Jeremy Thomas, as seen in The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (Cohen Media Group)

In his massive, provocative, and engaging 15-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Marc Cousins’s stream of consciousness approach burrowed into several themes, directors, subjects and eras in cinematic history. Unfortunately, that same approach in his documentary about British producer Jeremy Thomas—who won a best picture Oscar for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and who has worked with directors ranging from Ken Loach and David Cronenberg to Nicolas Roeg and Stephen Frears in a decades-long career—provides less than stellar results.

The title comes from Cousins’s dime-store psychoanalyzing: A rainstorm at Cannes reminds Cousins of a storm scene in The Shout, Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1978 film that Thomas produced, so Cousins decides “storms” is an apt metaphor for Thomas’s career. He spends several days with Thomas as they drive from England to the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, discussing Thomas’s films and other subjects.

Cousins divides the overview into six sections: “Cars,” “Sex,” “Politics,” “Death,” “Cannes,” and “Endings.” The Cannes section is as long as the others put together, which has the effect of shortchanging the other, more substantive chapters—at least in theory. Cousins is too often content to play a sort of game with Thomas’s lengthy and impressive producing credits. Thomas produced Cronenberg’s controversial 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash, about people sexually attracted to automobile crashes. Thus, Cousins tells us that Thomas loves to drive fast, something viewers also notice since Cousins films the producer as he’s flying on the highway on the way to southern France.

An example of Cousins’ film-buff approach: When they arrive at Cannes, Cousins films the famous red carpet and stairs at the festival, then presents a selection of stills from a grab bag of films that include stairs, including Cleopatra and The Shining. Still later, apropos of nothing, Cousins mentions a quiet scene in Sexy Beast, a 2000 film Thomas produced, of Ray Winstone talking on the phone. Cousins says he thinks it’s a tender scene, Thomas agrees: “It’s very tender,” he says, and Cousins moves on.

In the “Politics” section, Cousins opines that he finds Fast Food Nation—the 2006 Richard Linklater film based on the muckraking book by Eric Schlosser—the most political film Thomas has made, which may be true, but it seems a question better directed toward the director instead. (Pointedly, none of the filmmakers Thomas has worked with are interviewed.) In fact, Cousins quizzes Thomas throughout about the subjects and themes of many of the movies he produced. While he provides some interesting answers—when the directors are Bertolucci, Roeg, Cronenberg or Frears—it would make more sense to ask those filmmakers about their own films. In doing so, Cousins attributes to Thomas artistic decisions made by the films’ actual creators.

Debra Winger and Tilda Swinton are on hand to extol the many virtues of Thomas as producer and artist. Both are informative and even insightful. (Winger succinctly states that Thomas is good at “conducting the forces to come together” on the film set). Their incisive observations are, frankly, more substantive than Cousins’s own, especially when he reverts to chatty nicknames for Thomas, at various points calling him a prince, a petrolhead, a bohemian, and a survivor. He begins the film with his own cheeky narration, “Once upon a time, there was a prince—a movie prince,” which he returns to at the end, bringing in Winger and Swinton’s voices as well.

Thomas is a fascinating filmmaker, so even Cousins’s casual approach doesn’t diminish such an accomplished producer responsible for dozens of intriguing, even important films by a distinguished group of internationally acclaimed directors. Still, there are too many odd moments, like when Cousins plays a word association game with Thomas, who gives some amusing answers: “Star?”/“Shooting.” “Desert?”/“Island discs.” “Cannes?”/“Do!” One wonders where Cousins is heading with this, until he cuts to a sequence from Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, in which Michael Fassbender’s Jung plays a word association game with a patient. Maybe Cousins should have played it with Cronenberg instead.