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.
Jonathan DemmeI don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.
Jonathan DemmeWhen 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 DemmeI didn't go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.
Jonathan DemmeDocumentaries - 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?
Jonathan Demme