JONATHAN DEMME

A trilogy is a pretty abstract notion. You can apply it to almost any three things.

Everything I've made - it doesn't mean they've all been good - but everything I've made so far, big or little, fiction or documentary, has been something that I've been really enthusiastic about.

I've been making films since the '70s and trying to develop that best possible fiction-film style that I feel is the most expressive. At a certain point, I felt I was winding up making the same film stylistically and I found that boring.

I don't think it's sacrilegious to remake any movie, including a good or even great movie.

I was a sort of rock journalist - whatever that is - in London in the late '60s.

I'm guided by my enthusiasm.

I love doing fiction. I love doing performance films and I love doing documentaries that don't have music. I love to shoot and I love to shoot things I'm enthusiastic about.

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something.

When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!

I didn't go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.

I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.

I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do.

Documentaries - my God, there is so much going on in our country and in the world today that every time you open the newspaper or turn on the radio or watch the news on TV there is another documentary subject. We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there?

It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.

I'm of Neil Young's generation. Neil Young's songs have spoken to what it's like to be at least a white male of his generation over the years. Endlessly, he's sung about the stuff that I really care about. He's put into words the feelings that hit you at different transitional moments in life.

I also feel that the only thing more gratifying than working with someone who you've worked well with is working with someone new and coming up with something great.

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

They're out there, this appalling idea that there are companies that profit - not just profit but profit enormously - through war.

I felt from time to time that shooting live music is the most purely cinematic thing you can do. Ideally, the cinema is becoming one with the music. There is little artifice involved. There's no acting. I love it.

Extraordinary people are the Green Berets and the Navy Seals and the Olympic athletes - these are the ones who can face these extraordinary physical challenges and be triumphant.

Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing.

I remember the Neil Young brand hitting me very hard immediately. He wasn't an acquired taste. I loved him immediately.

I've never fallen into what I consider to be a trap of trying to figure out something analytically that could be a very popular film. I would hope my enthusiasm could match up with something with that potential.

As much as I love acoustic Neil Young - and I do deeply - I may be more passionate about the electric. Luckily it's not a contest, and we never have to make that choice. But Neil Young on an electric guitar - I feel like I've never seen or heard anything like it.

As a kid, a little kid, I loved going to the movies, and now I love making movies.