Jonathan Demme Quotes
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I like seeing the cameras because it helps visualize how the music people and the movie people teamed up.
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I've been making films since the '70s and trying to develop that best possible fiction-film style that I feel is the most expressive. At a certain point, I felt I was winding up making the same film stylistically and I found that boring.
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I adore film, and I adore music.
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I get creeped out by Francis Bacon's paintings, and I can't say exactly why. They're all really disturbing, and there is an almost nimbus-like quality behind some of his frightening characters and stuff.
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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.
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Especially after the Twin Towers, we're so terrified of 'Arabic' people. And talk about stereotypical negative portrayals of people of certain groups, if you look at the portrayal of Arabic people in Hollywood films, it's just appalling. They've always been just the easiest of targets - along with native Africans and what have you.
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I love doing fiction. I love doing performance films and I love doing documentaries that don't have music. I love to shoot and I love to shoot things I'm enthusiastic about.
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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.
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I still go out, but not a lot. If I go to see music, it's usually to the Blue Note, jazz clubs, things like that. When I travel, I find out where the jazz clubs are.
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They're out there, this appalling idea that there are companies that profit - not just profit but profit enormously - through war.
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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.
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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.
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When my generation, those early days of television - I know I've been thinking about this lately - my two flashes of me as a little boy. One, I'm standing in front of the radio freaking out that Nat King Cole's singing 'Lady of Spain', just this stuff coming out of the radio, and Guy Williams singing 'Wild Horses' coming out of the radio.
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The media has not done a great job in fulfilling their role - journalism's role in a democracy is to provide information on profoundly important subjects so we're an informed citizenry.
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You want the audience to be in the character's shoes. The more deeply into the character's shoes the audience is, the more they're going to care about what's going on.
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When you're filming, if you can't capture the relationships and interplay, that magical thing that transpires between musicians during a performance, then you're not going to have a deeply interesting film. It's vital.
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By the time I got to 'Silence of the Lambs,' I was madly in love with close-ups because I'm madly in love with actors, and a basic premise of 'Silence of the Lambs' is the story about two people fighting their way into each other's heads.
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I didn't go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.
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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.
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In early 1983, Gary Goetzman and I went to see my favorite band, the Talking Heads, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. The show was like seeing a movie just waiting to be filmed.
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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!
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When I saw Justin in 'The Social Network', I became deeply obsessed with the desire to work with him and reached out to Justin. When we met, we talked about a couple of things I was working on that did not come to fruition, but it gave us a meeting.
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Documentaries - my God, there is so much going on in our country and in the world today that every time you open the newspaper or turn on the radio or watch the news on TV there is another documentary subject. We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there?
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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.