Jonathan Demme
Director of The Silence of the Lambs whose back catalogue of films was quirky and wide-ranging
JONATHAN DEMME, who has died aged 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, which 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 protégés 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 trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling, who is assigned to interview Lecter – a cannibalistic psychiatrist turned serial killer – to help her track down Buffalo Bill, another serial killer who is “skinning” female victims.
In Demme’s hands the grisly elements of the book were everpresent 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 transsexual Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), who screams “You don’t know what pain is!” at one of his victims. Demme’s lingering close-ups challenged viewers to look into the eyes of both victims and villains, and the scene in which Gumb films himself dancing naked is as daring for its humour as it is for its grisly portentousness.
The film won five Oscars in total, 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. Starring two Hollywood superstars, Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas, as an Aids-stricken lawyer and his lover, it suffered from accusations by the gay community that it soft-soaped the story with chaste kisses and not a single scene in bed, but it contains some of Demme’s best work, including a wonderful opening shot as the camera rolls through the city streets, and an awkward encounter between Hanks and an ambulance-chasing lawyer played by Denzel Washington. For many, it was Demme’s most profound and sensitive work.
The son of an airline publicist, Robert Jonathan Demme was born in Baldwin, Long Island, on February 22 1944. He was educated locally and then at a Miami high school, where his father was working for the Fontainebleau Hotel and where young Jonathan took a part-time job as a cinema usher.
Harbouring ambitions to become a vet, he did a stint after school at an animal hospital and enrolled at the University of Miami to study Veterinary Science before realising that he “couldn’t hack” the course’s chemistry requirement. It was then that he offered his services as film critic to the college newspaper, the Florida Alligator. His first review was of the 1963 Peter Sellers comedy caper, The Wrong Arm of the Law.
As Demme later recalled, the job – and a viewing of François Truffaut’s crime drama Shoot the Piano Player, which “blew me away” – began to open 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 for his company Embassy Pictures.
For two years he worked for Embassy in New York – among his assignments was escorting Truffaut round on a publicity tour – and made his first film, a 16mm “short” called Good Morning, Steve. He spent some time in Britain producing television commercials and in 1970 was interviewed for the job of unit publicist on a film being shot by the renowned director of countercultural exploitation pictures, Roger Corman, in Ireland.
It soon transpired that Corman, who was immediately sympathetic, was looking for a writer. He asked Demme if he liked motorcycle movies, to which Demme assented, mentioning Corman’s 1966 film The Wild Angels. “Do you want to write one?” responded Corman. With his chum, the commercials director Joe Viola, Demme wrote a sex-and-violence motor-cycle gang picture based on Kurosawa’s Rashomon, titled Angels, Hard as They Come. He produced it on a shoestring budget, with Viola directing, in 1971. The next year the pair again shared duties making 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” subgenre, 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”.
In quick succession came Fighting Mad (1976), a rural crime drama starred Peter Fonda; Handle With Care (1977, originally released as Citizens’ Band), a comedy on a theme of fashionable CB radio, which flopped; and in 1979 Last Embrace, for United Artists, a thriller, slickly directed by Demme with a strong central performance from Roy Scheider. Around this time he also directed an episode of Columbo, “Murder Under Glass”.
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, it had its premiere at the Venice film festival. Demme won wide plaudits for his sensitive direction and Mary Steenburgen the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award. 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 now tended to be skilfully directed and polished, many of them drawing fine performances from female leads, such as 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 Meryl 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 observed, “because directing combines three of my favourite things in life: people, imagery, and sound – not just music, but the sounds of life.”
Jonathan Demme is survived by his wife Joanne Howard, an artist, and their three children Jos, Brooklyn and Romona. Jonathan Demme, born February 22 1944, died April 26 2017