As a tribute to filmmaker Jonathan Demme, who passed away today at age 73, I am posting this interview I did with him back in 1988, shortly before the release of Married to the Mob. I was grateful for the opportunity to speak with him — I had pegged him as a promising director when I saw Fighting Mad (1976), and subsequently enjoyed seeing that promise fulfilled in Citizens Band (1977) and Melvin and Howard (1980). My only regret is that our paths never crossed again.
The cinema of Jonathan
Demme is a vibrantly colored patchwork quilt where the rural Middle Americans
of Fighting Mad enjoy Sunday chicken
dinner, where the Utah Mormons of Melvin
and Howard cling fast to dreams fed by pop culture, where the funky reggae
princess of Married to the Mob hires
the widow of a Long Island Mafioso to work in a Lower East Side beauty shop.
Demme works in riots of
color and freeze-frames of eccentric details, insisting on the importance of
what lies at the edges of his frame and the fringes of our society. And he will
not be boxed in by fashion or genre. As a filmmaker, his enthusiasm is as
boundless and indefatigable. He will focus on a one-man show (Swimming to Cambodia) that's large
enough to contain multitudes, then pull back to encompass the curves and twists
of a romantic road movie (Something Wild)
that detours into harrowing violence. He can stalk David Byrne and the Talking
Heads all around a concert stage (Stop Making
Sense), or scramble along the highways, and smash through the defenses,
that separate small-town folks who are connected only by their C.B.’s (Citizens Band, a.k.a. Handle with Care).
Call him Demme eclectic
and he will smile, grateful for the compliment.
A 44-year-old graduate of
producer Roger Corman’s school of low-budget, fast-profit moviemaking, Demme knows
how to grab an audience. “Rule No. 1,” he says, quoting his mentor, “is to
never forget that the eyeball is the primary organ involved in the experience
of movie watching. And if you don’t keep the eye stimulated, there’s no way you
can keep the brain engaged.
“Of course, Roger said
this before the advent of stereo sound, so I guess the ear is almost as important
now. But that's OK. I’ve always liked to play special effects louder than they
should be, because they’re fun that way. Whether it’s a burp, or a knuckle
crack, or a punch — it’s just more fun to hear it loud and crisp, not at the
realistic level.”
But if you take a close
look at Demme’s labors of love — the “Sun City” video of Artists United Against
Apartheid, an "impressionistic documentary” called Haiti Dreams of Democracy — you realize there's more than sound and
fury to his sensibility.
Along with Martin Scorsese
and Danny De Vito, Demme recently established Filmmakers United Against
Apartheid, a group of more than 100 filmmakers who want to involve their films
in the cultural boycott of South Africa. And even in a frankly commercial
project like his latest film, Married to
the Mob, a darkly humorous romantic comedy about a Mafia widow and a
straight-arrow FBI agent, Demme projects his optimistic view of America as a richly
multi-ethnic society, a percolating melting pot where white bread can soak up
tasty foreign influences.
“In this day and age, with
so much strife, any opportunity to visualize cooperation between people who are
different is an opportunity that can’t be missed,” Demme said a few days ago in
his Plaza Hotel suite.
“I get mad at a lot of
movies that have the same old white-bread America in the background of the
story they’re showing, instead of trying to catch up with the way this country
is. There are a lot of people getting off the planes and boats every day, and
becoming part of this country, whether we like it or not. And it’s important to
go back to the basic spirit of America — that, in theory, it is a melting pot,
and that’s part of what makes it great.”
Clearly, Demme is a
filmmaker with a well-developed social conscience. Just as important, though,
he also has a healthy sense of humor. Even back in the early ‘70s, when the New
York-born, Miami-raised filmmaker was churning out schlock like Caged Heat and Crazy Mama for Roger
Corman, Demme brought a touch of populist politics to his work. But that's only
because “Corman said you should always make sure you have action, humor, a
degree of sex, and a touch of social comment” in a good drive-in movie, Demme
said.
Demme used all the
elements for his first film released by a major studio: Fighting Mad (1976), a populist revenge saga in which peaceful
farmer Peter Fonda waged war against wicked strip miners. Humor? A few laughs.
Sex? A degree. Social comment? A touch. Action? Plenty. And pretty violent
action at that.
Nothing Demme has done
since Fighting Mad has turned quite
so bloody. But his films often treat the possibility of violence as a constant
undercurrent in the melting pot. And sometimes, the promise is brutally
fulfilled. The jarring climax of Something
Wild turned off more than a few audiences. And even though the gunplay in Married to the Mob is played for laughs,
as counterpoint to the frisky romance between feisty widow Michelle Pfeiffer
and G-man Matthew Modine, characters do indeed die.
“I have real complicated
feelings about that,” Demme admitted. “I did my high-school years in Miami,
Florida. And it was a wide-open kind of place. There was a lot of fighting —
and I saw a lot of fights while growing up. And even got stuck in the middle of
one or two of them myself. So I have a first-hand understanding of how this
stuff really sometimes happens.
“I’m really very much a
pacifist. And I hate violence. But I have — well, you can’t use any other word,
you have to come back to fascination.
It’s a bad word, because it implies appreciation. Which, of course, there isn’t.
I wish there were a hard-edged synonym of fascination to describe the way I
feel.”
Some critics yearn to find
soft-edged, thoroughly appreciating adjectives to describe Jonathan Demme's
movies, if only to encourage moviegoers to buy tickets. Unfortunately, despite
the awards and rave reviews that have greeted many of his best works, Demme
remains more a cult favorite than a mainstream moneymaker. He thought he had a
chance at a mass-audience hit with Swing
Shift (1984), his admiring view of the women who kept the assembly lines
rolling while their men were off fighting World War II. But Goldie Hawn, the
film’s star, insisted on changes that, in Demme’s view, sabotaged the film.
Whatever the reason, Swing Shift was
a fast flop.
After that experience,
Demme said, “I don't want to work with any superstar, regardless of how good an
actor they are, if they picture themselves as a product with a group of avid
consumers out there, waiting to consume the latest manifestation of, say, the
Goldie Hawn product. That’s what it boiled down to on Swing Shift: ‘My audience is going to want to see more of me. My
audience wants to laugh at me.’”
Still, Demme won't deny
his desire to have a full-scale, across-the-boards box-office hit. Married to the Mob, with its
idiosyncratic rhythms and oddball exuberance, may not be the sort of film that
grosses $100 million. But it should appeal to a wider audience than Demme
heretofore has enjoyed. And, better still, it won’t disappoint his loyal fans.
“I've always loved this
kind of escapist movie — if it’s a good one — and still do. And I also have a
taste for more unusual fare, like Swimming
to Cambodia. I’m just happy that, so far, I've been able to do a variety of
things. And I hope I can still continue to do that, because it keeps recharging
my batteries.”
Demme felt more charged-up
during the making of Married to the Mob
than he has during the making of any other movie. But, then again, his
free-floating cheeriness might have had more to do with the birth of his first
child, Ramona, now 6 months old.
His wife, painter Joanne
Howard, “was pregnant while we were shooting the movie. And I feel like I did
my best work that I’ve done on Married to
the Mob. And I feel that I channeled my energies better than I ever did
before.
“And part of that was, I
wanted to be as effective as possible, so that I could go home and be with my
pregnant wife. And then in the cutting room, I wanted to be as articulate and
as clear, and push myself as much as possible, so I could go home and play with
the baby.
“I'm a late-blooming
daddy, and I'm loving every minute of it. And I feel like I’m really applying
myself. Not in a stronger way, but in a much more effective way. I’m not
schmoozing around as much as perhaps I was.”
