Documentaries - my God, there is so much going on in our country and in the world today that every time you open the newspaper or turn on the radio or watch the news on TV there is another documentary subject. We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there?

- Jonathan Demme

I've never fallen into what I consider to be a trap of trying to figure out something analytically that could be a very popular film. I would hope my enthusiasm could match up with something with that potential.

- Jonathan Demme

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.

- Jonathan Demme

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.

- 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.

- Jonathan Demme

They're out there, this appalling idea that there are companies that profit - not just profit but profit enormously - through war.

- Jonathan Demme

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something.

- Jonathan Demme

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

- Jonathan Demme

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

- Jonathan Demme

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

- Jonathan Demme

As a kid, a little kid, I loved going to the movies, and now I love making movies.

- Jonathan Demme

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.

- Jonathan Demme

Extraordinary people are the Green Berets and the Navy Seals and the Olympic athletes - these are the ones who can face these extraordinary physical challenges and be triumphant.

- Jonathan Demme

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.

- Jonathan Demme

A trilogy is a pretty abstract notion. You can apply it to almost any three things.

- Jonathan Demme

Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing.

- Jonathan Demme

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.

- Jonathan Demme

I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters.

- Jonathan Demme

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

- Jonathan Demme

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

- Jonathan Demme