A Tribute to Demme's Story

Guggenheim Honor Applauds Filmmaker's Diverse Career

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The Work of Jonathan Demme
A look at the varied career of the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, honoree at this year's Charles Guggenheim Symposium at the Silverdocs film festival.

It stands to reason that a director who's won an Academy Award, and whose films have garnered a clutch of Oscar nominations, might be content to rest on his laurels, or at least continue to ply the deal-making seas in search of the ever-bigger picture, ever-higher salary and ever-more-bimbolicious arm candy.

But throughout his career, Jonathan Demme, 63, has steadfastly resisted the blandishments and stereotypical excesses of the industry he's worked in for more than 30 years. And for much of that time he's turned his back entirely on the mythmaking machinery, directing and producing small, low-budget documentaries -- with subjects such as Haiti, political activists, rock musicians and AIDS -- that have earned him plaudits among film purists, if not conventional Hollywood recompense in fame and fortune.

Today, Demme will be honored at the Charles Guggenheim Symposium as part of the Silverdocs film festival, which will present the theatrical premiere of "New Home Movies From the Lower 9th Ward," part of Demme's documentary project on post-Katrina New Orleans. He's also at work on "Carter," a film about former president Jimmy Carter. The festival will present free outdoor screenings of two of Demme's best-known music documentaries, "Stop Making Sense" tonight and "Neil Young: Heart of Gold" tomorrow night.

Still best known for "The Silence of the Lambs," for which he received the Oscar for best directing in 1992, Demme is the ideal honoree at the Guggenheim Symposium, according to Silverdocs festival director Patricia Finneran. "It's not a lifetime achievement award," she says of the symposium, which was founded after the death of the eponymous Washington-based documentarian. (Barbara Kopple and Martin Scorsese were past honorees.)

Noting that Guggenheim made some of his greatest films about politics ("Nine From Little Rock," "Robert Kennedy Remembered"), Finneran says that the festival looks for filmmakers "whose work speaks to those values -- about civil rights issues, about respect for the common man, but also telling the story of great leaders."

For Demme, switching gears between documentaries and fiction films has been gratifying, precisely because the disciplines are so different. "When you're filming reality, you wind up trying to fashion that reality in a dramatic or interesting way so that it can grip an audience," he said from his office in Nyack, N.Y. "When you're doing a fiction film, you're trying to make it feel as real as possible. So it's a healthy twin set of reference points for me."

"The Silence of the Lambs," a huge commercial and critical success, marked the midpoint of a remarkably varied career for Demme, who got his start working for the legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman. His work has run the gamut from pulp ("Caged Heat," "Crazy Mama") and cult classics ("Melvin and Howard," "Something Wild") to problem-picture uplift ("Philadelphia") and remakes ("The Truth About Charlie," "The Manchurian Candidate").

Demme is currently finishing "Carter," which follows former president Carter in the wake of the publication of his controversial book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." Like "New Home Movies," the Carter film has involved "a strong degree of compulsion," he says. "You've got to make it. You fixate on the idea that it's a subject worth documenting, and then you find yourself making it. And you're never absolutely sure if you'll finish it, because half the time they're self-financed, Poverty Row labors of love, which is why I'm so thrilled the New Orleans film will be shown at Silverdocs. I can't believe it."

After Demme reached the heights of Hollywood success in the 1990s, fans of his more commercial work might well ask why he's spent so much time since on smaller projects. The producer Edward Saxon, who has worked with Demme on several films, chalks it up to artistic freedom. "Jonathan's just profoundly interested in issues of social justice, and visualizing the humanity of disenfranchised people. He's a humanist filmmaker, which is what makes his fiction films so great. And just like an artist who might work in sculpture and painting, [working in nonfiction] is a chance for him to flex different creative muscles and engage in a reality that isn't manufactured, but at a filmmaking level is still plastic."

Louis Black, an Austin-based editor and writer who is working on a book about Demme, agrees. "The thing that makes Jonathan a really great filmmaker, and part of what I argue makes him one of the few great Hollywood directors, is that he genuinely loves people. Look at Scorsese. Has he made a film about anyone you'd want to spend time with? Jonathan is genuinely excited -- about politics, about culture, about people. And when something excites him, he tends to make a film about it. He's driven by passions; he's not driven by career obsession. He's just an enormous fan."

In addition to "New Home Movies," segments of which were shown on PBS's "Tavis Smiley" last month, Demme hopes to create a 10-to-15-hour "Right to Return" series, as well as an online data bank for the 200 hours of digital video he shot in New Orleans. His Carter film will be released early next year. His next fiction film, "Dancing With Shiva," "a multi-character comedy with a serious edge," will be shot by the same cinematographer, Declan Quinn, using the same spontaneous, cinema verite style. And Demme will shoot his next documentary in Austin, filming the roots rocker Alejandro Escovedo performing at the closest thing to that city's Algonquin Roundtable, the Mexican restaurant Las Manitas, which is currently scheduled for relocation.

That's the plan, at least, unless something catches his eye in the meantime. "If the story's worth telling, I'll tell it," he says simply. "And arguably, everybody's story's worth telling."