99 Quotes by Jonathan Demme

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 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 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.

When you're working on a script, every word that's on the page, somebody has to read it. Make every word count in your stories.

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.

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.

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.

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something. Or, you have to be singing in a vocabulary that has tremendous appeal or else people are not going to want to sit there for eighty or ninety minutes hearing this stuff.

Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing.