Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

Partner

Money

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 always followed my enthusiasm. Whether the pictures have turned out good or not is one thing - but I've always had a lot of enthusiasm for the project at hand. "

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 'Neil Young Heart of Gold', that was a valentine to Nashville and country music in the Grand Ole Opry tradition and Hank Williams. "

" 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'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. "

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm guided by my enthusiasm. "

Jonathan Demme

Enthusiasm

Guided

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

Jonathan Demme

People

Because