Jonathan Demme

Director

1944-02-22

Quotes by Jonathan Demme

• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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