The films of Jonathan Demme (b. 1944) reflect his ebullient personality and are often infused with his love for Caribbean culture, pop music, fashion, and characters who reveal offbeat tastes and depths. He emerged from the 1970s American Renaissance that produced Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and others. His movies are funny, humane, and often unclassifiable by genre.
With conversations from the 1970s to the present, Jonathan Demme: Interviews focuses on Demme’s artistry, on his filmmaking philosophy, and especially on his progressive social and political concerns and how these have influenced the subject matter he has chosen to film.
Although best known for his Oscar-winning dramas The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Demme has also achieved acclaim for comedies (Married to the Mob; Something Wild), documentaries (The Agronomist; My Cousin Bobby; Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains), and concert performance films (Stop Making Sense; Neil Young: Heart of Gold). In this volume, he discusses his troubles with studios, his need to balance documentaries with fiction films, his early work as a critic and publicist, and his apprenticeship with Roger Corman working on “B” movies.
Robert E. Kapsis is professor emeritus of sociology and film studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is author of Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation. He is also editor of Nichols and May: Interviews; Woody Allen: Interviews, Revised and Updated; Charles Burnett: Interviews; and Conversations with Steve Martin and coeditor (with Kathie Coblentz) of Clint Eastwood: Interviews; Clint Eastwood: Interviews, Revised and Updated; and Woody Allen: Interviews, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
