Jonathan Demme Quotes

I think all television has to be about relationships and I don't think horror for the sake of it can work unless you're able to ground it in some kind of relationship.

There's a whole element of human interaction and character interaction that I really enjoy doing.

Even if it's a thriller or a comedy, it's always a love story for me, and that's what I concentrate on, because the love stories are my surrogates for the argument: two people in conflict that see life differently.

In film, you can create the illusion of time and space. People speak; characters reveal their feelings. You can use music, which informs how you should be feeling, and it carries you to the right emotional space.

'Twelve' was a total indie drama character piece. It wasn't that it was more about the performance, but it was just a very different thing where, with horror, there's this whole added element of the visual and the technical and the choreography.

This is not a football film. It's about two individuals - two good friends telling their story.

I don't use film in the way that the great auteurs do. I use film, the camera, to record as effectively and as perceptive as I am able what I want to say through the actors.

In television, the cuts are so quick: bang-bang-bang-bang-bang! I want to shoot two people and sit there for eight minutes and watch them. I've got a lot to learn about television and about the best ways to tell stories directorially in that medium.

There's nothing more thrilling than watching great actors say things that you wrote and bring them to life.

I've never been interested in watching or reading anything because it's the hero's story. I don't feel the need to be inspired by the character or learn a lesson. I feel the need to be engaged by them.

I'm not a pyrotechnical director; I'm not good with all those innovative things. What I am interested in is how actors can touch the heads and hearts of an audience.

'Hereditary' is unabashedly a horror film. In a lot of ways, it's in dialogue with other horror films. But I do know that it was important for me that the film functioned first as a family drama. I know that I'm never affected by anything if I'm not invested in the people to whom the genre things are happening.

We weave our real lives into our WWE lives. We just look at what's happening in our lives, and what can we do? What's the most annoying - as a bad guy, as a villain, what's the thing we can do to make people hate us?

The way I'm used to telling a story is by looking through the viewfinder and being really close to the actors.

My relationship with every film is more or less the same, but the experience is the difference. It comes with the people I am working with, the character I play.

I recommend to any of you, that's always a good way to make a film: use the interesting bits.

I'll put 'Stranger Things' up there with the best of it. I think it's such a profound show - it's very subtle in the way that it tells its story, but it's very effective. Every time I watch it, I feel something, which is very rare for me.

Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent.

I think there's an aspect of my soul, of my personality, that's very suited to directing. I like being in the room with actors; I love creating a safe space and a chaotic space for the discovery to take place. I love creating a sense of community.

Content films necessary don't go by the content, they go by the emotions. Content films are about content whether you want to portray the content or sell it through humour, through seriousness, is a choice of the filmmaker.

The term 'psychological thriller' is an elastic one these days, tagged liberally on to any story of suspense that explores motivations while keeping blood and chainsaws to a minimum.

It's why we're actors: to be able to tell the stories that really matter.

As a fan, I hated most of 'The Day After Tomorrow' movie except for the part where Emmy Rossum and Jake Gyllenhaal were stuck in the library, and I thought, 'Oh, I like this now.' There's something about bringing people together in odd circumstances and exploring the petri dish of what happens.

I studied as an actor at the theatre conservatoire in Quebec, but by the time I got to my third year, I was more interested in directing. There's more to it than helping actors get round a stage: it's a wonderful way of telling stories.

Our job, as actors, is not to tell the audience how interesting we are, but to entertain them with our films.