Jonathan Demme Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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It is hard to watch myself. I'm hypercritical, and it's difficult to watch a performance when I may end up being at odds with it - wishing I'd done something differently or that they had edited it a certain way.
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I wake up late, say 10 or 11, because we've usually been out and about town until 2 or 3 A.M. listening to music at the jazz clubs or hitting the jazz clubs post-theater.
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When you're not under a 'series regular' contract, and other jobs come up, you try to juggle everything.
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I live a half mile from the San Andreas fault - a fact that bubbles up into my consciousness every time some other part of the world experiences an earthquake. I sometimes wonder whether this subterranean sense of impending disaster is at least partly responsible for Silicon Valley's feverish, get-it-done-yesterday work norms.
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I grew up in different parts of Africa. I grew up in Mozambique and places like that. I've been in South Africa many times.
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I know someone from growing up who is in jail right now for the rest of his life, but he was one of the sweetest people I ever knew.
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I love to watch 'Chopped,' 'Jeopardy,' and 'Breaking Bad.' You can't pass up that one. Oh! One other show I love to watch is 'Suburgatory.'
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The loneliest Chinese man I ever met lived halfway up the Three Gorges, in Sichuan Province.
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Brad Pitt is a dude who just wants to make good movies. He's not afraid to surround himself with the greatest actors, which I always appreciate because I've also seen actors who only want to surround themselves with weak actors because it makes them look better. That ends up making a poorer movie.
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What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I've received a spam text.
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Whenever I see a tree that is climbable, it must be climbed. Sometimes when I'm on a run, I'll just run up a tree, jump on a branch and swing off. My favorite tree, in Saratoga, gets me a good 75 feet up.
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We ought to open up energy innovation across the board and - and remove the barriers to every form of energy.
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I grew up playing video games. And the cool thing about the EA Sports games is they took me through the whole motion-capture thing, where they put little sensors on my body so the video game really is me. It actually moves the way I move.
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My biggest bits of advice are, write as much as you can, finish what you start, get a thick skin, don't take crap from anyone, but also live your life and have fun. The stereotype of a writer holed up alone all day is really unhelpful. You can't write real people and real emotion if you don't let yourself experience them.
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Life is challenging but I'm always up for a challenge.
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I sing around the house, in the shower.
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I had no interest in being an actress what so ever, and when I was about 14 or 15, I was signed to a company in England. They owned a children's TV show which they put me in as a singer, and I was on the show for three years, and I left the show when I was 18 and started looking for a record contract.
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Some actors get fired up by the sound of the audience. I just want to retreat.
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I usually find myself hiking in a place that not a lot of people go hiking, just trying to find some solitude. I like being out in the middle of nowhere. Not always, but it's a good place to go to just reflect and think, and it's something I really enjoy.
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Obviously, I have to enjoy all I have. People depend on you, and now I can look back at everything I've gone through to get here with a different perspective.
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In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what's inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.
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Marlene Dumas is one of the two or three most successful female artists alive, if you judge by prices. I've never reviewed her work, because I find nothing in it to get excited about no matter how hard I look.
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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.
