Jonathan Demme Quotations

One thing that Neil and I talked about from the very beginning was making this movie feel like a dream -- literally a dream concert that takes you back in time and takes place in a dream location.

Neil would be singing these songs for the first time ever to an audience that never heard them before. He'd be so communicative under those circumstances.

We pretended it was a world premiere concert.

Each year, Cognac makes its mark with enthusiasm, style and confidence and it's wonderful to be taking part in this year's edition.

Seeing Neil Young expressing these lyrics and seeing the emotions that register on his face in his style of presentation is a sublime extra for understanding his music.

People can go on this emotional journey that awaits them if they surrender to the songs.

And then when the song was over I didn't say 'cut.' I thought it would be rude, 'It's Buster Keaton -- this guy knows exactly what size he is in the frame.' That's the filmmaker in Neil.

All my life I have been in love with film and music, and this feels like the best opportunity I have ever had to work with a fusion of the two artistic mediums,

It puts me in touch with some deeply felt, old-fashioned, powerful ideas about what America stands for, what the family stands for, what friends stand for. There's a complete absence of cynicism. I think it makes you feel good to be human.

I remember him telling me that he was going to New York for a couple of days. I could've sworn that he told me he was going to a foot doctor.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I'm guided by my enthusiasm.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something. Or, you have to be singing in a vocabulary that has tremendous appeal or else people are not going to want to sit there for eighty or ninety minutes hearing this stuff.

Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing.

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

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

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.

Every film deserves its own unique look.

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 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.