99 Quotes by Jonathan Demme

Maybe that’s where the new art comes in – to somehow have your eye on the marketplace and harness your art to come up with something you can be proud of creatively.

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.

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.

As much as I love acoustic Neil Young – and I do deeply – I may be more passionate about the electric. Luckily it’s not a contest, and we never have to make that choice. But Neil Young on an electric guitar – I feel like I’ve never seen or heard anything like it.

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.

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

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 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.