Jonathan Demme Quotes

Cinema sustains life. It captures death in its progress.

Once you start to play together, vibing off each other in the scene, it's not just the notes - it's the music. The script might be the notes playing, but we're making it music.

For me, every photograph is a portrait; the clothes are just a vehicle for what I want to say. You're photographing a relationship with the person you're shooting; there's an exchange, and that's what that picture is.

Good cinema is what we can believe, and bad cinema is what we can't believe.

With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short moments, and then you go on to the next thing.

I prefer a quartet, it makes everyone work harder.

Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about.

I wanted to go to acting school, and I did a few modeling jobs to pay for acting school. I never aspired to be a model. I met lots of photographers, and I learned a lot about light - as a source of love and illumination, light as a gift of love. On film, that's a massive contribution.

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

The camera is the slave to the actor.

Cinema at its best can express something of the pure irreducible fact of things.

Every time I look through the lens with Denzel, I'm like a 12-year-old kid. It's hard for me to look at the monitor because the fun is in watching him.

I've always loved those portraits that Alfred Stieglitz did of Georgia O'Keeffe over several years, which really convey the idea that there's not one image that can capture a woman, because we're changing all the time.

Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.

I worked with Jim James on my film 'I'm Not There' - he sang 'Goin' to Acapulco' with Calexico backing him up. We just hit it off, and it's such a beautiful moment in that film.

I often find myself feeling that filming music is somehow the purest form of filmmaking. This crazed collision of sound and images, the intense collaboration, these incredibly cinematic performances. And for the nights you're filming, a non-player like me gets to feel somehow part of the band.

I look at the camera as sort of a missing link between motion picture photography and still photography.

A lot of times as an actor you watch a film it's like thumbing through a photo book from your past. It's people you haven't seen in a while, there are people that have passed away, and there are people you owe phone calls to.

When you conduct opera, you control the stage. But with a film, the film controls you.

I have always been a fan of Kajol Ma'am. The way she portrayed Zooni's character in 'Fanaa' is etched in my memory. I have watched the film several times, and each time I have learnt something new from her performance.

There are documentaries that will just save your life and be the conduit to the art form you started out loving.

Of course theater will always be associated intimately to literature, but the themes or whatever have to penetrate you by the senses. Theater is a sensuous experience, and that's its main difference from film or any other dramatic art.

Manmohan Desai's films pack a lot of joy and have a child-like quality and you can see the director is having fun, but my movies don't suspend disbelief that much. But it's good to be compared to Manmohan Desai. He was run down by critics in his time.

I definitely enjoy the kind of magic that happens being on stage with a group when everything's working. The vibe when that's happening gets even better if the audience is involved and you can feel that interaction. That's something you don't get with your headphones on in a studio; it's much different.