Jonathan Demme Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

They're out there, this appalling idea that there are companies that profit - not just profit but profit enormously - through war.

Every film deserves its own unique look.

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.

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 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.

I've never fallen into what I consider to be a trap of trying to figure out something analytically that could be a very popular film. I would hope my enthusiasm could match up with something with that potential.

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

Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing.

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.