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. Jonathan Demme Read Quote
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. Jonathan Demme Read Quote
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? Jonathan Demme Read Quote
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. Jonathan Demme Read Quote
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. Jonathan Demme Read Quote
You want the audience to be in the character’s shoes. The more deeply into the character’s shoes the audience is, the more they’re going to care about what’s going on. Jonathan Demme Read Quote
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. Jonathan Demme Read Quote
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. Jonathan Demme Read Quote