David Marcus Thompson (born 18 July 1950 in Hackney, London) is a British film and television producer, and the editor of several books about film directors.

Overview

Thompson worked for the BBC from 1978 as a film programmer and documentary maker.^[1] In 1981 he filmed Woza Albert!. He was the founding head of BBC Films. Up until 2007, BBC Films was run and funded as a private company, with its own offices in Mortimer Street around the corner from Broadcasting House, while still under the full control of the BBC.

In 2007, a re-structure of the division saw it re-integrated into the main BBC Fiction department of BBC Vision, under the control of Jane Tranter. As a result, it moved out of its independent offices into Television Centre and David Thompson, previously head of BBC Films, left to start his own film production company, Origin Pictures. ^[2]

The films he has produced for Origin Pictures include The Awakening, An Education, and The Sense of an Ending. He has continued to executive-produce films for the BBC, including The History Boys (2006) and the remake of Brideshead Revisited (2008).

David Thompson's two-part BBC documentary on the films of Jean Renoir in 1993 led to him editing an anthology of the director's letters for Faber & Faber, Jean Renoir: Letters^[1] (1994, with Lorraine LoBianco). For the same publisher, he has also edited Levinson on Levinson^[1] (1992),Scorsese on Scorsese^[1] (1996, with Ian Cristie), and Altman on Altman^[1] (2006).