Jonathan Demme

The B-Movie School

Jonathan Demme was writing film reviews in Florida before Roger Corman offered him the chance to produce a movie. He had no technical training, but he knew what worked on screen. That chance meeting in a California office changed his destiny forever.

In 1974, he shot Caged Heat on a shoestring budget with actresses looking for a break. That debut in women's prison cinema wasn't aiming for art. It just wanted to recoup Corman's investment in the double-feature theaters of the time.

And the gamble paid off.

During that decade of learning, Demme understood that film was a matter of rhythm and soulful supporting characters. He shot action comedies and social dramas that went unnoticed by New York critics. But in 1980, he caught the attention of analysts with Melvin and Howard.

The film recounted the real-life encounter between a gas station attendant and billionaire Howard Hughes. That movie showed that Demme had a special eye for the American working class and its broken dreams. The industry began to see in him a storyteller capable of humanizing the extravagant.

The close-up as a weapon

In 1984, he filmed Stop Making Sense to capture the energy of Talking Heads live. Many critics still consider it the greatest music documentary ever made for its technical simplicity. Demme decided the camera should not get in the way of David Byrne.

But the big change came in 1991 with The Silence of the Lambs. He used a technique that constantly unsettled the viewer. The actors looked directly into the camera lens during the tensest dialogue scenes.

Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster did not look at each other during the filming of those scenes. They looked into the lens instead. So audiences felt that Hannibal Lecter was speaking directly to them. It was a risky directing choice that created an atmosphere of suffocating psychological terror.

The film won the five major awards at the 1992 Oscars ceremony.

In 1993, he directed Philadelphia, putting a face to the AIDS crisis at a time of great social stigma. Tom Hanks took the lead role, and the production moved away from visual experimentation to focus on the courtroom drama. The result was a massive box office hit that grossed more than 200 million dollars worldwide.

Lean years and a royal refuge

After his massive success, Demme entered a phase of troubled projects and erratic decisions. In 1998, he tried to adapt Toni Morrison's novel Beloved on a budget of 80 million dollars. The film was a financial disaster and barely recouped a quarter of its investment.

It was his biggest commercial failure.

From that point on, he turned to documentaries and smaller, more personal projects. He traveled to Haiti several times to shoot pieces on the country's political situation. For Demme, cinema always had a component of social activism that he did not want to abandon for big studio money.

In 2008, he won critical favor back with Rachel Getting Married. He shot the film with handheld digital cameras so it would look like home video recorded by a wedding guest. Anne Hathaway earned an Oscar nomination for a raw performance that shunned makeup and artifice.

In 2015, he released his last narrative feature, Ricki and the Flash, starring Meryl Streep. The production cost 18 million dollars and received a lukewarm reception in theaters. Jonathan Demme died in Manhattan in April 2017 from complications of esophageal cancer.