99 Quotes by Jonathan Demme

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 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.

Music films are great, but they can never compete with a live performance. Live music is what it is. It’s the whole point. You experience it in the moment.

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.

I’ve never had a good game plan. At a certain point, making independent films became more and more appealing to me because I like freshness and originality.

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

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

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