A friend of mine, who I love very much, got Aids and it really got me in a very intense way how tough life was for people with Aids.
Acting is by far and away the toughest job, in terms of film-making and maybe even the arts. How they do it I don't know, but they have to be allowed to get their satisfaction.
And he said, 'Don't take this the wrong way, I'm glad you're making the movie, but I'll probably never see it.'
And it went to great pains to enumerate why it was much better than what Warner Brothers had done.
As joyful as I was about how Stop Making Sense had turned out, I remember more the horror of what can happen to you in this line of work.
At a certain point you've just made a lot of movies that have come in on budget and are pretty good or whatever, so you're given another shot, but they aren't making money.
At first I tried to give the editors a lot of notes about how I wanted them to put the scene together.
Become a film-maker. The more radical people would say, if you can't buy one, steal one, whatever, but just start filming, because then you're a film-maker.
But my hunch is that it won't be a straight sequel. I don't think that he's the kind of writer to do it that way.
Everybody knows it's a documentary. It will probably be on television. Nobody expects it to set the box office on fire.
For a film-maker, in your professional life, it's hard to imagine anything more devastating, because you haven't just had your work taken away from you.
For me it isn't good to do that kind of research.
He was great. We called it the Roger Corman school of film technique. You really did learn on the job.
He winds up through a series of events taking a walk on the wild side and ends up imprisoned in this hideous work camp in the South and he's there and they show a movie that night.
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 also have a spoken agreement with the actors that this is okay with them.
I also love the absence of pressure, any kind of pressure, with documentaries. I know what Roger Corman's talking about when he says that a director has to be part businessman.
I can remember going to a theatre out there and seeing an almost finished version of Apocalypse Now and being overwhelmed with excitement.
I don't have an agenda, particularly, although from movie to movie there's a momentary agenda. I really wanted to make a movie that addressed the issue of Aids.
I don't know if many people have read the book, but it seems sometimes like the writer is trying to see the downside of the film-makers he was covering.
I don't think it's possible for me to pick a movie just because it's going to do well at the box office. I just don't have that knack.
I don't think it's sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie.
I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.
I get to get my ideas out of my system and they get to get their ideas out of their system and in the cutting room we find out what works.
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 like to start filming as quickly as possible. I like to get what the blocking is going to be like and then I like to start filming, rehearsing on film.
I lost my control after that. I was called into the office the next day for a list of changes, and I told them then that I was finished with my work.
I moved back to New York and made Stop Making Sense and so on. Anyway, that was a very long story and I apologise for going on. I had to get it off my chest.
I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters.
I think it was probably that it was completely understood that if you didn't complete the days work on any given day that you would be replaced.
I think that a lot of the people, like Hal Ashby, were a lot more complicated and there was a lot more magic going on in their lives and their work than the book indicated.
I trusted that Hanks would be really good, but I have to say he was even better. I thought he was magnificent in the movie, and I never imagined him being as good as he was.
I was a sort of rock journalist - whatever that is - in London in the late '60s.
I was really excited during that period of time making my Hell's Angel movies and my women in prison movies.
I wasn't deluged necessarily, but there were certainly a lot of opportunities, especially to do movies about serial killers!
I'm a real music enthusiast and I think it's exciting beyond description to work with a musical artist that you admire, and be filming and trying to capture his magic.
I've come to a point, or a realisation - what with the family etc - that it's such hard work for such a long time when you make a picture.
If you find yourself transported by what's happening then it's got to be good. Well, you've got to believe that it's got to be good anyway.
If you're in a cramped space and you can't move the camera around a lot to keep the eyeball interested, then you should be able to cut and you should try to get a lot of angles to cut.
It was scheduled for three nights in the beginning of December and September rolls by and October was rolling by, and Bob isn't providing the scenes.
It's about two years from when you get involved in it at script level to when you say goodbye to it in the theatres, and I've realised that you've got to be very enthusiastic about it.
Making a film with Robin I went back to the Roger Corman idea of trying to keep the camera moving and the interest sustained.
Movies were essentially my life, in a way, the great source of joy, but now I had another thing that was making me a little lazier.
Not so much that stuff I was talking about but just seeing how tough people can be and how mean they can be to you. I didn't want to see that again.
Of course now there's the book Raging Bulls and Easy Riders that documents that period. I think sometimes in a very unflattering way.
Often you came in and just like in our film there would be a drape, and then they would find some excuse to open this drape and reveal the street.
One of my favourite things in watching any performance on film is when there isn't a lot of cutting going on and when you get a chance to become really absorbed in the artist in hand.
One of the most significant scenes in any movie for me is in Sullivan's Travels when the director wants to make really meaningful movies.
Roger also said something I'll never forget. He said that as far as he was concerned the formula for a director was 40 per cent artist, 60 per cent businessman.
She has a tremendously successful television show, of course, in America, and that's all very involved with ABC and Disney.
She was just so pleased to act her part that there was never a moment's aggravation whatsoever.
Since bringing that rule in and realising that the best way to get my way is to let them get their way too, I've sometimes discovered in the cutting room that hey, they were right.
So a very high profile Hollywood writer was brought in to rewrite the movie as more of a kind of Tracy and Hepburn film, a light romance.
So this great heroic initiative began on the part of the black race in America and there's just so little about that in this period that we call Reconstruction.
So this guy came in and started writing scenes but had some difficulty writing them and was taking time, and meanwhile this one thing that we had been planning to do stopped making sense.
So we thought, great. And we were actually in the editing room, editing our latest Haiti documentary, about the quest for democracy in Haiti, and Tom came in.
That probably doesn't make any sense at all. In fact I don't buy it. Next question.
The first three or four movies I made I was always so astonished that I had made it through the process and my name was on the movie.
The more you get into that trip, the more the director can relax and enjoy what is going on.
The pressure is to find something that can be a successful movie to justify the investment they make in keeping the office running all the time.
There was a preview that night and the editors and I had gone back to the cutting room and restored our version, so they all sat down in the theatre again and saw what they hated.
They saw the new scenes and they came out slightly pleased but also, probably, scratching their heads because it didn't quite work.
They trashed the score, put the new scenes in, etc, and I was really depressed about all that.
We didn't want to do it just in one room, in an enclosed space, because the eye might get too familiar with the surroundings.
We started seeing actors and a number of things happened. A lot of actors didn't really want to consider playing a gay man with Aids at that stage.
We started talking and both agreed that it was absurd to do videos lip-synch, and that if we were going to do a video together then it should be a live performance video.
We went outside and had a little food and were chatting, and he was very soft spoken and intense and interesting.
What went through my head was that there was a movie waiting to be made here, which is also what I thought when I saw Robin perform for the first time a couple of years ago.
When it came to me, two years ago at Christmas, I find it hard to believe that such an aggressively different kind of movie was actually going to be financed. That was one reaction I had.
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!
With Beloved, I had been in touch with Rachel Portman because I admired her work so much, and it struck me as great that I'd have a woman to score Beloved.
With Beloved, I was given the opportunity to have very intense personal feelings about race relations and the state of racial affairs in my country and indeed the world.
With David Byrne and Talking Heads you had a whole stage full of musicians to cut to, so you were obliged to cut to a certain extent.
With Robin it was basically 'there he is' - except for when Tim and Denny joined him - and it's just one guy and one guitar. That was challenging.
You finish the day's work and then you go onto dailies and see what you shot yesterday. Usually you go into dailies really tired from the day's work.
I don't think it's sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie. I think what's sacrilegious is to make a bad movie, whether it's a remake or an original. It's what I always tell my actor friends, anybody who's in this, this [business], you've gotta try to hold out and only do the scripts, do the material that offers you the opportunity to do your best work. Because if you do stuff that doesn't give you that opportunity? Your work's not gonna be good. And you're gonna suffer in the long run from that. So I don't care if it's a remake if it's a great script with parts in it that can attract fantastic actors, God, you know, to make the movie.
I was really hooked on movies at a very young age. The Manchurian Candidate, along with Seven Days in May, Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove were this quartet of anarchistic black-and-white American movies, each of which did things that you just didn't do in American movies, especially in the realm of irreverence toward politics and government institutions and the Army. I was what, 16, it was shocking, it was thrilling and interestingly it predated my exposure to the French New Wave, so in away, this was the American, a certain kind of new wave in American movies.
Awarded honorary degree by Wesleyan University (June 3, 1990).
He co-directed Bruce Springsteen's "Streets Of Philadelphia" music video.
Uncle of Ted Demme.
Has 3 children, with wife Joanne Howard.
Directed Bruce Springsteen's "Murder Incorporated" music video (1995).
Frequently uses Pablo Ferro for his Title Sequences and montages.
Was voted the 45th Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985". Pages 255-258. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.
Father of Josephine Demme.
He frequently casts the same actors in most of his films, including Paul Lazar, Ted Levine, Harry Northup, Charles Napier, Dean Stockwell, Robert W. Castle, Denzel Washington, Jude Ciccolella, and Tracey Walter. He also tends to use non-actor friends or musicians he likes, as long as they are "interesting".
Directed 7 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards, Christine Lahti, Dean Stockwell, Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster and Tom Hanks. Steenburgen, Hopkins, Foster and Hanks won Oscars for their performances in one of Demme's movies.
He and Michael Mann have both directed a Hannibal Lecter film and have also both been involved in a film about Howard Hughes. Mann directed Manhunter (1986) and produced The Aviator (2004), which he was originally to have directed. One of Demme's earliest films was Melvin and Howard (1980), and he later went on to direct _Silence of the Lambs, The (1991)_.
Member of jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000
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