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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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" 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. "

Jonathan Demme

Film

People

Dancing

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

Jonathan Demme

People

Because

" 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. "

" I'll tell you - what I can tell you is that I know when I saw 'Zodiac' and then again when I saw 'No Country For Old Men,' there was a moment in each of my viewing experiences where I went, 'Dammit, this is scarier than 'Silence Of The Lambs.'' "

" 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

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

" I'm guided by my enthusiasm. "

Jonathan Demme

Enthusiasm

Guided

" 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 don't think it's sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie. "

" 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'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. "

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

" In 'Heart of Gold' at one point, there were 23 players on the stage with him. And part of what's magic about Neil is the way he interacts with the other musicians. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

Jonathan Demme

Taste

Loved

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Jonathan Demme

Think

Stop

" 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 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'm all for streaming, and I do think it's thrilling that a gazillion people can see our film the day it drops. On the other hand, I'm a fierce believer of the theatergoing experience. My hope would be that films can be enjoyed in both ways, that there's room for both. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing. "