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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. "

Jonathan Demme

Early

Band

Seeing

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" There's that rule: Don't show any of the other cameras. Why? Do you think the viewer doesn't think we filmed this? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was a Talking Heads fan from the very beginning. "

" 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. "

" Every film deserves its own unique look. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

Jonathan Demme

Successful

Skill

" 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. "

" Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Jonathan Demme

Film

" 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

Enthusiasm

Hope

" I had had no aspirations to be a filmmaker or a writer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Jonathan Demme

New

New Orleans

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

" 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. "

" 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. "