Music was first love of Demme
: Through Oscar winning director Jonathan Demme’s freewheeling filmmaking life, that included Silence Of The Lambs, sounded a steady rock ‘n’ roll beat. Music was his first love and his first credit. Long before he was an Oscar-winning director, he was music coordinator for a little-seen 1970 thriller Sudden Terror.
And Demme’s death on Wednesday aged 73 means that the final scenes he shot in his adventurous, hopscotching career were musical, too. His last full-length documentary was a Justin Timberlake concert film. The last scene of his final feature, Ricki And The Flash, was Meryl Streep, as an aging rocker, bringing down the house with Tom Petty’s American Girl.
Few filmmakers have been so drawn to the marrying of music and image the way Demme, a selfavowed “fanatical rock ‘n’ roller,” was. He stuffed 49 songs into Something Wild. Springsteen’s The Streets of Philadelphia gave his Philadelphia its melancholy heart. And his seminal Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, deftly captured the swell of David Byrne’s art-funk spectacular.
Demme, and his films, were never so alive as when the music was playing — and playing loud.
“I’ve come to believe, and I kind of felt this when we did Stop Making Sense, that shooting live music is kind of like the purest form of filmmaking,” Demme told The Associated Press last year.
“There’s no script to worry about. It’s not a documentary, so you don’t have to wonder where this story is going and what we can use. It’s just: Here come the musicians. Here come the dancers. The curtain goes up.
They have at it and we get to respond in the best way possible to what they’re doing up there.”
The filmmaker died of complications from esophageal cancer in his New York apartment, surrounded by his wife, Joanna, and three children.
Demme broke into moviemaking under the B-movie master Roger Corman.