JONATHAN
DEMME

Although he is best known for helming a horror classic, Jonathan Demme is also one of the most prominent documentary filmmakers of the past twenty five years, and his latest film blends both styles beautifully.

A protégé of Roger Corman, Demme started his directing career in making exploitation films for Corman and received a big break as a major filmmaker with MELVIN & HOWARD. He solidified it with the 1985 concert film STOP MAKING SENSE and hit the apex of his career with a Best Director Oscar win in the classic THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

After a couple of documentaries, Demme has returned to feature filmmaking with RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, an intense comedy/drama about an addict coming home from rehab to attend her sister’s nuptials as emotions about their lives fly wild.

To promote RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, the legendary filmmaker sat down with the Crypt and others in a detailed discussion on his latest film, his future projects, his thoughts on independent cinema today, and his stellar cast in this exclusive.

How did you find the cast of RACHEL GETTING MARRIED?

JONATHAN DEMME: Excellent. Oh you mean how did I cast them? (Laughter) Sorry, that’s a little Demme humor there. That’s an old family thing. To get back to the real meaning of your question, just in general casting of this movie, because Jenny Lumet didn’t trouble herself to write sympathetic characters and in spite of which I fell in love with the script and the characters and fell in love with them, I felt there was a particular need to try and cast excellent actors as always but excellent actors who were unusually likeable to some way balance this disregard for rooting interest in trying to make people sympathetic. Because this was a ferociously New York movie, that excited me, the need to find fresh actors on our low budget in a city that has a fantastic theater culture and TV, so we chose casting directors who were more theater-cenrtic, more than the usual film casting directors and gave them the mandate; bring us the actors who you feel are fantastic. The ones that you would just put in a movie because you think they are exceptionally gifted as actors but also ones that you like to love too. It’s funny because in another thing I told them not to worry about gender. I told them that even if you think there’s nothing for them, if there’s an actor that you love, bring them in here and we’ll see if we can find something for them. So anyway, Tunde, who plays Sidney, came in on the same day as Mather, who plays the best man, as well as a bunch of other actors, and Mather and Tunde were the people I liked the most. They were the ones who I didn’t want the chat to end. I liked being with them.

I had offered the part of Sidney to Paul Thomas Anderson, who is not an actor but who is an adorable, enormously likeable person and is a friend of mine and he had come to a table read of the script and he was great. It was funny because Anne was at the table read and afterwards she went to me going “That guy Paul was good, wasn’t he?” I told her, “You mean Paul Thomas Anderson,” and she freaked out going “THAT was Paul Thomas Anderson? Oh my god! I’m so glad I didn’t know that!” Anyway, I offered the part to Paul and he didn’t want to do it. He was finishing up on THERE WILL BE BLOOD. He didn’t want to take the part in the movie. That was a digression but Tunde had a quality to me of this deep reservoir of serenity. I don’t know quite what to call it but this inner light coming out of him. I think here’s a guy who could survive a weekend at the Buchmans and seemed undeterred with his wife. It worked for me and it manifested itself in many ways.

Mather has this thing about him and I don’t know Mather very well but he seems like a guy who has been through a lot and has come out the other side. He feels like a member of what I call the “Lucky To Be Alive” club. Some of the members of that are in the age of Dennis Hopper who is really nice now and he wound up being that. It was a boiler plate for casting every single part. That’s why when it came to a guest list for the wedding, I couldn’t go with extras. I wanted people that I liked there or people that I thought I would like if I got to know them.

The pacing of the wedding in the last third of the movie is refreshing in that it allows the characters to breathe and it takes time in establishing the final act. Do you find as a director moments where you are pressured to truncate certain moments in the film to miss the flow of the film you want?

JD: Finding the right amount of time to dare to devote to non-story advancing stuff was a huge part. There was a much longer version of the wedding and it was at first hard to cut it down. There were more songs they were dancing to. Everything was different but what became the point to where I got it to an acceptable place was that there was just so much time where you could wait for the payoff of Debra leaving. In earlier versions, I hoped at that point in the movie people are waiting for the final confrontation between Kym and Abby to happen. To a certain extent it could be suspenseful to wait and see when it would happen. Another point is you could lose touch with it so when people start speaking dialogue you are reminded that “Oh yeah, there’s a story going on there.” I wanted to feel like Kym could still in the context of drinking and stuff that it could get bad for her and they’re ignoring her now. Everybody’s having so much fun and she’s being neglected. I also felt that the kind of the joy and abandon that comes with the music had been earned by the struggle that preceded the wedding. I wanted also to once again put Kym, the person who mustn’t drink or take drugs in the context of people who are getting looser and looser, I was fascinated by the fact that these people had been so likeable and then I started judging everybody in that they were having too much fun. I hoped that there was a lot going on even though there wasn’t a narrative progression.

What is it about a wedding that makes it such an attraction to make it the central theme of a movie?

JD: To me that it’s a wedding doesn’t interest me at all. That’s not a plus for me. It’s a takeaway for me. If someone tells me it’s a movie about a wedding, I’m actually turned away from it. This is a story of Jenny Lumet fashion where she has said to me that the movie came from the idea of a sister about to me married. She chose that but I just sort of feel like it’s arbitrary, the wedding. It’s a way to get families together and force them into one place where if a family is haunted enough by something in the past and if it’s unresolved enough, as it is in this case, it can be very interesting if it’s perceived as truth. I’m not a theater person per se. I love to go to a good play. I am a Chekov person. As an entertainment seeker, I love Chekov. He couldn’t give a shit why people had gathered. I don’t even know why they’re together for any of these things, but they’re together and he lets it rip and that’s what Jenny did here. I love the way in her script that Kym comes out of rehab and immediately there’s two different communities. One is the family community and she is perceived and judged in a very particularly way. It was very hard for her to enter the family community. It’s very hard for her to be there. The other community is strangers who don’t judge her and it’s easy for her to be there. You can see who Kym really is. Her deepest self is evident there and it’s with these strangers. Now if she tries to bring that aesthetic which is the aesthetic she lives by now which is being truthful and lord knows she’s selfish and self centered and such, when she comes home and when she’s at the rehearsal dinner where she brings her twelve step aesthetic to that, it’s disastrous. As a moviegoer, it fascinates me because I find that scene mortifying. I love that scene so much and even now I’ve seen it 20 or 30 times, when she gets “I think she was twelve years old,” I’m going “No!” She kills the room. Every single person in that room except for Kieran because he gets the humor, he gets it.

By the way all the speeches except for Kym and Emma’s speeches were all made up in the moment by whoever talked, so the next person who gets up is Fab 5 Freddy. Fab evokes getting stoned and immediately the room is relaxed again. The room loves hearing this. He sits down and the next person who gets up is one of my favorite actors is Beau Sia, he’s the guy who gets up with the wine and chug a lugs it. He can’t make a coherent statement yet they adore him, then it cuts to them going home. Speaking of the length of this, it was noted by some that they felt if they had Kym make her speech and it cut to them coming home, it would’ve been more interesting. My thoughts were that she didn’t ruin the night. She killed the room but she didn’t ruin the night but in her defense and the truth of the thing, this was a lot better.

All these years after GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER, you do this film. Can you talk about what it’s like to do a film where you don’t have to comment on this racial integration?

JD: All I can tall you is that we never discussed the race components of the couple of the party. To me and maybe I’m naïve, but it wasn’t pertinent. Like I said before, the first person I offered the role of Sidney to was Paul Thomas Anderson, who was white. He passed on it and I offered it to Tunde. That’s the kind of world I live in where none of us marvel how groovy it is that “Hey, we’re a mixed couple!” That’s just living in New York. I have to tell you something funny in that we showed the picture at Venice. It had a fabulous response from the audience. I met some journalists there and a couple of people said and I think it’s fair where they said “Is this a Utopian vision of America where there’s white, black, Asian, there even looked like some Muslims in it. Was it,” and I went “No. That’s the America I know it.” Also, if you watched the Barack Obama Democratic Convention thing because when I was watching it I felt that it was just like our movie! Having said that, I love that it is the racial component of the couple and I’m delighted with that but it’s not because of that. I’m pleased and I feel that my intelligence is respected by not having it obligatorily dealt with it in one way or the other. I love the line that Carol Jean Lewis who plays Sidney’s mother. In her improvised speech, she says that this is what it would look like in heaven. To me when I hear her hear that, I think she’s saying that all human beings of different kinds are together. I think that’s brilliant that she improvised that. That’s the closest the movie comes to it because it wasn’t in the script. That had resonance with me. Tim Sqyures, the editor, who I’ve never worked with before, all I can tell is that Tim Sqyures, even as Declan got to shoot it the way he wanted to shoot it and the actors acted the way they wanted to, Tim was the first time in my life I had an editor show me one version of a cut scene which was very good and then would cut a whole other version with all other material, sometimes a third version. In this film, I didn’t do what I always do which was to go back and find some little nuggets. I felt like Tim made the movie breathe a little.

The character of Abby, played by Debra Winger, has a lot of similarities to Mary Tyler Moore’s character in ORDINARY PEOPLE. Did you compare Abby to that character?

JD: I can compare the two as far as my reaction to them. I’ve heard that reference once or twice and that had never occurred to me. I know I was very judgmental on Mary Tyler Moore’s character. I think I hated her for her coldness and how oblivious she was for the pain she was causing and therefore it was an extraordinary bold choice for her. That was a very cold and stark performance. As far as Debra’s Abby, I want to put it in context of what I see on screen but it’s too filtered by my thoughts on the script. I am very moved by Abby. When she says her goodnights and can’t bear to be hugged like that, I feel so bad for her and I realize that even as the other three surviving members of the family, I can see that Rachel has dealt with the tragedy by moving on. Paul has dealt with the tragedy by just trying to endlessly rekindle the love and make up somehow for the pain and suffering that will never go away. Kym dealt with it by getting herself wasted more than she had before. Abby dealt with it by completely moving on in a whole other way and creating this streamlined life and totally denying it. When she drives away and Kym doesn’t have that moment of closure with her, it’s a very complicated moment because in a way I have to admit it’s frustrating. We watching the movie have earned the moment of approaching because Kym has earned it too and we’re denied it. At the end of the movie I feel like poor Abby. I feel that by the end of the movie that Paul’s going to be alright. I think that Kym and Rachel will be alright. I think there’s a very real hope for Kym. I sense that Rachel will be fine. Abby’s the one that’s tragic to me. She’s real tragic. Debra told me that she knew what it was supposed to be but she feels so much for this girl now. I felt bad for telling her that she mustn’t. That’s what is so devastating about it; that she can charmingly not feel. She did one and Debra was beautiful in this outpouring of stuff signaled to Anne. That’s the first one we put in the movie but we took it out because it was bullshit. The other ones, I know Debra’s feeling that stuff in the other takes and that perceptible too.

Do you think they all become sympathetic because of how the tragedy affected each and every one of them and how they had to deal with that?

JD: I know one of the things that made me really feel very excited of the challenge of making this movie was this thing about what we said before, because they were immediately not likeable, all of them, but they were talking in ways that were different than what I was used to in the movies I’ve seen. They were smart and kind of funny. Sometimes they’re jokes weren’t funny and they were in this edgy, freaky situation. I wanted to see what was going to happen. That was what my motor was. What’s going to happen here? At a certain point, I didn’t find them sympathetic per se but I found myself invested in them as a reader. I cared now. I didn’t want Kym to ruin the wedding. I didn’t want the wedding to be ruined for Rachel. I rooted for Paul and I went on their side a lot. That’s what made me want to do it and I used to say to myself when I was doing the movie that I was lucky I had Jenny’s first screenplay because she hasn’t learned any of the rules yet. She doesn’t know that you’re supposed to have a strong, linear arc and rooting interest and all that stuff. I think though that she’s way ahead of all that.

You have such a varied career as a filmmaker, moving around from features to documentaries. It’s a way like Howard Hawks and how does that encourage you and what brought you to this movie?

JD: There’s a filmmaker of the same generation as Howard Hawks whose filmography I used to obsess on. I used to look into filmographies of directors and see the films they did for years. I used to see some that had three year gaps and wondered what they were doing in that time not realizing they were living life. The filmography that obsessed me was Budd Boetticher. He was a wonderful low budget film director that I loved. You’d see that he directed at least one film a year for ten years and then fifteen years later a documentary on the life of a bullfighter. I thought to myself “Did he go insane? What happened to that man?” As I’ve gotten older and gotten myself sucked into documentaries, I so get it now in that the gaps don’t matter and doing what pulls you to it is what matters. The stuff that I’ve done, I’ve always done. I’ve never took a job per se. I honestly felt that everything I’ve done could be a terrific movie if we did it properly. I started getting interested in documentaries in the late 1980s and just over time I’ve been getting more and more into that. In the last eight or nine years, I’d say right after BELOVED, I’ve gotten less and less into the corporate arena, the big budget arena. The pay is fantastic and you get to work with Denzel Washington but I also think you can work with them if you have the right low budget script too someday. Whatever that was which is what I loved and enjoyed and made the most of for a long time doesn’t exist for me anymore. I don’t care if I don’t have a script in development. I’m not interested in reading any scripts. I love that Sidney Lumet called me up and sent me his daughter’s screenplay that I consider to be a beautiful screenplay and I got to shoot it in a style that I as a moviegoer am very responsive to in many of the movies I’ve done in this looser way. I’m thrilled with the way this has turned out. I’m now making a documentary on Bob Marley and we’ve found hundreds of hours of footage that nobody knew existed. I’m going to film with his sons and we’re going to go down to Jamaica and explain the impact on him and Marcus Garvey and the Harlem Renaissance. There’s no script that can compete with trying to find the vessel for Bob Marley for me.

I know you’re a fan of the Warner Bros. Cartoons with Daffy Duck who would go into a room and cause havoc. There are a lot of scenes in the movie where Kym seems to enter a room and cause havoc. Was that intentional?

JD: (Laughing) Seeing how Kym changes a room because she is a hand grenade and such a pain in the butt, it wasn’t a conscious thing but I’m glad that you saw that. As a matter of fact, she is Daffy Duck.

Are you Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny?

JD: I’m Elmer Fudd (laughter). No, I’m Bugs.

It’s interesting being that you’ve made documentaries lately that you’re first feature in four years has a very documentary like feel to it in the way that it is presented. Reading the script, was that immediately how you felt you had to shoot it?

JD: If you’re ever clicking channels and you come across at any fiction movie I’ve made, stay with it long enough because you’ll never have to wait long for shots of people talking into the camera when they’re talking to each other and that’s because Tak Fujimoto and I early on wanted to experiment with the idea of taking that Hitchcock subjective camera shot. The point of which is to put the viewer for a moment into the shoes of a character. We were like instead of having a standard close up where everybody is looking slightly off camera, what if we can the audience literally in their shoes so they get to know what it’s like to get these lines. Over time we did that more and more and people never commented on it. Nobody thought it was weird. People often if the movies were good were very invested in the characters so we did that. That was the why of what I had really come upon to pull the audience into the movie. For this one, that formal approach both didn’t ring true for me and it also bored me. I didn’t want to show up again and open up my fuller brush thing and take out the looking into the camera shot and stuff, and Declan Quinn the cameraman without whom this film wouldn’t exist. It wouldn’t have been done this way if it wasn’t a Declan who I knew would make it look wonderful in the documentary style. Our idea was let’s pull the audience in by making it feel so real, as real as the stuff we see in home movies. Also Declan and I have done three documentaries. I think Declan’s documentary coverage is more thrilling to me visually and just in terms of energy than any pre-designed stuff. That’s why we never rehearsed. We never, ever rehearsed. We never picked a shot. The actors never knew where the camera was going to be any more than Jimmy Carter knew where it was going to be when we followed him around all over the place so we brought that aesthetic to it.

Being that you were mentored by Roger Corman who made a ton of low budget films, what’s your opinion of films today being made on such low budgets more affordable than when you started directing for Roger at the start of your career?

JD: I passionately feel that it’s fantastic. I just think it’s the most wonderful thing. Almost everything I think that’s going on in the quote on quote movie business is bad. Fewer people watching on the big screen. More screens showing fewer movies. The formulization of what we see. The one great thing that’s going on and it’s truly revolutionary is that it’s not just you can make a feature for that and I’ve done a couple of documentaries with my own money and they look like it but they get shown on TV and some of them have been shown in a few theaters. I just think it’s fantastic and for me the cutting edge of all cutting edges in that regard is YouTube where there are now filmmakers. Who knows how young the youngest filmmaker is. If you look up for example Jimmy Joe Roach on YouTube and you can see what he can do with three minutes, there’s just so much exciting stuff there. We finally live in a day and age where almost everybody who can get their hands on a camera and then get into their computer can make a film. The potential audience is anybody who can get to another computer to look at it. We’re so close now. I saw a demonstration at a place where I interviewed Werner Herzog last month in an interview for the New York Times and they had a demonstration on how a huge cinema sized screen in an auditorium and the images were coming from someone’s laptop. So now anything that’s on a tiny computer can be on a big screen.

I’m just happy I can put my film on my iPhone.

JD: (Laughs) That’s amazing too.

Thanks for your time Jonathan.

JD: My pleasure.

(Special thanks to Falco Ink)