Jonathan Demme: Director of ‘The Silence of the Lambs’
1944-2017
JONATHAN Demme, who has died at the age of 73, was a film director whose work seemed to encompass almost every genre, but he was best known for The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the horror-thriller adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel. It earned him an Academy Award for best director and delighted audiences with the monstrous Dr Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), who ate his victim’s liver “with some fava beans and a nice chianti”.
One of several proteges of the independent filmmaker Roger Corman, the ebullient Demme was already an established director in Hollywood when he took on The Silence of the Lambs. But his back catalogue was varied to the point of quirkiness, including the 1984 Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, and in 1987 Spalding Gray’s strange monologue, Swimming to Cambodia.
It was, however, Demme’s range, humour and his fascination with human nature that made The Silence of the Lambs more than just a pulp thriller. He teased out of Hopkins one of the most memorable and menacing performances in cinema history. Jodie Foster, moreover, reinvented herself in Hollywood’s eyes as the plucky FBI agent Clarice Starling, who is assigned to interview Lecter to help her track down another serial killer.
In Demme’s hands the grisly elements of the book were ever present but not exploited. Much of the story became about Lecter and Starling’s connection — which has hints of a diabolical parent-child relationship — and the torments suffered by the film’s other villain, the transgender Jame Gumb (Ted Levine).
The film won five Oscars although it caused some controversy for what was seen as insensitivity in its portrayal of the female victims and the transgender Gumb.
Demme’s response two years later was to make Philadelphia, one of the first big Hollywood films to treat the subjects of Aids and homophobia.
The son of an airline publicist, Robert Jonathan Demme was born in Baldwin, Long Island, on February 22 1944. He was educated locally and in Miami where he worked as a cinema usher.
He enrolled at the University of Miami to study veterinary science before realising that he “couldn’t hack” the course’s chemistry requirement.
He also wrote movie reviews for the university newspaper and recalled being blown away by François Truffaut’s crime drama Shoot the Piano Player. It opened his mind to the possibilities of film.
His father introduced him to Joseph E Levine, producer of Zulu, about which Demme had rhapsodised in print, and Levine offered him a job as a publicist.
Among his assignments was escorting Truffaut on a publicity tour. Demme also made his first film, a 16mm “short” called Good Morning, Steve. He spent time in Britain producing TV commercials and in 1970 joined Corman as a publicist.
On an offer from Corman, Demme and a friend, Joe Viola, wrote a sex-and-violence motorcycle gang picture, Angels, Hard as They Come. He produced it on a shoestring budget, with Viola directing.
The pair then made The Hot Box, which Demme summarised as “about nurses who become captured by a revolutionary band in a small deprived nation”.
Demme’s debut as director was Caged Heat in 1974, another exploitation film, this time in the “women in prison” sub-genre, slightly tongue-in-cheek and with some Freudian symbolism thrown in for good measure.
Then came the action-comedy Crazy Mama (1975), about a family on a crime spree. It was the film in which he began to move towards the mainstream, demonstrating, as one critic put it, his “strong sense of community”.
Demme’s breakthrough film was a sympathetic comedy drama of ordinary America, Melvin and Howard, in 1980. Based on the story of a “Mormon will” supposedly left by the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, Demme won plaudits for his sensitive direction and Mary Steenburgen won the best supporting actress Oscar.
The critic Pauline Kael praised Demme and his writer, Bo Goldman, for entering “the soul of American blue-collar suckerdom”.
After a lean period, his next film was Swing Shift in 1984, a wartime comedy starring the partnership of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. Demme and his lead actors disagreed over what sort of film they were making but the result was generally considered a success.
A devotee of the band Talking Heads, Demme brilliantly edited footage of three performances into Stop Making Sense, which was hailed as “coolly iconoclastic”. He would go on to make more than a dozen documentaries over the years, including three with Neil Young.
His films later tended to be skilfully directed and polished, many of them drawing fine performances from female leads, among them Something Wild (1986) with Melanie Griffith, Married to the Mob (1988) with Michelle Pfeiffer and The Silence of the Lambs.
Among his later pictures were, in 2004, a remake of The Manchurian Candidate starring Denzel Washington, with a superb turn by Meryl Streep as a senator, and the intimate Rachel Getting Married, for which Anne Hathaway won a best actress Oscar.
His last film was the comedy Ricki and the Flash, of which Streep was the high point, playing a middle-aged woman pursuing her dream of becoming a rock star.
“There’s nothing I’d rather do than direct,” Demme said, “because directing combines three of my favourite things in life: people, imagery and sound — not just music, but the sounds of life.”
Demme is survived by his wife, Joanne Howard, an artist, and their three children, Jos, Brooklyn and Romona.
Directing combines three of my favourite things: people, imagery, and sound — not just music, but sounds of life