Explore Quotes by Jonathan Demme

I like seeing the cameras because it helps visualize how the music people and the movie people teamed up.

The excitement of wading into 'reality' and just finding out what happens - and then the challenge of selecting those things that happened and shaping them in the editing into a narrative that will have appeal and be engaging - is a great, great thrill.

I often find myself feeling that filming music is somehow the purest form of filmmaking. This crazed collision of sound and images, the intense collaboration, these incredibly cinematic performances. And for the nights you're filming, a non-player like me gets to feel somehow part of the band.

I'm all for streaming, and I do think it's thrilling that a gazillion people can see our film the day it drops. On the other hand, I'm a fierce believer of the theatergoing experience. My hope would be that films can be enjoyed in both ways, that there's room for both.

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.

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.

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

I'm guided by my enthusiasm.

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.

I remember the Neil Young brand hitting me very hard immediately. He wasn't an acquired taste. I loved him immediately.

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.

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.

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.

In early 1983, Gary Goetzman and I went to see my favorite band, the Talking Heads, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. The show was like seeing a movie just waiting to be filmed.

I didn't go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.

When I saw Justin in 'The Social Network', I became deeply obsessed with the desire to work with him and reached out to Justin. When we met, we talked about a couple of things I was working on that did not come to fruition, but it gave us a meeting.

I've always followed my enthusiasm. Whether the pictures have turned out good or not is one thing - but I've always had a lot of enthusiasm for the project at hand.

I adore film, and I adore music.

I'll tell you - what I can tell you is that I know when I saw 'Zodiac' and then again when I saw 'No Country For Old Men,' there was a moment in each of my viewing experiences where I went, 'Dammit, this is scarier than 'Silence Of The Lambs.''

When we finished 'Stop Making Sense,' we went right to the San Francisco Film Festival for the world premiere, and people swarmed the stage and started dancing before the first song was even finished.

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