Demme Quotes & Sayings

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. — Jonathan Demme

When I'm channel surfing, and 'Silence of the Lambs' comes on, I have trouble turning it off. I wouldn't say that about 'Beautiful Mind.' It's a good movie, but I'm much more in awe of what Jonathan Demme did with 'Silence of the Lambs.' — Toby Emmerich

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. — Jonathan Demme

I also feel that the only thing more gratifying than working with someone who you've worked well with is working with someone new and coming up with something great. — Jonathan Demme

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

I think, on a larger note, that filmmakers and studios should start to tuck it in a little bit, because films wouldn't have the pressure they have if the word wasn't out about how expensive they were. — Ted Demme

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. — Jonathan Demme

I tried to stick to my game plan, which was always being aware of what my A story was - the love story between a father and his son, and that son and his daughter. — Ted Demme

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. — Jonathan Demme

Jonathan Demme is a very sharp editor of his movies. — Anthony Hopkins

I think music is just a wonderful ingredient that helps us understand a scene better. And certainly you can overuse music, and you can use the wrong music. I probably have been guilty of these things over time. But if you use music correctly as a friend of the theme, a friend of the narrative, ou can lend some terrific connective tissue to a film. — Jonathan Demme

Maybe that's where the new art comes in - to somehow have your eye on the marketplace and harness your art to come up with something you can be proud of creatively. — Jonathan Demme

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. — Jonathan Demme

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. — Jonathan Demme

We were friends with Jonathan Demme. We were all down on the West Side of New York, and I think I met Kurt [Vonnegut] through Edith [Demme]. And then I was lucky to do Who Am I This Time? [1982], which was an adaptation of his short story that Jonathan Demme directed with Chris Walken and I, and that really cemented the friendship. — Susan Sarandon

I'm of Neil Young's generation. Neil Young's songs have spoken to what it's like to be at least a white male of his generation over the years. Endlessly, he's sung about the stuff that I really care about. He's put into words the feelings that hit you at different transitional moments in life. — Jonathan Demme

I felt that as long as we were being honest, and that we didn't bend the truth to accomplish another goal, to be entertaining or to be a happy ending, I was confident that we'd be able to tell the story the way it happened. — Ted Demme

I'm guided by my enthusiasm. — Jonathan Demme

And then we watched an amazing number of movies from the late '60s and '70s, which is my favorite time, and we studied their camera movements, their stocks, the way they lit stuff, the colors they used. — Ted Demme

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. — Jonathan Demme

I think Woody Allen calls it 'anxiety of influence.' When you're in your formative years and you watch a movie that makes you want to make movies ... For Wes Anderson, it's Truffaut. I'm sure for P.T. Anderson it was Scorsese and Jonathan Demme. — Max Winkler

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something. — Jonathan Demme

When you're working on a script, every word that's on the page, somebody has to read it. Make every word count in your stories. — Jonathan Demme

As much as I love acoustic Neil Young - and I do deeply - I may be more passionate about the electric. Luckily it's not a contest, and we never have to make that choice. But Neil Young on an electric guitar - I feel like I've never seen or heard anything like it. — Jonathan Demme

I was influenced by European movies, old Fellini, old Kurosawa - any sort of foreign film. — Ted Demme

The older I get the more I realize there's no real good guys or real bad guys, and I'm curious about how the good guys got good and how the bad guys got bad. — Ted Demme

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. — Jonathan Demme

They're out there, this appalling idea that there are companies that profit - not just profit but profit enormously - through war. — Jonathan Demme

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! — Jonathan Demme

Everything I've made - it doesn't mean they've all been good - but everything I've made so far, big or little, fiction or documentary, has been something that I've been really enthusiastic about. — Jonathan Demme

I've never had a good game plan. At a certain point, making independent films became more and more appealing to me because I like freshness and originality. — Jonathan Demme

Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing. — Jonathan Demme

I remember the Neil Young brand hitting me very hard immediately. He wasn't an acquired taste. I loved him immediately. — Jonathan Demme

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. — Jonathan Demme

It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film. — Jonathan Demme

But my humble opinion is, I'm not quite sure where I stand on the legalization of drugs - though, if tequila is legal, pot should probably be legal. — Ted Demme

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films. — Jonathan Demme

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

That's why I'm really trying to produce my own stuff. This film was so good, because I produced it myself, and developed it, and made it with New Line, which is a smaller studio, so I was in control of a lot of stuff that I wasn't in control of for my other films. — Ted Demme

The thing that's great about those guys at Miramax is the Weinstein brothers. They are the two funniest guys I've ever met in my life. — Ted Demme

Music films are great, but they can never compete with a live performance. Live music is what it is. It's the whole point. You experience it in the moment. — Jonathan Demme

I was a sort of rock journalist - whatever that is - in London in the late '60s. — Jonathan Demme

I don't think it's sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie. — Jonathan Demme

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

What I think happens today is that a lot of filmmakers look at other films that are retro pieces, like L.A. Confidential, and say, oh, that's period. We didn't want to do the stereotypical stuff. — Ted Demme

Every film deserves its own unique look. — Jonathan Demme

I'm at Miramax now, where I've actually been treated like a Prince. — Ted Demme

After a few months, I decided to do one more leg of the Le Noise tour and film the last show with Jonathan Demme in Toronto's Massey Hall/ It turned out to be a great night. Everyone was very happy because we had captured it. During a review of the digital files, we realized that the resolution was not full, it was a stepped down quality, not the best it could be. My own team's excuses were not adequate, because I was not informed of the decision to go to a lesser quality. Lesser quality is so accepted as normal now that even I had used it unknowingly. I went back to Massey Hall and set up a PA system like the one I used at the show, played back the mixes through the PA, and rerecorded the house sound at the highest resolution. I did the best I could with a bad situation. It does sound great now. Thankfully, the PA mix was only one step down from the highest resolution, so when it resonated in the hall and was rerecorded at the highest level, a high resolution hall sound was captured. — Neil Young

There are a lot of films that are drug dramas, and we didn't want to tell Scarface again. — Ted Demme

You know, I think everything I do cinematically for the rest of my life will probably have some direct route back to Jonathan. But I love him to death. He's like my best friend and my big brother. — Ted Demme

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

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? — Jonathan Demme