Jonathan Demme Quotes

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.

I don`t think it`s sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie.

When 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!

I was a sort of rock journalist - whatever that is - in London in the late `60s.

I also feel that the only thing more gratifying than working with someone who you`ve worked well with is working with someone new and coming up with something great.

I don`t think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

I don`t think it`s sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie. I think what`s sacrilegious is to make a bad movie, whether it`s a remake or an original. It`s what I always tell my actor friends, anybody who`s in this, this (business), you`ve gotta try to hold out and only do the scripts, do the material that offers you the opportunity to do your best work. Because if you do stuff that doesn`t give you that opportunity? Your work`s not gonna be good. And you`re gonna suffer in the long run from that. So I don`t care if it`s a remake if it`s a great script with parts in it that can attract fantastic actors, God, you know, to make the movie.

I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters.

I was really hooked on movies at a very young age. The Manchurian Candidate, along with Seven Days in May, Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove were this quartet of anarchistic black-and-white American movies, each of which did things that you just didn`t do in American movies, especially in the realm of irreverence toward politics and government institutions and the Army. I was what, 16, it was shocking, it was thrilling and interestingly it predated my exposure to the French New Wave, so in away, this was the American, a certain kind of new wave in American movies.