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 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 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
Seeking to reset ties with the US, visiting Pakistan finance minister Ishaq Dar stressed his country’s commitment to fighting terrorism at a meeting with national security adviser HR Mcmaster at the White House.
Dar, who met Mcmaster and others in the Trump administration on Wednesday as a special envoy of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, told the NSA “Pakistan’s commitment to fight terrorism from its soil was manifested by the successful conclusion of the operation Zarb-e-azb, which was now being followed by a nationwide combing operation Rad ul here said in a statement. “As a result of these efforts, the inci dence of terrorism in Pakistan had significantly reduced,” it added.
The Americans responded according to the same statement with understanding. “The US side noted Pakistan’s sacrifices in war against terrorism and its support to strengthen Pakistan’s counter-terrorism capabilities.”
Though the embassy state ment did not say Dar brought up the Kashmir issue with Mcmas ter, he later told Pakistani report ers that he did. But no details were available of this part of their conversation. Us-pakistan ties have nosedived over Islamabad’s continued reluctance to act against all terrorist groups oper