Jonathan Demme Quotes

With docs, there's often a very direct communication between the filmmaker and the audience. With narrative movies, we leave it a little bit more open.

'Devdas' isn't a real film. It isn't in the same genre as Mira Nair's 'Monsoon Wedding,' where the camera's presence is so understated it almost disappears.

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.

I love documentaries. It's actually my favorite medium of film.

Whether you're a believer or not, a flawed biblical epic is going to be more entertaining than a remake of a Paul Verhoeven movie or some third-rate sci-fi flick.

I film normal-life subjects in natural settings that some people would consider uncinematic. But what I want to show is nature itself, as the truth of life.

I've been encouraging documentary filmmakers to use more and more humor, and they're loath to do that because they think if it's a documentary it has to be deadly serious - it has to be like medicine that you're supposed to take. And I think it's what keeps the mass audience from going to documentaries.

His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction.

Films like 'The Godfather,' 'Chinatown' and 'The Exorcist' brought a realism and currency and understatement to their genres that we wanted for 'Mildred Pierce.'

The most important thing for me is realism. I don't like writing which does somersaults on the page, and I'm no great fan of the hard work literary novel.

Bangalore Days' is a complete entertainer that is a completely different a genre from 'Ustad Hotel,' and the songs are just that - entertaining.

Any documentary; any capturing of a non-fiction event, is a hyper-realistic condensation of reality that hopefully reveals an emotional truth. It's never the actual literal truth of an event.

At times doc filmmaking feels more rewarding creatively. Because you are creating something out of pure cinema - instead of narrative cinema, where you've got a script and a cast and you build from your foundation, whereas in documentary, you're building out of chaos.

It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means "feature film" in disguise.

I think the story should always determine the visual approach. There are situations where you want things to feel alive and like life, and there are situations that should have some magic and the separation with the grain.

There's a line I love in Conan The Barbarian where someone says, "That used to be another snake cult, now I see it everywhere." That's certainly true of documentaries. I wouldn't say it's ubiquitous, but it's become close to ubiquitous. It's everywhere.

Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape.

This whole business of documentary being a second-class citizen is bullshit. A documentary can be as interesting, as dramatic, as sad, as funny, blah, blah, blah, as a fiction movie. Or it can be as awful as a fiction movie!

I don't want to make pompous, serious films.

I don't want my novel to be like Madame Bovary, finely crafted with the life edited out of it. I want my novel to be like a friend telling me a story -- so we go off on thoughts; that's the way it is.

In my mind, there isn't as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.

In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.

I've ended up as a filmmaker who really loves the movie part of movies. That time in my life was a big influence on the kind of movies that I ended up making. I always think I'm going to make a movie that's gritty and real, but then I make a movie that's like an opera. I fight it at first and then that's just the way it is.

I am a director and I think actually they're not that different - dramas and docs aren't that different. When I'm doing a drama I'm trying to make things feel as believable and real as possible. The hair, the make-up, the costume, the design, you're trying to make it authentic. And when you've got a documentary it's all authentic, so what story are you going to tell and how do you make it dramatic and exciting? It's the same thing.

The trend for documentaries will never go away, because everybody wants to learn about the world. The world is awful in parts, but there's always going to be briliant documentaries about it, and there's always going to be people who want to see them.