In Demme’s eclectic career, a nonstop rock ‘n’ roll beat
NEW YORK » Through Jonathan Demme’s freewheeling filmmaking life 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 called “Sudden Terror.”
And Demme’s death Wednesday morning at the age of 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 self-avowed “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, of course, 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 livemusic 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 bestway possible to what they’re doing up there.”
The filmmaker died Wednesday morning of complications from esophageal cancer in his New York apartment, surrounded by his wife, Joanna, and three children, said Demme’s publicist, Annalee Paulo.
Demme broke into moviemaking under the B-movie master Roger Corman in the early 1970s, and his prodigious, wide-ranging body of work always kept the agile curiosity of a low-budget independent filmmaker. His career spanned documentaries, screwball comedies and tales of social justice. Yet his most famous films were a pair of Oscar-winners.
“The Silence of the Lambs,” the 1991 thriller starring Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and Jodie Foster as an FBI analyst, earned him a directing Oscar, as well as best picture. He followed that upwith “Philadelphia” (1993), with Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, the first major Hollywood film to confront the AIDS crisis. It remains a landmark film in the portrayal of gay life and injustice, subjects Hollywood has previously largely turned a blind eye toward.
Hopkins, Foster and Hanks all earned Academy Awards for their performances in those films. Demme’s sensitive, alert eye help produce countless other acclaimed performance, too, from Melanie Griffith (“Something Wild”) to Anne Hathaway (“Rachel Getting Married”).
“Just as passionate about music as he was about art, he was and will always be a champion of the soul,” said Foster. Hanks called him “the grandest of men.” “Jonathan taught us how big a heart a person can have, and how it will guide how we live and what we do for a living,” said the actor.