Top 33 Jonathan Demme Quotes

I didn’t go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.

The whole Orion zeitgeist, of treating filmmakers as partners, to me it’s inseparable from the success of ‘Silence of the Lambs’.

Tak Fujimoto and I, when we started getting enough of a budget where we could afford the right lenses – ’cause we started out doing low-budget pictures together – we started experimenting with this subjective camera thing. And we kind of fell in love with the idea of using that as our close-up.

When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!

I don’t think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

I was a sort of rock journalist – whatever that is – in London in the late ’60s.

I like seeing the cameras because it helps visualize how the music people and the movie people teamed up.

As a kid, a little kid, I loved going to the movies, and now I love making movies.

Extraordinary people are the Green Berets and the Navy Seals and the Olympic athletes – these are the ones who can face these extraordinary physical challenges and be triumphant.

I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It’s a really amazing thing to be able to do.

The excitement of wading into ‘reality’ and just finding out what happens – and then the challenge of selecting those things that happened and shaping them in the editing into a narrative that will have appeal and be engaging – is a great, great thrill.

I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something’s going on, somebody’s going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.

If you’re doing a music film, you’ve got to be singing about something.

That is – the use of the subjective camera is an idea that’s been around in movies for a long, long time. And it’s an idea that was seized on very notably by Sam Fuller and by Alfred Hitchcock in two different very kind of – otherwise very different styles of filmmaking.

I’ve never fallen into what I consider to be a trap of trying to figure out something analytically that could be a very popular film. I would hope my enthusiasm could match up with something with that potential.

All of us who lived outside of New Orleans were horrified and heartbroken by what we saw when Katrina hit, the floods that followed the hurricane that happened.

I’ll tell you – what I can tell you is that I know when I saw ‘Zodiac’ and then again when I saw ‘No Country For Old Men,’ there was a moment in each of my viewing experiences where I went, ‘Dammit, this is scarier than ‘Silence Of The Lambs.”

In ‘Heart of Gold’ at one point, there were 23 players on the stage with him. And part of what’s magic about Neil is the way he interacts with the other musicians.

It’s such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It’s hard for fiction to compete with that.

I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.

I’m all for streaming, and I do think it’s thrilling that a gazillion people can see our film the day it drops. On the other hand, I’m a fierce believer of the theatergoing experience. My hope would be that films can be enjoyed in both ways, that there’s room for both.

When we finished ‘Stop Making Sense,’ we went right to the San Francisco Film Festival for the world premiere, and people swarmed the stage and started dancing before the first song was even finished.

At certain points, I was afraid there was something – a missing chink of skill – that was going to prevent me from having a movie that was financially successful. That frightened me.

I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters.

I adore film, and I adore music.

A trilogy is a pretty abstract notion. You can apply it to almost any three things.

I felt from time to time that shooting live music is the most purely cinematic thing you can do. Ideally, the cinema is becoming one with the music. There is little artifice involved. There’s no acting. I love it.

There is so much going on in our country and in the world today… We’re getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what’s really the story there? Well, I’m turned on by that kind of stuff.

The occupied territories and the movement of settlements – moving people today off of their property and claiming it – is illegal.

It was so easy for me to see that Anthony would be a superb Dr. Lecter because he had been such an amazing good doctor in ‘The Elephant Man’. He had been as believable a doctor as you can imagine, and he was good.

I was a Talking Heads fan from the very beginning.

I don’t think it’s sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie.

I’m guided by my enthusiasm.