scene. "There's a twisted morality in the characters," admits Thomas "Mr Summers is, to me, not unlike the Unabomber. He could have written those letters the Unabomber wrote to the paper, even if he doesn't go as far as blowing up universities."

And, in the end, Summers is behind the meting out of justice, not just to The Fat, but to his gleaming Rolls Royce, too. All the Little Animals isn't at all like those movies where the hero, supposedly well-off, drives a 1972 Ford LTD. You wonder why he has such an unfashionable heap, then it gets comprehensively wrecked and you realise the production couldn't afford to wreck a new car. Well All the Little Animals isn't like that at all: the Rolls definitely gets it.

"The Rolls Royce was totally trashed," chuckles Thomas. "We killed the Rolls Royce. We did a total Pete Townshend on that Rolls Royce."

Which brings us full-circle, back to Thomas, the petrol-head, and his motorcycle. "You know," he says, "my bike caught fire outside the office today and we had to douse it with water. I got off the thing and it was smoking away. I thought it was going to blow up. It's had it."

A gentle reminder from the little animals, perhaps?