British documentarian Mark Cousins’s “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas” is a fine introduction to the 70 or so films produced by the titular London-born impresario. It’s barely an introduction at all, however, to Thomas himself.

Structured as a road movie, “Storms” puts Cousins and Thomas in a car together during the producer and automobile enthusiast’s annual drive from London to the Cannes Film Festival. (The year would be 2019, since the film includes the Cannes premiere of “First Love,” directed by Takashi Miike and produced by Thomas.) The pair make a few stops along the way, but most of the interruptions are in the form of clips or stills from movies that Thomas produced, or earlier ones that influenced him.

Born in 1949, Thomas is a child of the cinema, as the documentary briefly acknowledges. Both his father and uncle were directors of successful mainstream British movies. But Thomas was drawn to less conventional material. One of his first jobs was as an editor for Ken Loach, maker of low-budget social-realist dramas.

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Thomas eventually directed a single film, 1998’s “All the Little Animals.” But he’s prospered primarily as a producer, working with such well-regarded but not always commercial directors as Miike, David Cronenberg, Nicolas Roeg, Jim Jarmusch, Terry Gilliam, Nagisa Oshima and Bernardo Bertolucci. It was for Bertolucci’s 1987 “The Last Emperor” that Thomas collected a best picture statuette at the Academy Awards.

The producer has overseen films set in China, Morocco, France, Bhutan and other far-flung locations, but nearly all of them are in English. Was this a mutually agreed-upon strategy, or did Thomas essentially dictate the terms of a new Anglophone global cinema? Cousins doesn’t ask.

Sometimes the movie merely alludes to facts about the producer’s life and identity. During a stop in Paris, Thomas and Cousins visit the site of the internment camp from which Jews were deported to the east by the Nazis. Is Thomas Jewish? The answer is not provided. (It’s yes.)

Eventually, Thomas muses on his role as a father, and Cousins interjects photos of the producer’s three children. But there’s not a word on marriage, marriages, a wife or wives.

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Reportedly, there have been three. Does this have anything to do with the “storms” of the title? Aside from an anecdote about a time when Thomas declined to flee an outdoor cafe in Cannes as a thunderstorm arrived, the title doesn’t seem particularly suitable.

There have been storms, of course, about such movies as “Crash,” Cronenberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel about fetishists who seek sexual gratification in auto wrecks. (Thomas keeps a framed copy of a newspaper denunciation of “Crash” on his wall.) The excerpts from Thomas-produced films include much nudity, mostly but not always female, as well as brutal moments. The most graphic are a slaughterhouse scene from Richard Linklater’s “Fast Food Nation” and a murder from Roeg’s 1982 “Eureka,” one of the rare movies to receive an X rating in the United States for violence rather than sex.

Cousins clearly spent a lot of time locating suitable movie clips for this portrait. Chronologically, they range from 1928’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc” — one of Thomas’s influences — to a pair of movies Thomas produced in 2019: “First Love” and Matteo Garrone’s “Pinocchio.” Cousins invested much less effort in interviewing Thomas’s associates. Most of the remarks come from two veterans of Thomas films who happened to be at Cannes in 2019: Debra Winger and the endearingly pretentious Tilda Swinton. The latter calls Thomas “the dream producer” and a lot of other things, some of them quite batty.

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The producer talks about the actors and directors with whom he’s worked, but says almost nothing about what he contributed to the films they made together. Instead, he drives, reminisces about a serious health scare and sings along with the Grateful Dead. “The Storms of Jeremy Thomas” portrays Thomas as good company and an erudite cinema buff. As for what he does for a living, that hardly seems worth discussing.

Unrated. At Landmark’s E Street Cinema. Contains scenes of violence, nudity and sexual situations. In English and Japanese with some subtitles. 93 minutes.

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